Web Design
June 25, 2006
A collection of AJAX hacks (recipes) coupled with intelligent discussions. A good book to buy for anyone interested in AJAX and modern web application development.
The book begins with a great introduction to AJAX and then provides a useful grab-bag of commonly needed AJAX applications.
For example:
- Processing Web forms.
- Validations: credit card numbers, email addresses etc …
What are AJAX ‘hacks’?
AJAX ‘hacks’ are concise code samples that can be used as ‘components (if you will,) that you can plug into your own work.
Besides the usefulness of having a reusable collection like this, you can learn a lot from the ‘hacks’, since each one is coupled with a good discussion.
Some highlights:
- Ruby on Rails and AJAX discussions
- Examination of the open source AJAX libraries like Scriptaculous and Rico.
- The concise and clear coverage of AJAX basics.
As with all O’reilly books, the writing is clear and concise and well presented.
Note: this is not a beginners tutorial … you will need to be able to work with and understand JavaScript.
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May 16, 2006
NOTE: SEO is the acronym for: ’search engine optimization’. This is the process of making your web pages more search engine ‘friendly’ by tweaking code and content.
Choosing a proper domain name can have a huge impact in terms of how it affects your positions in the search engines and your overall traffic.
THE 3 CRITICAL FACTORS
- The domain name should contain key words.
- The domain name should be as short as possible – easy to remember and easy to type in.
- The domain name is slightly better off as a .com over say a .net, org etc …
1. KEY WORDS IN YOUR DOMAIN NAME
No one knows the exact algorithms that the search engines use to determine who ranks higher. But you can learn a lot when you have several websites that get a lot of traffic …
One thing I have discovered over the years, is that keywords in a domain name do have a serious impact as far as the search engines are concerned. That said, MSN seems to hold it as being more important than the other 2 major search engines: Google and Yahoo!
The point is that you should start your SEO (search engine optimization) work BEFORE you even register your domain name. Try to choose a domain that contains a good keyword.
2. SHORT DOMAIN NAMES ARE EASY TO REMEMBER
I think this one is obvious … if your domain name is:
www.fantabulousefluffyregistereddogs.com
… chances are people will have a hard time remembering it! Instead something like ‘www.fandogs.com’ would be much better.
3. WHY ARE .COM DOMAINS BETTER?
Less to do with search engines and everything to do with the fact that most people will type in ‘.com’ before .net or anything else.
For that reason alone, try to register a .com before anything else.
Stefan Mischook
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May 1, 2006
I have had two major problems with Ruby and Ruby on Rails:
- Hard to find Ruby/Rails hosting.
- Not too many clients looking for Ruby programmers.
One thing has changed:
A major hosting company (GoDaddy.com,) has stepped up and now supports Ruby on Rails hosting – there goes my first argument against learning Ruby!
Quote from GoDaddy:
“Our customers are finding Ruby on Rails to be incredibly valuable in shaping their online presence,” said Bob Parsons, GoDaddy.com CEO and Founder. “We are pleased to be able to offer support for a framework that increases the utility of the sites we host.”
With GoDaddy.com jumping in, this will force/influence other hosting companies to adopt Ruby and as such, I believe over the next year, Ruby hosting will become more and more common.
BUT EVERYTHING IS NOT PERFECT WITH RUBY… YET.
Even though it looks as though the hosting thing is resolving itself, we still have the issue of the number of Ruby gigs/jobs floating around … not that many yet.
There is still so much PHP out there (hosting, frameworks, products) that I think for next few years, PHP will continue to dominate with regards to small to medium size projects.
That said, I think that Ruby will be a player for a few reasons … most important, is the strong acceptance of Ruby (and Rails) by the Java community.
Another problem with Ruby and Rails, is the stability of the fastcgi plug-in that works with Apache 2.x.
Basically, there are still some lingering issues with how Ruby ‘talks’ to Apache. This is major, but there are many high profile, high traffic websites that seem to be running fine anyway … ?
CONCLUSION
Despite the aforementioned issues with Ruby and Rails, I am actually involved with putting together a major project with Rails … I know, I know, I’m a bit of a hypocrite!
My reasons?
- Ruby and Rails are compelling – there’s some good stuff in there that should make the project much easier to build.
- I wanted to explore Ruby and Rails with a real project – I’m just a ‘Curious George’ I suppose …
I plan to come back to you and give you my impressions as to how easy (and useful) it would be for web designers (not programmers) to learn at Ruby vs. say PHP.
Stefan
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April 25, 2006
As you may know, one of the hardest things about getting your websites to appear in the search engines, is actually getting noticed by the search engines in the first place! If they don’t know you even exist …
To solve this problem, the best thing to do, is to get your site listed on a website that already is visited by Google or Yahoo etc …
A COUPLE OF OPTIONS
One way to do this is with link exchanges. Another is by submitting your website to a directory. The problem is that good directories (that get visited a lot,) usually take their time to list new websites, or you have to pay.
For example: Yahoo! cost about $295 just for them to consider your site – there is no guarantee they will even accept you!
…
To make a long story short, killersites.com has a brand (spanking) new web designers directory. If you have a website and you are looking for web design contracts and exposure to the search engines, now is the time to get your website listed since it is FREE … for now.
Web Design Firms Directory
I will at some point, stop accepting free listings because each entry has to be validated by human eyes … that takes time! To be clear, if you list your site now, it’s free. It will also always be free, for that level, for you guys and gals.
–
I have an article comparing AJAX (the hot new name for a type of JavaScript programming,) and FLASH. There is some collision between the two, and it is an interesting read to see how these technologies compare.
This will be out within the next few days.
Thanks,
Stefan Mischook
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April 20, 2006
These days people are really interested in web traffic – big web traffic. But one thing that many web designers don’t consider, is the quality of traffic.
NOTE: SEO is the acronym for: ‘search engine optimization’. This is the process of making your web pages more search engine ‘friendly’ by tweaking code and content.
NOT ALL WEB TRAFFIC IS CREATED EQUAL
People love counting page-views and unique visits but from my perspective, if the traffic sucks, who cares if you get 100 000 visits a day!
HOW TO DETERMINE THE QUALITY OF WEB TRAFFIC
- How long people stay your website
- Your conversion rate – if you sell stuff.
- How many bookmark/’add-to-favorite’ your website.
- How many people visit your website by directly typing in your web address.
You know your traffic (probably*) sucks if are people leave right away, don’t buy anything, never bookmark your site etc ..
You can determine what the numbers are for the above points, with a good stats program.
* People could also be leaving because your website sucks – bad usability etc.
THE MORE SPECIFIC THE SEARCH TERM/PRASE – THE BETTER
Let’s say you sell Irish Setters and you have good rating for the key word: ‘dogs’. And since lots of people search using the ‘dogs’ key word, you get lots of ‘dog’ traffic.
I called it ‘dog’ traffic because what you find, is that the vast majority of your audience is NOT looking for Irish Setters, most are looking for information about (all the) other types of dogs in the world …. and that’s if your lucky!
Who knows, maybe they are looking for information on bad stocks (a la stock market,) or maybe on not so attractive women … it’s hard to say with such a loose/broad search term.
OK, LET’S GET BETTER TRAFFIC
With this understanding, you now decide to target ‘Irish Setters’, and with work and luck, you get good position in the search engines. But now, you’ve lost your top ‘dog’ position … dog dangit!
But is it really bad news? Well no, because you now find yourself getting people who are actually interested in what you are offering (Irish Setters) and as such, sales go up AND you get more return traffic.
WHY GOOGLE TRAFFIC IS BETTER FOR BUSINESS
To the point: people who reach you from other websites are typically ‘browsers’. These people are not ready to ‘pull the trigger’ on anything specific, they are simply snooping about not ready to commit … that’s why search engine traffic CAN BE much better.
HOW WEBSITE CAN DELIVER GREAT TRAFFIC
That said, some websites can deliver great traffic, if they are designed to filter/clean up traffic properly.
For example: if my website has a link to your Irish Setter selling website, and the link text reads:
‘Buy superb Irish Setters’
Chances are that people who click through from my website to yours, will be more likely to want to buy an Irish Setter from you. If on the other hand, my link text read: ‘free Irish Setter Information’, the quality of the traffic will decrease – you’ll be getting a bunch of free-loaders!
CONCLUSION
Don’t waste your time chasing sucky traffic … go for the ‘killer’ traffic.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)
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April 5, 2006
When people think of Java, they think of some mighty indestructible language/environment that never goes down – well at least less than other platforms like PHP or .NET.
REALITY CHECK
After running my own servers for 6 years (IIS with Resin) with few troubles, I moved hosting to outside sources. I had to go through several hosting companies before I found one that could even run my simple POJO based applications!
Now after a year has passed, my experience with shared Java hosting can be summarized:
- Tomcat seems to go down at least once every 7-14 days.
- Contrast this to PHP – never goes down.
FINAL COMMENTS
The Java community tends to dismiss PHP as some scrappy scripting language that can’t be counted on … I must confess, I used to think that too.
Now after a year of using both Java based and PHP based applications, I have personally found PHP to be much more stable and reliable. I am actually nervous that my Java applications (and Tomcat) will fail regularly and am moving to migrate everything to PHP.
I have no axe to grind, just speaking the truth based on my experience.
Stefan Mischook (The Web Design Heretic)
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December 30, 2005
INTRODUCTION
The title of this article is controversial … the truth often is.
In my effort to reveal (what I consider to be) a huge disservice to the web design world, I continue to hammer home the fact that the web standards movement has gone too far – it has promoted bad practices and bad web design.
WEB STANDARDS ARE GOOD … WHEN USED AT THE RIGHT TIME.
Before I go on, I want to stress that I believe web standards are a good thing – it makes sense that browser makers agree on how things should work … it makes web design and web application development much easier and cheaper
That said, let’s try to remember that web design is not a mathematical equation to be balanced (or validated,) it is about creating effective websites that work today!
A LITTLE BACKGROUND.
I was building websites in 1994 back when the W3C was formed. For those of you who may not know, the W3C is an organization put together to define the specifications for web technologies like:
The web standards were created for browser manufacturers to implement and not for web designers. Well … at least not until the browser makers can get their act together and properly support the web standards.
It makes no sense for web designers to try and force web standards based code to work in browsers that don’t support web standards properly.
WEB STANDARDS-CART BEFORE THE BROWSER-HORSE
Those who lead the web standards movement, must have forgotten the wise old proverb: ‘Don’t put the cart before the horse.’
In the context of web design, this means that you shouldn’t try to use technology/techniques and code that is NOT YET supported in the majority of browsers being used. Unfortunately, the web standards movement has done just that, and now there is a cost a lot of people are paying.
THE COST OF ZEALOUS ADHEARENCE TO WEB STANDARDS
In a reality where (currently supported) CSS is not well suited for page-level layouts and buggy/inconsistent implementation between the major browsers (Internet Explorer FireFox,) are a fact of life, designing web sites following the now popular web standard zealot practices, has wasted countless hours for no real benefit.
Consider these facts:
- CSS for layout is not intuitive at all. Since when is: ‘margin:0px auto’ intuitive for creating center aligned layout.
- CSS is buggy and inconsistent between browsers.
- The only true advantage of CSS based layouts is the separation of structure from formatting. This translates into the cross-device compatibility. A questionable need for most websites at this time …
CSS code for page layout stinks in terms of intuitiveness … it is the worst technology for page or user interface layout I’ve ever seen. Anyone who has designed screens with Java or VB knows this. Actually, anyone who has used HTML tables for page layout knows this!
For example:
Creating a center aligned fixed or fluid layout, where the height expands perfectly in all browsers (without the need for hacks) is trivial and intuitive with an HTML table. With CSS, it is a tricky thing that requires hacks.
In fact, a whole culture of ‘hackery’ has developed because of this flaw in the thinking of the web standards zealots – the foolish practice of ‘putting the cart before the horse.’
TROUBLE WITH CSS HACKS
Because of the aforementioned problems with CSS and the browser bugs, hacks have been created to shoe-horn web standards based web sites into working with the browsers. At first glance the hacks seem like a viable solution … but they aren’t.
In fact, hacks should be avoided because CSS hacks rely on ‘broken’ aspects of browsers … things that can get fixed. Any programmer (with just a little experience) knows that basing your work on a broken technology is a recipe for disaster … because things get fixed.
THE DISASTER HAS OCCURED – IE7 WILL BREAK MANY WEBSITES THAT USE THE PROMOTED HACKS
One of the major arguments the web standards movement has used to convince people to ignore reality (the reality that CSS based layouts suck in many ways,) is the famous (infamous) forward-compatibility argument.
The myth of forward compatibility in a nutshell: if you build your sites to standards, they are guaranteed to work in the future.
As it turns out, the first time this argument was put to the test (IE7) it failed miserably. IE7 will be web standards compliant – so much so in fact, that many commonly used CSS hacks will break in IE7, forcing many well meaning web designers to have to go back and change their code – who’s going to pay for that time?
Some web standards zealots might argue that hacks are not ‘really’ promoted by the movement … this simply not true. Every web standards book, every web standards guru mentions, uses and promotes hacks. It too bad, since many web design books published in the last 3 years will have to be trashed since they teach techniques that will break in IE7.
THE SOLUTION
The key to this whole mess is found in common sense and a little experience:
Don’t leverage specifications until they are supported in the browsers.
Ok, how about making things work in both IE and Mozilla based browsers? The best solution is to use IE conditional comments. This is one example where thinking outside the web standards box makes perfect sense.
Stefan Mischook (a.k.a.: the web design heretic)
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September 29, 2005
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WHAT IS AJAX?
What?! You don’t know? And you call yourself a nerd…
AJAX is short for: ‘Asynchronous JavaScript and XML’. AJAX is a combination of technologies that have been around for years.
- HTML/XHTML
- CSS
- DOM
- JavaScript
- XMLHttpRequest object to exchange data asynchro
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From Wikipedia:
Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or Ajax, is a web development technique for creating interactive web applications.
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