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  A Fun Approach To Creating More Successful Websites

As Web designers and developers, each project we work with has a unique set of goals and requirements. But one goal we have for all of our projects is that we want them to make an impression on people — we want the websites that we create to be memorable.A fun experience is often an enjoyable one and an enjoyable experience is usually a memorable one. Therefore, it stands to reason that one of the ways to create a memorable experience is to make it a fun experience. In this article, we’ll take a look at how adding a bit of “fun” into the mix can help us produce more e...

3,619 0       UI WEB DESIGN SUCCESS ELEMENTS


  Building the new AJAX mail UI part 2: Better than templates, building highly dynamic web pages

This is part 2 of a series of technical posts documenting some of the interesting work and technologies we’ve used to power the new interface (see also part 1, Instant notifications of new emails via eventsource/server-sent events). Regular users can skip these posts, but we hope technical users find them interesting.As dynamic websites constructed entirely on the client side become de rigueur, there are a number of templating languages battling it out to become the One True Way™ of rendering your page. All follow essentially the same style: introduce extra control tags to intersp...

2,808 0       WEB DESIGN DYNAMIC AJAX UI


  the Performance Golden Rule

Yesterday I did a workshop at Google Ventures for some of their portfolio companies. I didn’t know how much performance background the audience would have, so I did an overview of everything performance-related starting with my first presentations back in 2007. It was very nostalgic. It has been years since I talked about the best practices from High Performance Web Sites. I reviewed some of those early tips, like Make Fewer HTTP Requests, Add an Expires Header, and Gzip Components.But I needed to go back even further. Thinking back to before Velocity and WPO existed, I thought I might ...

2,935 0       WEB DESIGN PERFORMANCE GOLDEN RULE


  Building a Modern Web Stack for the Real-time Web

The web is evolving. After a few years of iteration the WebSockets spec is finally here (RFC 6455), and as of late 2011 both Chrome and Firefox are SPDY capable. These additions are much more than just "enhancing AJAX", as we now have true real-time communication in the browser: stream multiplexing, flow control, framing, and significant latency and performance improvements. Now, we just need to drag our "back office" - our web frontends, app servers, and everything in between into this century to enable us to take advantage of these new capabilities.We're optimized for "Yesterday's Web"Modern...

2,370 0       WEB DESIGN REAL-TIME WEB WEB STACK


  Why so many Python web frameworks?

When asked about the plethora of web frameworks for Python the answer is often that it is way too easy to put together one in Python. That certainly seems plausible since there are so many libraries that implement the components of a web framework and if it's easy to plug those pieces together then maybe that lowers the bar of entry for new frameworks. So let's give it a shot, we'll pick some components and spend a couple hours seeing how far we can get building a web framework, which we'll call Robaccia. Executive Summary: Robaccia was built in three hours and a total of 60 lines of Pytho...

2,616 0       WEB DESIGN PYTHON WEB FRAMEWORK DYNAMIC SCRIPTING LANGUAGE


  Dieter Rams' 10 principles of good web design

Dieter Rams is one of the most important designers of the 20th century but his famous 10 principles for good design focused on industrial design. Here Lisbon-based designer Nuno Loureiro applies them to web design “My heart belongs to the details. I actually always found them to be more important than the big picture. Nothing works without details. They are everything, the baseline of quality”  â€“ Dieter RamsSince I got to know the work of Dieter Rams back in college, I became fascinated by the exceptional pro...

3,366 0       WEB DESIGN PRINCIPLE INNOVATION


  Web Design 101: Get Your Color Contrasts Right

Great web design is hard.  It requires imagination, a keen eye, and the ability to project ideas onto a, generally digital, medium.  In today’s world this calls for a conflation of both artist and technologist.  I am not one of these people. I am a technologist, but I am no artist (thankfully I know some great artists!).Nonetheless, I’ve always had a good eye for things that look good and for sites that look like they were built with an early version of Microsoft FrontPage <yuck!>.  Futhermore, there are several aspects of design that I consider low-hang...

3,092 0       UI WEB DESIGN STRUCTURE CONTRAST


  Internet trends and your web development strategy

Takeaway: Ryan Boudreaux looks at some of the latest reports on how users are spending their time on the web. Keeping an eye on trends is one way for web developers to stay current.Recent figures in Internet activity include several interesting trends, including:the number of smartphone-user adoption ratesCyber Monday sales figuresmobile banking app usagesocial networking on mobile social mediahours spent onlinesearch habitsTrends in worldwide Internet activity may or may not translate well into changes and updates to an organization’s web development and design plans. As a result, many...

3,274 0       WEB DESIGN MOBILE WEB APP INTERNET TREND