Tag: google+

Short Head

Posted on by Evan Mullins

Use zipf's short head to tune your website rather than redesign the whole thing. To make a website successful it needs to meet the needs of the users. Find out what those needs are by using the short head philosophy to equate most searched things as the biggest needs of the users. Use personas to segment the audience and make sure you've got each audience covered and all their main needs. Then showcase the content that they need.

Every websites could benefit from this process. Every new site or redesign should start with this research and strategy. It does take time and effort, but it has the biggest return on investment in making an effective website. I still think redesigns are still needed, but slapping a new design on a bad architecture and structure benefits no one, especially the user.

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Stop Redesigning And Start Tuning Your Site Instead | Smashing UX Design
Let’s look at why redesigns happen, and some straightforward and inexpensive ways we might avoid them.

Img Set?

Posted on by Evan Mullins

Great article at a list apart discusing the state of the industry regarding responsive images. This picks apart the set attribute of the img element from a surprisingly objective view coming from someone so close to the picture element. Insightful discussion about the principle behind the proposals than the actual solution too. If the working group wants the community to be involved and then ignores it in favor of "their own" biased unproven/untested ideas.

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A List Apart: Articles: Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point
The goal of a “responsive images” solution is to deliver images optimized for the end user's context, rather than serving the largest potentially necessary image to everyone. Unfortunately, this h…

Picture element of srcset attribute?

Posted on by Evan Mullins

Bruce details the reasons and story behind the srcset attribute which is now introduced as an alternative to the picture element. Some aspects of the attribute are nice (like the fact that it's an attribute and not a new element, so it's creating up new elements with for problems. It's adapting currently used elements to be more future-friendly), but some aspects are weird – like the totally foreign syntax (where did that come from?). There is also some worry that the elements that are proposed and introduced by the community get nowhere, but then a when someone at apple makes a proposal it gets new immediate support from the group. Anyways, either way I think one of these solutions (or a variant) should help alleviate much of the pain behind responsive images. At least the discussion is happening, no?

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HTML5 adaptive images: end of round one | HTML5 Doctor
Those web authors in the W3C Resposive Images Community Group soldiered on in frustration that they were they being ignored because the problem itself wasn't seen as a problem. Then this week, Edw…

SVG Preloader with Raphael JS

Posted on by Evan Mullins

Here's a very creative use of using a newly available technology. Using svg graphics which are very lightweight, for a website preloader. I like the animation used as well.

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Make a stylish preloader with SVG | Tutorial | .net magazine
Many sites neglect users with slow connections. Ian Culshaw explains how to use SVG library Raphaël to create a preloader that’ll hold the users' attention while pages load

CSS3 Button/Icon set

Posted on by Evan Mullins

I've been secretly hoping to see a few of these pop up once the whole icon font idea spread through the nets. I really like this idea and it's a very nice implementation too! I only see some quality issues on a couple of the icons (such as youtube), but it's awesome and I hope to see it in use for the sake of consistency!

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Zocial Button Set: 72 CSS3 Buttons
The idea behind this project was to produce a consistent set of buttons that could be used for the range of social actions frequently taken in Web applications. These actions are often important goals for users, such as connecting third-party accounts or sharing content to third-party platforms, so their appearance has to be attractive and clear.
The standard buttons provided by third parties (such as Facebook, Twitter and SoundCloud) vary in size, style and interactivity. A consistent button…

Application Cache Gotchas

Posted on by Evan Mullins

A great writeup from Jake Archibald about the downfalls and downfalls to Application Cache. Having just attempted to building a mobile site using application cache, I remember hitting almost all of these gotchas and realizing that Application Cache wasn't all it made itself to seem. I resorted to actually making a mobile app rather than deal with the manifest file and it's counter-intuitive caching. This article would have helped immensely and I can't tell you how entertaining it is to read anything by Jake.

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A List Apart: Articles: Application Cache is a Douchebag
Good morning! Over in “castle Lanyrd” we recently launched our mobile site, which caches data on events you're attending for viewing offline. I've boiled the offline bits down to a simple demo…