Recent Reading (Analytics, WordPress Short Codes, Jira, JavaScript Videos, Protocol Relative URLS, Facebook)

Posted on by Rob Larsen

There’s a lot of content this week, including about 5 hours of video embedded right in the page for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

Analytics – The Usability Lab of the new decade

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.

Short Code resources

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’m actually using them for the table of contents on my ongoing How To Make a Web Site series.
Continue reading “Recent Reading (Analytics, WordPress Short Codes, Jira, JavaScript Videos, Protocol Relative URLS, Facebook)” →

How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 2: The Head

Posted on by Rob Larsen

Last time out we looked at the Anatomy of a Web Page. Using that, let’s move on and look at the first of the two major sections, the head.

For the sake of this blog post, the head includes two pieces of code that are actually before the head. Sue me 🙂

Using the head from my (recently updated) starter assets project as an example, let’s look at the code in detail. First, what it looks like in total:
Continue reading “How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 2: The Head” →

Let Me Direct You to the Quote of the Week.

Posted on by Rob Larsen

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:

The iPhone Obsession.

*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

How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 1: The Anatomy of an HTML Page

Posted on by Rob Larsen

HTML + CSS + JavaScript = Content + Style + Behavior

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.

Continue reading “How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 1: The Anatomy of an HTML Page” →

How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 0: Introduction

Posted on by Rob Larsen

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

The Rest of the Series