How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 6: Best Practices for Common HTML Elements (IMG, A)

Posted on by Rob Larsen

We’ll finish up our tour of the body tag with several posts featuring general notes about common content elements. I’ll be taking my time with these as getting this stuff right will go a long way towards getting the most out of your site.

Comfy?

On with it then.

Links <a>

The link is the engine of the web. The concept of Hypertext (the H in HTML) itself is expressed in the power of the link. Google is Google because of the power of links. There is no better place to start.

Basic usage

<a href="http://www.drunkenfist.com/"  
        class="contact" 
        title="my personal site" 
        rel="me">DrunkenFist.com</a>

Write Good Link Text

For body copy you want to write link text that is descriptive of the link destination. generally this means a short phrase (5-10 words, depending on who you ask) that clearly describes the link. For that reason “click here” is generally not the greatest link text. For a live example and more on this topic take a look at link chapter of the the US Government’s Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines. It’s full of really interesting tips on handling links.

For the SEO-minded, the above advice has the added bonus of generally including keywords which flow link juice and context to the targeted page.
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Recent Reading (node.js, P3PC, Event Delegation, Twitter)

Posted on by Rob Larsen

After relaunching my personal site and realizing all my other sites are in pretty good shape for the first time in forever, I’ve suddenly found myself with plenty of free “tech time” to mess around with whatever I want to mess around with. Which is cool, because, while I appreciate being able to tinker in a very practical manner on production sites and learning from what what works now, I really miss being able to mess around with the newness out there. Sometimes, like with the HTML5 work I’ve been doing, the two can meet, but more often than not the brand new stuff needs to sit on the burner a little bit before it’s ready for prime time.

You’ll see where all of this is going when you see the first topic in this month’s recent reading roundup.
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I’m Going to be Speaking on Front End Performance in May

Posted on by Rob Larsen

There’s always a slide about performance in my presentations. This time? Every slide will be about performance. I’m chomping at the bit to get started on this one.

The Bocoup guys were crazy enough to invite me down to talk about my favorite topic- front end performance. Here’s the write up:

Front End Performance for the Common Man: Practical Strategies to Speed Up Your Site

Day: Wednesday May 19th 2010
Time: 6:30pm – 8pm
Cost: Free

Rob Larsen will examine the core concepts and techniques behind the performance of the web’s fastest sites and will translate them into practical examples. This talk will cut across several technologies (JavaScript, CSS, Ant, Apache and more) to present a suite of tools any developer can use to speed up their site- no matter the size or budget. RSVP to The Event Page.

It’s going to be a really good talk- full of practical examples and advice for every flavor and level of web developer. You should totally go.

Actually, you should just go to all the Bocoup talks. Smart people talking about killer technology = fun times. I’ll be a regular there.

How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 5: The Body – How To Structure Your Markup

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Five posts in and finally we get to the heart of the matter- getting your content onto the page for your users to enjoy. This will be done in two parts. This, the first part, will deal with how to structure your HTML so it makes sense from and organizational standpoint and so that you can easily style it with CSS. Let’s look at a stripped down example of what I’m talking about.

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DrunkenFist.com Redesign Launched. More HTML5 Goodness.

Posted on by Rob Larsen

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.

A couple of notes.
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