Webapps. 5 ways to give your site a speed boost in less than 30 minutes. Development : The estimated time to read this article is 4 minutes In this age of broadband, users are unlikely to leave your site for being too slow. However, if you want to create a feeling of satisfaction and a pleasant user experience you need to keep download times to a minimum. In a recent interview usability expert Jacob Nielsen wrote: One of the main guidelines is to show the next state (e.g., the next page) with one second of the user’s action (e.g., click) in order for users to experience the feeling of a freely-flowing interaction, as opposed to a sensation of delays. The problem is that speed optimisation can often sound intimidating.
I have just tweaked Boagworld to make it slightly more responsive (yes I know it is not perfect) and I needed little technical knowledge and it took less than 30 minutes. 1. Firebug is a Firefox plugin that is essential for any web designer. 2. This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. 3. 4. 5. What else? Check Browser Compatibility, Cross Platform Browser Test - Brows. Browser Sandbox - Run any browser from the web. The Spoon.net Browser Sandbox makes cross-browser testing and backwards compatibility easy. Just click Run for any browser to launch it instantly. Browsers run within an isolated virtual environment, eliminating the need for installs and allowing legacy browsers such as Internet Explorer 6 to run on Windows 7 and 8. Virtualized browsers behave exactly like installed browsers. And because they run locally, you can test web applications hosted on your own development machine or on internal servers.
Spoon.net supports standard browser components like Java applets and ActiveX controls as well as popular browser plugins like Firebug, IE Developer Toolbar, and CSS and JavaScript debugging consoles. Using the Browser Sandbox at Work? 23 Brilliant Web Apps To Simplify Designer’s Work Life @ Smashin. Don't Forget to participate in a contest where you can win an amazing e-Commerce template from TemplateMonster. This is one of the very best list of its kind where you can find the simplest online web designer’s tools that are developed for designers and may be very helpful for you as well when you want to get your work done or just for fun. I hope web designers will like this list, but you can also use them and will love them whether you are an office worker, a manager, a supervisor, a student, a home user, etc.
Most of them are not very well-known, but they are really amazing in respect to their features. This is the list of 23 Brilliant Web Apps To Simplify Designer’s Work Life. Just take a look at them and share your thought’s here. You are welcome to share more Useful web tools that will be helpful for web designers and our readers/viewers may like.
Adobe BrowserLab An easier and faster solution for cross-browser testing. Color Scheme Designer PHPanywhere Carbonmade Posterous iPlotz Pict. 60 Resources for the Frugal Web Developer. With the economy reeling and VC’s spending less and less on startups, developers have had to adapt how they create sites. Because of the world’s economic state, we’ve had to change how we develop. Some may see this shift as a grim prospect. Change is hard, and change is essential to staying alive in these conditions. However, if you can cut expenses in your development process without cutting quality by using free methods and tools, then you may be able to develop without using any extra money. “Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.” – H.G.
The first step to becoming a frugal web developer is cutting back on expenses. Text Editors If you’re wanting to bypass buying robust text editors like Textmate, BBEdit, or E Text Editor, try some of these free products instead. EmacsEmacs is a robust text editor that can edit just about any language with the help of extensions. Text Wrangler Text Wrangler Notepad++Notepad++ is a free text editor for Windows users. Versions Git. 7 Steps for Systematizing The Design & Build Process « Noupe.
Sep 17 2009 Systemization is basically what it says on the tin, i.e creating a series of processes or a pre-defined set of steps to speed up and quicken a laborious and or repetitive task. So how can you systemize the design & build of websites? The day to day nuts and bolts of your business? Below are 7 steps you will need to create systems to fulfill repetitive and dull tasks so you can save time for creativity to flow. Snippet Repository Absolutely everybody should have a code / design repository. Here’s a few ideas as to what you could store to save you countless hours in re-writing, re-designing and wasting time: Contact forms (create one which allows you to quickly customize for different projects User Management / login scripts e.t.c (create one that is not heavily integrated into your design with loads of inline code for even more time saving) Payment handlers and online store scripts (if you’ve built one before, why not re-use it?)
Code of conduct widthheightcolorpositionmisc Homepage. Cheat Sheets for Front-end Web Developers. Cheat sheets are helpful to have around because they allow you to quickly remember code syntax and see related concepts visually. Additionally, they’re nice decorative pieces for your office and can prepare you for client questions regarding web development.
In this article, you’ll find 23 excellent, print-ready cheat sheets for HTML/HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (including MooTools and jQuery). So go ahead – print out your favorites and pepper your workspace with these wonderful references. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. JavaScript 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. mootools 1.2 cheat sheet 18. jQuery Cheatsheet 19. jQuery 1.2 Cheat Sheet 20. jQuery Visual Map – PNG Miscellaneous 21. 22. 23. These are great resources regardless of the size of your clients. 10 Excellent Feedback Tools for Web Designers.
It’s easy to get caught up doing your own thing and even easier to stick to what you know already know. However, whether you’re a developer or a designer, seeking out constructive, third-party feedback can bring your projects to a new level. You may also know that finding objective, qualified sources of feedback can be near impossible (your relatives and roommates only cut it for so long).
That’s why I’m bringing you 10 fresh, useful and fun ways to get an outside perspective on your work. So no more excuses, it’s time to break out of your rut and start getting the feedback you need to learn, improve, and grow as a professional. Free web-based feedback communities 1. Concept Feedback is a brand new community for designers, developers and marketers. 2.
The name explains it all. 3. This cool venture from OnWired allows designers to solicit feedback from a panel of industry veterans, including your very own Jacob Gube of Six Revisions. 4. 5. 6. Web-based collaboration tools 7. 8. 9. 10. 19 Firefox Add-ons For Designers. Are you a web designer who wishes you could do more in one handy spot instead of having multiple programs open? Well, thanks to the enormous Firefox add-on development community, your web browser can do almost everything for you. We already covered Firefox add-ons for developers, but we couldn’t leave out the people that sit there and actually design what the developers have to build. These 19 add-ons will allow you to choose colors, measure dimensions, save screenshots and a whole lot more. Be warned that you should be selective in what add-ons you add to your browser due to the fact that the more you add, the slower it goes, but can you really resist very many of these?
Color Tools ColorSuckr: ColorSuckr will pick the 12 most common colors out of an image and allow you to build a palette out of them. ColorZilla: ColorZilla allows you to get a color reading from any point in your browser (not just the page), and you can adjust the color and paste it into other programs. Measurement Tools. Massive Compilation of Designer Tools. Web designers have a wealth of tools available to them, for doing everything from organizing their thoughts about a particular design to debugging the final design. But with so many tools out there, how do you ever determine which ones are really useful and which ones are just going to waste your time? We’ve compiled a massive list of some of the best and most useful tools out there for web designers.
Purposely left off the list are common tools most designers are likely already using (like Dreamweaver or Panic’s Coda, Photoshop or GIMP, and similar common software programs that pretty much every designer already has in their toolkit). These are tools that will save you time, make you a more effective designer, simplify or speed up your design process, or otherwise make your life easier. Compilation of Offline Tools Most roundups of useful web design tools only focus on online tools. But there are a couple of very useful tools you can utilize to open up your options when it comes to design.
30 Handy Cheat Sheets and Reference Guides for Web Professionals. Cheat sheets and reference guides are useful for both beginners and advanced web professionals. They can be used to help you remember syntax or as a tool to aid in memorization. In this post, we aim to cover the reference guides for all of the most commonly used platforms, software and coding languages. Below you’ll find a compilation of the 30 most useful and well-organized cheat sheets, checklists and reference guides. If you know of a useful cheat sheet that we haven’t covered here, please share the link in the comments’ section at the end of the article. 1. 25-Point Website Usability Checklist Usability is a central concern for any web developer.
Four major components are covered in this checklist: accessibility, identity, navigation and content. Download the 25-Point Website Usability Checklist 2. This is a great reference guide to ensure browser compatibility. The table also offers an interactive feature that highlights the row your cursor is on. Go to the Browser Compatibility Table 3. My Development and Design Process. When first teaching myself CSS, I often became frustrated making sense of the whole thing. I was used to wrapping my content in presentational markup and everything obviously happening for a reason. I read as much as I could about CSS and the separation of structure and style. As I read more, I could see that my markup began to make more sense, I was applying semantics to document markup and it felt like I was starting to make the most of what XHTML and CSS had to offer.
To this day, I try to read as much as I possibly can about design and development, and I’m always seeing new and improved ways of doing things. Not because it’s using the latest trend on the Web, but because it makes more semantic sense, or is more accessible. Developing the standard, semantic, and accessible Web is an ever changing process. I quickly learned that it’s much more time effective to separate the development of a website into parts; markup and style. Take, for example, a page of Google search results: CSS - Quirks mode and strict mode. Page last changed today Quirks mode and strict mode are the two ’modes’ modern browsers can use to interpret your CSS.
This page gives a short overview of the reasons for and the differences between these two modes. When Netscape 4 and IE 4 implemented CSS, their support did not match the W3C standard (or, indeed, each other). Netscape 4 had horribly broken support. IE 4 came far closer to the standard, but didn’t implement it with complete correctness either. Although IE 5 Windows mended quite a lot of IE 4 bugs, it perpetuated other glitches in CSS (mainly the box model). To make sure that their websites rendered correctly in the various browsers, web developers had to implement CSS according to the wishes of these browsers.
Therefore, when standards compliancy became important browser vendors faced a tough choice. So moving closer to standards compliance would cause problems. Therefore any solution to this problem had to On this site I use this doctype in most pages. UI Library: YUI Compressor. According to Yahoo! 's Exceptional Performance Team, 40% to 60% of Yahoo! 's users have an empty cache experience and about 20% of all page views are done with an empty cache (see this article by Tenni Theurer on the YUIBlog for more information on browser cache usage). This fact outlines the importance of keeping web pages as lightweight as possible. Improving the engineering design of a page or a web application usually yields the biggest savings and that should always be a primary strategy.
With the right design in place, there are many secondary strategies for improving performance such as minification of the code, HTTP compression, using CSS sprites, etc. In terms of code minification, the most widely used tools to minify JavaScript code are Douglas Crockford's JSMIN, the Dojo compressor and Dean Edwards' Packer. Documentation: Detailed description of the YUI Compressor and how to use it. How does the YUI Compressor work? Using the YUI Compressor from the command line Additional notes. Best Practices for Speeding Up Your Web Site. The Exceptional Performance team has identified a number of best practices for making web pages fast.
The list includes 35 best practices divided into 7 categories. Minimize HTTP Requests tag: content 80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images, stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. One way to reduce the number of components in the page is to simplify the page's design. Combined files are a way to reduce the number of HTTP requests by combining all scripts into a single script, and similarly combining all CSS into a single stylesheet. CSS Sprites are the preferred method for reducing the number of image requests. Image maps combine multiple images into a single image. Inline images use the data: URL scheme to embed the image data in the actual page.
Top | discuss this rule tag: server ... <! Modernizr. A Guide to Caching and Compression for High Performance Web Appl. Ver the past several years, web applications have evolved from collections of simple HTML pages into highly scalable and interactive rich applications built using a variety of technologies. Designing and developing these applications is complex. In addition, decision makers are increasingly seeking to build even more rich interactive capabilities into such applications while still maintaining or improving their performance. But high performance comes at a cost. To build web applications that deliver a solid end user experience, developers need to address the potential performance bottlenecks.
This article focuses on caching—an imperative for delivering high performance applications—and also briefly touches on compression. Several companies produce and sell specialized compression and performance products. Performance Bottlenecks The performance bottlenecks are primarily high latency, congestion, and server load. Simply put, cache is temporary storage. Caching. DevSnippets. Clixpy.com - a Must-Have Usability Tool for Webmasters. Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches - Web. 55+ Extremely Useful Online Generators for Designers. BLUE VERTIGO | Web Design Resources Links | Last update JUN.01.2.
25 Important Web Design Tools | Tools | PelFusion.com. 100 Terrific Web Design Cheat Sheets that Will Save you Time, Mo. 21 Free And Useful Web Tools For Web Designers @ SmashingApps. Beyond Basic Web Development | Morethanseven. 50 Useful JavaScript Tools | Developer's Toolbox | Smashing. The Business of Software. PHP Quick Profiler. WebmasterWorld News and Discussion for the Web Professional. 28 Useful(Really) Web based Tools to speed up your web developme. Ajax loading gif generator.
Joel on Software. What we're thinking. Directed Edge News » Blog Archive » On Building a Stupidly Fast. Experiences deploying a large-scale infrastructure in Amazon EC2. 37 Phenomenal jQuery Plugins and Demos for Developers : Speckybo. Sphere (Color Theory Visualizer) 15 Helpful In-Browser Web Development Tools | Developer's T. 27 Indispensable Web Design and Development Firefox Extensions : 20 Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know - NETTUTS. Daily Artisan » 12 Tools To Decrease Website Load Times. 16 Web Based Handy Web Designer Tools : Online Marketing Blog - 11 Free And Helpful Web Based Tools That Every Designer May Want.