How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 4: The Body

Posted on by Rob Larsen

The body is clearly going to take a while, since it contains all of the content on the page. I’ll be breaking it out into chunks. This first post will focus on how I use the body tag itself.

I generally use the body tag to hold basic information about the page to use with both CSS and JavaScript. I want to capture the general type of page (home pages, landing page, gallery page, tertiary page, form page) and then the style of the page within the general type (e.g., art, movies, blog.) Coming up with a good, logical scheme for this kind of thing can generate plenty of unexpected benefits throughout a site build.

It can also help with planning as these classifications can be used as part of the estimation process- “I’ve got 5 major templates and 10 variations, that’ll be 2 weeks of work.”

Here are some examples from the ongoing redesign of DrunkenFist.com. These might help to crystallize what I’m trying to do.
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How To Make a Web Site the Modern Way. Part 3: A Quick Aside on Organizing Files

Posted on by Rob Larsen

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:

Grab a copy from the starter assets repository if you’d like to play along at home.

Let’s look at each in turn:
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I’m on TV. WordPress.TV That Is.

Posted on by Rob Larsen

You’ve all seen this, but now here it is from the official channel.

https://videopress.com/v/wp-content/plugins/video/flvplayer.swf?ver=1.16

Speaking of WordPress and HTML5, I’m knee deep in the process of getting DrunkenFist.com relaunched and I’ve been doing the WordPress component for the past few days. It’s super complicated. Which means, of course, I’m having a blast with it 🙂

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.
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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:
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