14Dec
There were a few areas of the new website that I was kind of excited about showcasing as I thought they were a little different or possibly even something brand new. One of these things is the contact form.
The form itself is pretty standard, really there’s not much you can do to make a form exciting, and with three text boxes and a textarea there isn’t much complexity to try and improve the user experience. In the background the validation of the form is also fairly standard except for one small feature; the email validation.
Continue reading “Email validation a new way”
30Nov
At the time of writing this post I have just finished browser testing the new site (I wrote it a while back) and it went rather smoothly. The reason for this is because I now use the rule:
If I can’t see it, I don’t care
In the past I would spend hours over the smallest details when it came to browser testing, ensuring a site was identical to the original design. Of course this was a little crazy, so now I get a site built and working in Firefox and then browser test to remove an obvious or critical functionality or positioning problems. The reason for the careless approach is that many users will not notice the small differences or notice that anything is broken as they probably don’t compare sites in various browsers like Web Developers.
Continue reading “Leaving IE6 behind”
19Nov
The 404 page is one of the most imaginatively designed web pages in a person’s website. A page totally unrestricted by elements such as navigation and headers that are common on most websites. My own 404 page was very bland; it looked exactly like the rest of the website and had only a few links back to the main website. It was ugly and barely helpful.
Redesigning my site provided the challenge to have a go at doing something more creative.
Continue reading “What to do with a 404 page”
16Nov
OK, so Smush.it isn’t actually broken but when Yahoo took over the company it’s most useful feature appeared to vanish.
When Smush.it was first released a user was able to insert the top level domain of a website and have Smush.it crawl the entire site and CSS files for images to optimise. When Yahoo took over the only ways to optimise images are to do it page by page or upload a maximum of 5 images at a time. Both these options are far from ideal.
What to do
The solution is so simple, I’m not sure why it took me so long to figure it out. If the best you can do is use the YSlow plugin to smush images displayed on a single page then all that is required is for that single page to be created to display all the images within a website.
Continue reading “Fixing Smush.it”