9 Excellent Tools for Design Mockups. So you've just taken some killer photos with your new DSLR, or you captured a great video with your iPhone — what's next? While it feels natural to just post media quickly to your Facebook Page, sometimes great photos or video need their own home in the form of a personal website. But on the other hand, it's not easy to make a website layout that complements rich media. In order to make a great website, professional web designers take advantage of mockup tools to analyze layout, design and functionality.
Taking advantage of these applications (some of which are 100% free) is a wise move — especially if you're interested in creating a professional website for your photography or video. We've rounded up nine applications that can help you get the most out of designing your web layout. What's your tip for displaying photos or video on your website? Let us know in the comments. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. HotGloo's pricing plans range from $14 to $54 per month, with a 15-day free trial for new accounts. How Gamification Can Make News Sites More Engaging. Gamification, the use of gameplay mechanics for non-game applications, is transforming online news into an engaging, social and fun activity. It’s quickly becoming the next frontier in web and mobile technology.
But what makes gamification successful? Simply put: motivation. By tracking readers' success, news organizations provide a sense of progress. This, in turn, motivates readers to continue reading, commenting or performing whatever actions on the site that will contribute to their overall progress. At Mashable, we’ve incorporated gamification into Mashable Follow, our social layer and content curation tool. Readers sign up for Follow with their Facebook or Twitter login to comment on and share stories, manage their news streams by following the topics they care most about, and connecting with fellow readers by viewing and commenting on their site activity.
Activity is the core of Follow. Rewarding readers for taking these actions was an important component of Follow. Room For Growth. Node.js Performance Tips from LinkedIn. LinkedIn’s Shravya Garlapati has shared a number of tips for improving performance on their mobile site while using Node.js. LinkedIn is working with a standard HTML5 mobile site as well as apps for iOS and Android. Previously, LinkedIn has talked about its continuous integration testing for mobile, now they’re sharing some of what they’ve learned.
A couple of the tips are fairly obvious. For example, make sure that you use gzip to compress requests and responses. Don’t use Node.js for static content like stylesheets or images. LinkedIn recommends and uses Nginx for its mobile site. Another tip that (one hopes) is obvious? But LinkedIn also has a few insights that might not be obvious. Garlapati also recommends using binary modules with Node.js, and standard V8 JavaScript rather than client-side libraries. Infographic: What Tools Developers Actually Use. 22 Essential Tools for Testing Your Website's Usability. The Web Design Usability Series is supported by join.me, an easy way to instantly share your screen with anyone. join.me lets you collaborate on-the-fly, put your heads together super-fast and even just show off.
A site's ease of use, or its usability, is an integral part of its success, especially with websites becoming more and more interactive, complex and packed with features. User-centered design is all about building websites that fulfill the goals and desires of its users, and at the heart of this concept is that a user must be able interact with your website effectively. Testing usability is an art and a science. There are many times when usability testers rely on qualitative measurements, intuition, opinions and feedback from users and experience. However, there are also factors you can test quantitatively to ensure that a site is usable. In this post, we'll discuss six crucial factors that affect usability.
What other tools have you used to test website usability? 1. 2. 3. 4. Top Web Developer Tools of 2011. While browser-based operating systems haven’t taken over the world, 2011 has been a pretty good year for Web developers. It’s an exciting time to be working in Web development, and there’s never been a better crop of tools to work with. Web standards are eclipsing proprietary toolkits, and the development community is creating its own set of open source tools to work with. Here’s a look at some of the best we’ve seen in 2011. To be clear, this isn’t exclusively a list of tools that debuted in 2011. Basically, we’re looking to highlight tools that are innovative, widely used and/or wildly useful for Web developers. jQuery and jQuery Mobile No list of Web developer tools would be complete without jQuery, the ever-popular JavaScript library that we’ve covered extensively on ReadWriteHack. Even Microsoft has made the case for jQuery and technology surveys show jQuery well in the lead for 2011, moving from 27% of sites surveyed in December 2010, to 42% in December 2011.
Bootstrap PhoneGap. Create a web page - StumbleUpon.