Let’s face it. Marketing in the digital age is hard. Where will you put your efforts? How do you know it will pay off? The Isobar 50 is our list of the top 50 challenges that online marketers are grappling with today, and our recommendations for dealing with them. If you’re an online marketer, this is the place to get answers to your most pressing marketing and online business questions.
I provided answers for three of the questions and I even sound like I know what I’m talking about: Read the rest of this entry »
In case you missed it the latest Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview is out and it’s a thing of beauty. It added Canvas support so the first thing I did was run it through some demo code. It’s faster than Chrome. Visibly faster. No benchmarks needed. It’s such an incredible difference from the current Internet Explorer family which are many times slower than the good browsers out there.
The good news doesn’t stop there. There’s actual standards support.
In the past few days I’ve been revising the CSS compatibility table with information about the latest crop of browsers. There’s no doubt about it: this is IE9’s show. It just supports nearly everything. No hassle, no buts.
HTML5 is the latest version of the language that serves as the foundation of the web. It’s the first major revision in over 10 years and as it’s gotten closer to its final form and more and more browsers begin to implement its features it’s become a source of intense interest and contention in the technology community. This article hopes to explain the realities of HTML5, dispel a couple of myths and shine some light on the future of the web.
To begin we’ll need to define what we’re talking about when we say “HTML5.” There is a specification to refer to and much of what falls under the HTML5 name lives in that spec. In addition, there are several related specifications and APIs that are lumped together and called “HTML5″ when people talk about these things informally.
So, conversationally, HTML5 consists of the following:
New Semantic Elements
HTML5 has introduced several new elements. They aim to introduce more meaning to markup and codify existing web development patterns. Some examples of these new elements are nav (for navigation), article, header and footer.
I launched the redesign of DrunkenFist.com last night. It’s my second HTML5 site. I took a lot of what I learned from the work we did on A Wider Net and applied it to a much larger project. Fun times.
This won’t be the longest entry in this series, but I did want to take a second to outline the way I organize files. You can come up with your own scheme. There are many. This one works for me, so I use it. The basic idea is to keep everything in a logical, easy to find place every time I make a site.
Let’s take a quick look at the generic file structure I use:
Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path talks up analytics. Don’t I feel like a smart guy with all my fancy analytics experience?
That’s probably something I don’t talk enough about here- analytics. I’ve got a ton of experience with both Omniture and Google Analytics, doing some pretty advanced work. I should share that.
Anyway, good article talking about the UX benefits of analytics data. Check it out.
This is a little resource page from one of the WordCamp Boston Ingite talks. WordPress Short Codes are clearly awesome and I don’t use them enough. I aim to change that.
I have a real post queued up to go in an hour or two. To tide you over until then, I present the web development quote of the week:
Since my attempts at capturing web developers’ hearts and minds by publishing fundamental research have failed miserably but my thirst for attention continues unabated, today I will once more shout at iPhone developers. That’s proven to work.
More specifically, today I will shout at web developers who think that delicately inserting an iPhone up their ass is the same as mobile web development.
My emphasis.
Read the rest of the excellent post* over at Quirksmode:
*it really is. It starts off with the above quote but goes deep into some issues that people ought to keep in mind when working on mobile sites- especially when faced with the titular iPhone obsession
This the one of the guiding principles of the way I make sites. We want to keep our content/data, in the form of HTML (HyperText Markup Language) code, neatly separated from the rules that tell the browser what it’s supposed to look like, in the form of one or more CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and rules that tell the browsers what it’s supposed to do, for our purposes, written in JavaScript.
Why?
Well, there are many reasons. I’ll give you two big ones and then it’s onto the next section. We’ve got a lot to cover.
Well, I leaked it earlier this week, so I might as well get started.
Welcome to How to Make a Web Site the Modern Way, a blog series outlining, to the best of my ability. how to build an HTML page using today’s best practices. The focus won’t be on specific coding techniques, although there will be some of that, it will be on how the pieces fit together. Without experience, it’s tough to know how the pieces of a web page fit together in the best way. I’ve got some of that experience and I’d like to share it with people. So at the end of all of this, I’m hoping this series will serve as a one stop shop for people looking to understand the big picture.
First up: The Anatomy of an HTML Page .
Some basic principles:
Fast: I want pages to be as fast as possible by default.
Findable: This isn’t really the same as SEO, but it’s kind of like a cousin to it. I want to make pages spiderable, human scannable, computer readable and generally information rich.
Standards compliant: I’m not a standards zealot, but I try my best to follow web standards wherever possible.
Accessible: I try to make pages as accessible as possible.
Usable: Usability is a deep topic, but there are things you can do, by default that will enhance the usability of your site.
Intuitive: I want developers to look at the stuff I do and say “hey, that makes sense.” I also want it to make sense to me when I return to it in six months
Breakable: Which is a funny way of saying “graceful degradation,” a concept that colors a lot of what I try to do. The idea being- if something’s going to break, or not work as expected, make sure that it’s not totally screwed up
I just wanted to point folks to the small project I started on Google code- Starter Assets.
It’s based on some work I did at Cramer to standardize the development process there. The idea was to provide a standard set of files and a standard file/folder structure for people to start with whenever they were initiating a new project. I’ve expanded on it in this case to (eventually) include several doctypes (right now it’s just xHTML strict- HTML5 will follow soon) and links to popular JavaScript libraries on the Google Ajax Library CDN (just jQuery for now.)*
To use, you’d just download or SVN export the folder that corresponds to the doctype/library combination that strikes your fancy and you’re good to go.
I’ve released it in advance of a blog series I mentioned during my JavaScript presentation this past Thursday. It’s a step-by-step tutorial on how I build web sites called, “Building a Modern Web Site.” Read the rest of this entry »
