The move was generally well received. This was reflected in the comments from WebProNews readers on our past coverage. For example, a commenter going by the handle Stupidscript said, "It’s definitely a good time to start wrapping your head around the notion of ‘providing context’, because the web is heading into its "semantic" period … where each link will be more or less valuable based on its relationships with and context to information found behind other links."

Google’s use of breadcrumbs in search results is the focus of a recently submitted question to the Google Webmaster Central team. The question was, "Google is showing breadcrumb URLs in SERPs now. Does the kind of delimiter matter? Is there any best practice? What character to use is best? > or | or / or???" Google’s Matt Cutts responded:

Matt says you should have a set of delimited links on your site that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy. He also notes, however, that it is still in the "early days" for breadcrumbs.

"Think about the situation with sitelinks," he says. "Whenever we started out with sitelinks, it took a while before…for example, we added the ability in Google Webmaster Tools where you could remove a sitelink that you didn’t like or that you thought was bad. So we started out, and we did a lot of experiments, and we’ve changed the way that sitelinks look several times. And we have different types of sitelinks (within a page, and the standard ones you’re familiar with). So we’ve iterated over time."

In this same way, he says, Google is in the early stage with breadcrumbs and he has seen different experiments with them. For example, there have been prototypes where the breadcrumbs were in the rich snippet gray line, above the regular snippet. "Having it in the URL is kind of nice, but it could still change over time," he says.

He says the best advice he can give is to make sure you have a set of delimited links that accurately reflect your site’s hierarchy, and that will give you the best chance of getting breadcrumbs to show up in Google, but Google will continue to work on ways to improve breadcrumbs. He says any new announcements about it will likely be made on the Google Webmaster blog.

While Matt doesn’t exactly lean toward one way or another with regards to which character to use as asked about in the submitted question, all of the examples I have seen highlighted show the ">" used. That includes examples from Google’s original announcement on the inclusion of breadcrumbs. Based on that, if I were going to choose one, I’d go with that.

There are three types of breadcrumbs (as described here): path, location, and attribute. Path breadcrumbs show the path that the user has taken to arrive at a page, while location breadcrumbs show where the page is located in the website hierarchy. Attribute breadcrumbs give information that categorizes the current page. Obviously, location breadcrumbs would be the ones Google is using (although with personalized search becoming more of a factor, who knows in the future?).

Have you seen an increase in clickthrough from breadcrumbs in Google resutls? Discuss here.

Related Articles:

> Google Rolls Out Breadcrumb Display in SERPs

> Google Makes it Easier to Tell Where Results Originate From

> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

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In case you are not sure what the difference is between these two types of pages here is a quick explanation;

1. The sole purpose of a landing or sales page is to either sell a product get someone to opt in to your mailing list or preferably both of these options. This page needs to be dedicated strictly to achieving either or both of these aims and should not have anything else on it that is likely to distract your visitor from its purpose.

Although this squeeze page is part of your website it will not be embedded into the rest of the site. This sales page exists separately from your main website and its sole purpose is to achieve one or both of the options available on that page.

2. Now the main function of an article page is to add valuable and relevant content to your internet based business that will not only get your site to rank highly on the search engines such as Google but will generate targeted traffic for you and the more traffic you get to your website the more sales you are likely to make.

The beauty of content pages is that each page can be linked to all the other pages on your website and this makes it easy for your visitors to explore and become familiar with the products and services that you have on offer. Remember when linking through from page to page that you should also hyperlink the keyword phrases that describe the purpose of the target page.

If you want to get the best chance of getting maximum attention from Google then you need to keep your articles as unique as you possibly can. Something else that will increase your SEO rankings is to be sure that both your article headline and any sub-headings, as well as your closing paragraph are key-word optimised.

These two pages are the main types of pages to be found on websites, but there is also a third type of page that is extremely important and that is the homepage of your internet based business website.

Although this page should also be designed with the purpose of persuading and informing, its main function should be to keep your visitors up to date on the available content and encourage them to look further to find the information and services that will benefit them and to get them to willingly give you their name and email address.

So keeping this in mind it would be worth your while to include any links to your most recent articles or any news updates on products or services so that people can easily click through to find them. Always ensure that your opt-in form is displayed in a prominent place on your homepage, so that visitors can leave their details for you without having to search.

Finally but of great importance is to be sure that all of your content pages including your homepage are linked to your sales pages as the reason for doing all this work is so that you can get as many of your interested visitors as possible to click through to your sales pages and purchase your products.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

There are Two Different Types of Pages Required for Your Online Based Business Website

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Don’t like the gallery layout? Click here to view everything on one page.

About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons—maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in—the tip didn’t make the front page. From the Tips Box is where we round up some of our favorites for your buffet-style consumption. Got a tip of your own to share? Add it in the comments, share it here, or email it to tips at lifehacker.com.

Open Data Files in Text Editors to See if They Can Be Tweaked

DanYHKim explores all possible options to tweak configuration files:

I was trying to work with an Adobe Acrobat .pdf form, and tried exporting the form data to a .fdf file (Form data file?). Of course, any filename.fdf will open by default in Acrobat, but I tried opening it using Notepad.

Notepad is pretty agnostic about how it opens files. The .fdf turns out to be plain text. It contains the names of all of the form fields, delimited by angle brackets, and any data in these fields.

With some study, I was able to make a spreadsheet to hold data for multiple forms, and then generate a plain text file that can be used to fill out the .pdf form. I don’t need to save each completed form as a separate file, or work through the hacks necessary for keeping forms that prohibit saving.

What other seemingly-proprietary files are actually text? Well, a VMware .vmx configuration is plain text. A Protein Data Bank molecular crystal structure file is plain text. An Acrobat .pdf file is a mix, but sometimes you can alter the text in a .pdf document by editing the plain text elements. It’s worth the look.

Linux users are certainly already used to this idea, but it does work across operating systems—although not with all types of files, sadly. Some will just come up as garbled text, and it takes some trial and error to see which file types you can tweak yourself. As always, back up the file before you mess with it.

Differentiate Bookmarks in the Bookmark Bar for Reading Later

leftymcrighty uses his bookmark bar for bookmarks and items to read later:

When I want to read a web page at a later time, I find bookmarking the page isn’t good enough, because I’ll just forget it’s there. My quick fix is to drop them on Firefox’s Bookmarks Toolbar, so that they’re always out in the open whenever I open the browser. To ease up on overcrowding (and make my “read later” bookmarks stand out even more), I remove the name from all my permanent bookmarks, leaving only the website’s icon. This works quite well in conjunction with Xmarks, because I can bookmark something at work to read when I get home. Also, with the wide-screen format so popular in most new monitors, this leaves plenty of room for links to pile up in the toolbar.

Use Dryer Sheets as PC Dust Filters

Cory finds a nice-smelling way to protect the inside of his PC from dust, while keeping air circulation:

My new computer case had LOTS of extra vent holes, which are great, but I was concerned about even more dust flooding in.

To solve this I took the sides off and cut unfolded dryer sheets a bit larger than each vent and taped them in place. Plus as the air passes thru them it creates a nice smell, well at least for a short while.

Organize Groceries on the Conveyor Belt for Quick Unpacking at Home

Photo by Matt MacGillivray.

Mike organizes his items at the store so he doesn’t have to later:

While I’m waiting in line at the grocery store, I organize my groceries on the conveyor belt so that they get bagged in categories. I’ll put up all of the produce, then canned goods, frozen foods, bathroom stuff, etc. When I get home, everything is more or less sorted and I can quickly get everything put away.

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You inject helium into your site (e.g. put it in an included footer) and then when you hit the first page you will have a popup asking for the pages you want to test. Helium will find the style sheets that you use and will store that information and the page information inside of localStorage. Then it will XHR around (so your styles need to be on the same host), test each page, and finally give you results.

I put up a trivial example to give it a ride and ended up with:

I ran into a minor issue with regards to relative stylesheets so I did the Github thing and forked, fixed, and pull requested. I love Github

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Or, another choice is to publish it as a ’static page’…a page that stands on its own…meaning it is literally a separate page with a separate address from your homepage. Your readers access these pages by clicking on a link that you have provided on your blog.

Most often you will find these navigation links listed in the sidebar, on the top near the header and sometimes even at the bottom of the blog page. (Make sure these pages open in a ‘new window’ so that your customer can easily navigate back to the home page…you don’t want to loose them.)

An example of some ’static’ pages that should or can be included on your blog are:

1) About Page: This is probably the most common page used among bloggers and the first place I head to after I’ve read a post I like on a particular blog. Use your ‘About Me’ page to allow your reader get a more personal view of you. This page gives your new readers a glimpse or snapshot of the person behind the posts. You can and should include a picture of yourself. Additionally, you can explain a bit of why they should subscribe to your blog on this page.

2) Contact Page: Many times your readers will have questions after reading through one of your posts…or maybe something captured their interest and they would like to partner with you on a project. Whatever the reason, you should have a page dedicated to contacting you. Without this page, you will never know how many opportunities you may have missed with your readers and potential partners. Someone may even have been impressed enough to want to advertise with you. Make it easy for them to locate this important page…don’t test their patience by making it difficult to locate…they may walk.

3) Disclaimer Page: With the new FTC rulings about bloggers that came out late 2009, it is imperative that you inform your readers what you ‘get out of your blog.’ If you make money from your blog through affiliate associations or ads, you must inform your readers of this fact or risk big trouble from the FTC. You can balance this revelation by explaining to them some of the costs associated with your blog.

4) Service Related Pages: Any kind of services that you may offer your blog readers such as coaching or consultation services should be given their own page. Your readers will be more likely to buy your services from a dedicated page that you have set up than a flash in the pan mention in one of your posts.

5) Best of Page: Also referred to as a ’sneeze page’…not squeeze page! All your most favorite or most popular blog posts can be included on this page. Use this page to highlight anything about your blog that you want front and center or you know your readers will enjoy because of its previous popularity.

6) 404 Page: Most bloggers are aware of their 404 Error page. This error page is what someone sees when they navigate to a broken or deleted link or a link that is not working for some reason. What most bloggers are not aware of is the fact that they can customize this page to their advantage so that readers are directed to what they are looking for. Additionally, it provides the reader with something else to keep their interest. A blank 404 Page is a wasted opportunity.

7) Unique Projects: Should you participate in any kind of event…charity or otherwise, it is always a good idea to create page dedicated to this particular event. This gives the event much more importance and allows those with interest a place to follow up on any dates or updates that they need be aware of.

Testimonial Page: Selling an item or even selling yourself can be much more impressive if you include testimonials from others that have used the product or service and can provide their details. Once again, there are new strict rules concerning using testimonials so make sure you understand the new FTC rulings before placing any on your blog.

Although there are many more choices for pages in your blog, the choices listed above should be included in most blogs. Beyond those, there are no hard core rules on what pages to set up as each individual blog offers something different. You are only limited by your imagination.

Once you have settled on a blogging subject, visit other blogs with similar interests/topics as yours and check out their pages and how they have set up their blog. Great way to get ideas for your own.

Blogging is a platform that is growing by leaps and bounds. It is here to stay. The more you understand what elements are important to your blog the quicker and easier it will be to be successful at blogging.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Why You Need Static Blog Pages

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As you already seen in our previous posts about Single Page Website Designs that showcase your work in single page design is a hot trend now days. It’s kind of ironic to see what designers can do with single pages as modern age designers love to experiment with things and observe how people interact with their work. Even though this is not a common trend to follow but still as the new design styles come up, and as more and more designers notice them and make use of them in their work, this kind of trends emerge.

In this presentation, you’ll find a variety of highly-creative, beautiful and most importantly inspirational designs which is following the same trend of single page designs. The main purpose here is to stimulate your creativity and to inspire your imagination to create your own design trend because your website represents you and your brand.

You may be interested in the following modern trends related articles as well.

• Single Page Website Designs For Design Inspiration – Part I, Part II
• 55 Excellent WordPress Site Design for Design Inspiration
• 99 Creative And Beautiful Looking Portfolio Designs
• 60+ Amazing Examples Of Illustrative Web Designs
• 50+ Beautiful Website Designs Using Office Stationery
• Grid Style In Modern Web Design: Showcase and Resources

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other trends that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

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Think Green Meeting

KINO

The Great Bearded Reef

Fajne Chlopaki: Portfolio

Mogulista

SocialSnack

BULLET PR

Zee

Legwork Studio

Art by Annis Naeem

Portfolio of Tyrale Bloomfield

We Shoot Bottles

Silverbackapp

Tim Van Damme

basil gloo

Charlie Gentle

Chiragj Solanki

Contrast

Brian Murchison

Visualbox

www.MelissaHie.com

Tyler Finck, Sursly

volll

SectionSeven Inc

Dan Tobolic

Work at Play

Black Estate Vineyard

Search Inside Video

Samir Tuladhar

f claire baxter

Nile Inside

rzmota.com

The Portfolio of Bryan Katzel

Carbon Aspect

smartcube.ie

GIANT Creative

Hello. My name is Myke Ambs

Fabiano Meneghetti

sebdesign.eu

NETWiSE Strategies

About the Author

Gisele Muller is someone that recently discovered a new career online. A person that really likes technology, design, photography and creativity. An eternal geek wannabe, tech fan and a communication lover! Current location: Porto Alegre, RS – Brazil. Twitter: @gismullr

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Mac and iPhone developers aren’t the only ones doing their part to raise money for Haiti earthquake victims, Apple is also pitching in. You can now donate money to the Red Cross directly from iTunes.

You can access the iTunes donation page [iTunes link] using the direct link or by clicking on the graphic on the main iTunes page. Denominations range from $5.00 to $200.00 and come out of your iTunes account. One hundred percent of the donation will go to the Red Cross. Because you will be donating anonymously, if you need a receipt or further acknowledgment, check your iTunes e-mail account for your receipt.

Google has already donated $1 million to ground support in Haiti, and other tech giants are also stepping up to the plate.

If you want to donate to the Red Cross but don’t want to use SMS, iTunes is just one more option for helping out!

Tags: haiti, itunes, red cross

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You will need to use FBJS (Facebook Javascript). This provides the functionality we need to develop custom facebook pages. This is also to protect other users privacy at the same time and restrict Javascript features that can be abused. This tutorial helps you cut short your search and gives you a head start in your quest to build custom tabs within Facebook pages.

Source: http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/creating-a-custom-facebook-page/

Sponsors

Pixmac: Stock Photos, Royalty Free Pictures and Images

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You will need to use FBJS (Facebook Javascript). This provides the functionality we need to develop custom facebook pages. This is also to protect other users privacy at the same time and restrict Javascript features that can be abused. This tutorial helps you cut short your search and gives you a head start in your quest to build custom tabs within Facebook pages.

Source: http://www.webdigi.co.uk/blog/2010/creating-a-custom-facebook-page/

Sponsors

Pixmac: Stock Photos, Royalty Free Pictures and Images

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A/B testing is the process, usually aided by tools like Google Website Optimizer, by which you are able to test different elements of your page such as graphics and text to see which generates the best results.

For example you might wish to work out which banner for your latest special offer generates the most clicks to the detail page. The results will help you make an informed decision not only about that campaign but future ones as well.

Sharing results

ABtests.com is a site that allows you to upload and share your A/B testing results. It’s not often this information is exposed as it could lead to an obvious competitive advantage. It’s definitely worth looking through the results as you will be instantly able to implement many of the ideas on your own sites.

Currently there are sections covering tests for:

• email newsletter sign-up pages
• home pages
• landing pages
• launch reminder pages
• pricing pages
• product pages
• sign-up pages

If you are into testing then you should check it out.

Site URL: http://www.abtests.com

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Google’s on a mission to make its Place Pages valuable hubs of location information. Today the company added verification for local businesses who claim their pages and a post to your Place Page feature.

It’s a yet another maneuver in Google’s continuing strategy to dethrone Yelp as the de facto resource for local venue information and customer review data.

Both new features are pretty noteworthy additions to the offering, and they’re designed to entice more local businesses to claim and update their Place Pages, which by association should attract more customer attention as well.

The Local Advantage

Post to your Place Page is nothing more than a Twitter-like status update box with a 160-character limit that updates your business listing with whatever current information you want to expose to the Google audience. You can access it from your Local Business Center dashboard when you’re logged in. Posts expire in 30 days, but it seems likely you’ll be able to delete outdated entries as well.

To further stimulate Place Page adoption, Google is adding a verification badge to pages that are claimed. Think of this as similar to Twitter’s verified accounts, with the main purpose being to assure page viewers that they’re viewing something actively maintained by the business in question.

Place Page Prominence

In case you haven’t been keeping track, Google Place Pages were introduced in late September 2009. From the get-go it was clear these were meant to rival Yelp business pages in function and utility, but appeal to the mainstream searchers using Google for local queries.

We got to witness that strategy in full earlier this month when Google revealed their location-aware mobile homepage Near Me Now. If you need even more proof of a local attack, look no further than the QR code window decals that Google sent to businesses with top Place Pages or the rumored acquisition of Yelp.

For only having been in existence for four months, Place Pages seem to be getting Google’s full attention, and we certainly expect many future updates in the coming months.

Tags: Google, hyperlocal, place pages, social media

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If you’ve visited Google.com since then you’ll see they’ve given up some home page real estate to highlight the tragic event. The home page now features the following sentence:

“Information, resources, and ways you can help survivors of the Haiti earthquake.”

The sentence links to an information page about how the public can help disaster relief in Haiti, complete with donate buttons for UNICEF and CARE, processed by Google checkout.

As well as using their popularity to spread the word, Google has announced they will be donating $1 million to the relief fund.

Not to be outdone, Yahoo and Bing also feature Haiti on their home pages. Yahoo highlights an article about texting to support Haiti as their lead story and also includes a small link for donation options. Bing features two small links labeled “How you can help Haiti” and “Get the latest earthquake news” below the fold, at the very bottom of the page.

If you want to donate to Haiti disaster relief, you can visit the Google link above or contact one of the many charitable organizations in the region directly.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How Google Helped Haiti

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You are welcome to share more useful reminder web apps that will be helpful and our readers/viewers may like. Do you want to be the first one to know the latest happenings at SmashingApps.com just subscribe to our rss feed and you can follow us on twitter and do not forget to become our fan on facebook as well.

Google Notebook

Google Notebook is a free online application offered by Google that allows users to save and organize clips of information while conducting research online. The browser-based tool permits a user to write notes, clip text and images, and save links from pages during a browser session. The information is saved to an online “notebook” with sharing and collaboration features. Notebooks can be made “public”, or visible to others, and can also be used to collaborate with a list of users (either publicly or privately).

Zoho Notebook

With Zoho Notebook, You can create different types of content like text, image, audio, video, etc. It will allow you to share a whole book, page or just an object on a page by granting read/write permissions. There is an option to keep track of changes not only at the book or page level but also at the object level.

Yahoo! Notepad

Yahoo! Notepad is a place to write down and organize notes. You can access the notes from any computer, anytime—they’re part of your password-protected Yahoo! account.

Notefish

Notefish makes Internet research simple. If you are making a purchase or planning a trip, this is perfect for you. You can save information from the web into a single online Notefish page, then organize and share with anyone you want.

Springnote

Springnote is a great way for you to create notebooks for ideas, interests, multimedia, projects, and documents. It allows you to create pages, to work on them together with your friends, and to share files.

WebAsyst

You can make or keep notes online with WebAsyst. It would be thoughts, instructions, memos, to do lists, recipes, or plan a party or any kind of short text notes. There is an option to share your notes with friend and colleagues and having each with specific access rights.

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Venkatesh Rao is a researcher in the Xerox Innovation Group, and the project manager for Trailmeme, a research beta technology that allows users to blaze and follow trails through web content and the Trailmeme for WordPress plugin. He blogs at ribbonfarm.com.

As much as we focus on developing new technologies, it is also essential that we break free of certain metaphors that bind and restrict our thinking about what these technologies can ultimately achieve. The familiar “document” metaphor, among others, has cast a long shadow on how we think about the web, and is standing in the way of some innovation.

The Conceptual Metaphor

In his classic study of media theory, Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan wrote, “We look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”

Consider these terms: page, scroll, file, folder, trash can, bookmark, inbox, email, desktop, library, archive and index. They are all part of the document metaphor, a superset of the “desktop” metaphor. Some elements, such as scroll, desktop and library pre-date the printing press, but all are based on some sort of “marks on paper-like material” reference.

It is important to understand that the document metaphor is more than a UI metaphor. It is in fact a fundamental way of understanding one domain in terms of another. For better or worse, we continue to understand the web in relation to how we understand documents. Unlike figurative metaphors, such as “he was a lion in battle,” which are simple rhetorical statements, conceptual metaphors like document-ness are pre-linguistic, and quietly ubiquitous. They infiltrate how we think about things on a much more basic level.

Did it ever occur to you that the phrase “the stock market is up” is actually a particular spatial metaphor for what is really just a number? As a result, we think of the stock market as a geography, which has non-trivial ramifications for how we make decisions about it.

This is often a good thing — conceptual metaphors can be helpful. In dealing with novel phenomena, we often have no choice but to understand the new in terms of the old, the complex in terms of the primal, the abstract in terms of the tangible (companies often pitch themselves according to this logic, i.e. “we’re like FriendFeed for dating”). Accordingly we often conceive of new features, new business lines, and new market opportunities in the same way.

The Tyranny of the Document Metaphor

Conceptual metaphors aren’t always a good thing, though, helpful as they may be. A conceptual metaphor enriches your thinking in some directions and impoverishes it in others. It can become a crutch, and a burden.

Consider the terms open and close for digital documents. Serviceable though they were in the early eighties, they make little sense for the live, constantly evolving web “page.” For a rapidly changing page, the pause, play and rewind metaphor borrowed from music player UIs is more appropriate, something the Google Wave team has recognized, for example.

As a technology evolves, the metaphor struggles to keep up. It becomes increasingly strained. McLuhan’s “medium is the message” phenomenon starts to really kick in, as users encounter the limits and biases of the medium.

In the early days of computing, we needed only a few terms, such as click and double-click, to mitigate the deficiencies of the document metaphor. Today, we make new demands of the metaphor every day, and it fails us regularly. Consider the irony of your Twitter home “page” that can “scroll” much faster than you can “read.”

The solution? Look for new conceptual metaphors.

Liberating the web, Conceptually

Let’s continue with the Twitter example.

The conceptual metaphor of a party, with many overlapping public conversations, works much better than the document metaphor. Sophisticated users keep Twitter in their peripheral vision, where it behaves more like an oral medium that you “listen” to in the background, rather than “seeing” it in the foreground, which the “document” metaphor encourages. Note the deficiencies of the conversation metaphor though: it does not cover the Twitter link economy, or asymmetric following. These are better understood through a “marketplace” metaphor, which, however, downplays the conversational aspects.

Likewise, the metaphor that we currently seem to be embracing for the web is “the stream.”

The emergence of the real-time web has finally precipitated the need for a more dynamic framing, and while the stream is accessible and understandable, it is not without its limitations. The flow of information and our “jumping in and out of the stream” may actually point us in a dangerously passive direction. We may dam a stream, redirect it or harness its power for other uses, but the stream remains a metaphor that emphasizes precisely our inability to control or effectively influence or filter it.

Such are the trade-offs in engineering new metaphors. Google Wave is based on a flux metaphor. YouTube borrows a “channel” metaphor from television. The research project I manage, Xerox Trails, is based on the tricky “trail” (as in hiking) metaphor first proposed by Vannevar Bush in 1945.

Conclusion

Central to all these programs of metaphor re-engineering is a recognition that the hyperlink is the basic building block of the web. Our conceptualization of the web still does not truly reflect its non-sequential, branching texture, created by hyperlinks.

We still haven’t truly understood that click and link are as fundamental today as read and write.

All in all, throwing off that burden is an immensely difficult task. It is much easier to create technology that conforms to dominant metaphors. What we need to do as we enter the third decade of the web, however, is consider what we want the web to be rather than awkwardly fitting that vision into older descriptive paradigms.

We need to finally begin articulating the metaphors that will move us beyond the book, and the document. Understanding the rhetoric of the hyperlink may be the most essential challenge we must meet before we are able to move our thinking forward and accommodate our digital ambitions.

Images courtesy of IconArchive and iStockphoto, scherbet, kickers and shulz

Tags: conceptual metaphors, document metaphore, innovation, social media

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Editors note: Learn more about measuring the success of your site at Future of Web Apps Miami – February 22nd – 24th 2010. Buy your ticket now.

Ryan pointed out a nice little feature of Google Webmaster Tools recently and I thought it worth sharing.

Hidden away under the labs tab is a feature called “Fetch as Googlebot”. With “Fetch as Googlebot” you are able to see exactly how a page appears to Google when it’s crawled. Here’s the results for carsonified.com/blog. Click the image below to see it full size.

Why is this useful?

• It allows you to troubleshoot a page’s poor performance in search results. For example it will identify content that can’t be crawled by Google.
• It can help identify if your site has been hacked with malicious and undesired content
• It identifies he HTTP response returned by your server
• It highlights the HTML code as seen by Google. Useful if you use a lot of generated content in the page.

Other useful tools

As well as “Fetch as Googlebot” Webmaster Tools has a number of useful options including:

• Sitemap submission
• Facility to edit your sitelinks (links that appear beneath the pages search result in Google)
• Help with reindexing your site if you move it to a new domain
• Top search queries, keywords and subscriber stats
• Help with robots.txt files
• Crawler stats

You can find more out about Webmaster Tools on the Google web site.

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Online shopping is a great way to economize and reduce the stress of shopping, but shopping online for certain types of products can be harder than shopping in person. Recently, I looked at how well major online retailers (Macy’s, Target and Overstock.com) facilitate shopping for a deceptively complex, though very common, item: a set of 300-thread-count, white cotton sheets for a queen-sized bed. Here’s what I found.

Macy’s

As with all things Macy’s, its website is highly polished and savvy with marketing. The home page is clear and well organized, with categories that are well delineated and prominently displayed. This clarity continues on the “Bed & Bath” landing page, where the “Sheets” option is emphasized, being listed under “Bedding” as well as in the “Featured Categories” on the right. But once they’ve made their big choices, most shoppers will undoubtedly run into problems.

The “Sheets & Sheet Sets” page is a stumbling block. The ways of filtering the hundreds of options in this list are limited, and the filters we find are confusing and inconsistent anyway. Although a prominent “Brand” filter is available, I don’t purchase sheets regularly, and so I don’t have a strong commitment to any one brand (at least not any stronger than I do to color, pattern, material, etc.).

The left navigation menu provides additional options, but these are of limited value. The list mixes promotional navigation (”One Day Sale”) with content (”Sheets Buying Guide”) and filters (”By Threadcount”). The best way to help shoppers narrow down a long list of items is by adding a filtering function, allowing shoppers to prioritize. This page would greatly benefit from a function that allows users to sort or filter based on common criteria such as color, price, size and material.

So, I try the “Sheet Buying Guide,” the link to which is prominently highlighted on the “Sheets” page. The “Guide” is a well-written glossary of terms, but it doesn’t deliver on my expectation of assistance with selecting sheets. Strike two.

Large view

The left column offers more product categories. Because the difference between “Sheet Sets” and “Bed Sheets” isn’t clear, I choose “By Threadcount” as the next best option. Selecting “200-320 Threadcount” reduces the results to a more manageable size. The pictures help me to distinguish the items, making it easy to dismiss patterned sheets and focus on the seven solid-color choices that fit the bill. However, with each item displaying as many as six different prices and four lines of underlined descriptive text, even this small handful of options is difficult to scan. Being able to compile a few options into a comparison table would really help!

Large view

It seems the only way to tell which sheets are available in white and queen size is to check them out one by one. So I start clicking on items. The first looked fine but got poor customer ratings. Seeing the rating on the product page, along the number of people who reviewed and would recommend the item, is helpful, but seeing this information on the results page would have saved me a click.

Large view

The second item might work, but I have to scroll down the page to see the available sizes and prices. Listing the sheet sets of different sizes alongside pillow cases and single sheets makes it a bit hard to scan for what I’m looking for. Also, I notice that printed and solid colors are listed as separate items, making the list longer and more complex than it needs to be. Being able to make my selection in a simple multi-step process would be better (e.g. Step 1: select the size. Step 2: select the color, etc.); either that or combining all of the colors into a DHTML drop-down menu that includes a thumbnail image. I decide to keep looking. The third item is a possibility, but it’s a bit pricey.

The fourth item isn’t available in queen size. The fifth doesn’t come in white. Now I have to remember: was it the first or second one that I liked? I wish I could mark candidates so that I didn’t have to remember (or takes notes). The inconspicuous “Compare to best sellers” link might have been helpful, but it isn’t: items are displayed in a nicely organized table, but they seem randomly selected from multiple product categories, such as mattress pads and pillow cases, and relevant data is missing from the comparison rows.

Moving on, I notice something new on the sixth product page. While previous pages displayed all sizes in a single-item selection list, this one has “Size tabs” at the top of the list. Did I miss this before? Because these tabs are so discrete and appear only on some product pages, I can’t be the only shopper who missed finding the best option for my needs.

Large view

Once I’m ready to make my selection, I scroll down to find… “Add to bag”? Macy’s would do better to stick with the standard “Add to Cart” phrase, and not introduce verbal cleverness—and uncertainty—at the moment a shopper is ready to commit to the sale. I click this, and the page refreshes with an error message at the top of the page. I’ve forgotten something, though the message isn’t specific about whether I omitted color, size or item type. I need to scroll down to learn that I haven’t entered a quantity. Displaying the error message next to the offending field would be better, or better yet, default the quantity to “1″ when I select an item color.

Large view

I correct the error and proceed, getting important feedback in the form of a pop-up window that confirms my selection, the cost and a running total of items in my bag. Appropriately, two options are presented: “Continue shopping” or “Checkout.”

The check-out page displays a clear and detailed list of items I’ve chosen, with an option to easily change quantities by using a drop-down menu next to each item. Any change quickly recalculates the total cost, including shipping charges and estimated tax, without requiring me to “update” or “save” the change, as one sees on many other commerce websites. At least this part of the process was a good experience.

Large view

Though Macy’s website has many nice features, the most important function of finding the right product is unwieldy at best. The absence of an effective method of narrowing down a list of products to find the item I’m looking for made the experience more difficult than it should have been. Although the high-quality photography makes it quick and easy to scan products, the combination of multiple colors or elements in a single shot sometimes confused me.

Target

I had high hopes for Target, which has done such a great job of transforming itself from a cheap discount chain into an affordable, appealing and style-conscious retailer. I went onto its website hoping it brought its customer focus to the online experience.

The home page is cheery, though a bit overwhelming. Colorful graphics and promotional headlines vie for attention and thus decrease the prominence of the main navigation a bit. On mouse roll-over, the main navigation pops up a list of categories and sub-categories. For my purposes, “Home” seemed the best option, and “Bed + Bath” the most logical choice. But then I notice a “Bedding” category in the promotional rotating carousel, which looks more relevant. Big mistake. There’s nothing there about sheets. I’ve landed in the seasonal section for some reason.

Large view

I return to my first choice, selecting “Bed + Bath” from the main navigation. This page has several other overlapping categories, such as “Bedding collections” and Home bedding basics.” I have to look hard to find “Sheets” under “Bedding Basics” just above the fold.

Large view

The “Sheets” page looks friendly, with bright-colored dots and a “Shop by color” option front and center. A quick scan reveals several other obvious filtering possibilities: I can also shop by “Material” or, on the left side, by “Color” (again), “Fabric,” “Special sizes,” “Thread count,” “Type,” or “Brands + designers.” Although I’m not sure what the difference is between the two colors, I choose the “White + Cream” color dot.

Large view

The “Results” page has a clean appearance, with various options for displaying items: as a thumbnail grid (the default) with larger images or as a list; although these options are indicated by icon and are not immediately obvious. I can also sort by such useful attributes as price and rating. A single price range is displayed for comparison. And knowing how much credence to give a rating is easy with the number of reviews indicated.

But there are too many items to sort through. I choose “300 thread count” from the filters in the left column, expecting the results to reduce to a manageable number. Instead, I get a whole new list of results, in all colors. Stranger still, bedskirts and duvets also appear in the long list of items. Apparently one can’t combine the color filter with the thread count filter. Not ideal. I guess I’ll have to wade through the list of “white” sheets.

Large view

The “Quick info” pop-up helps a bit, displaying additional information in a pop-up window atop the results page. It’s useful for seeing which sheets are available in queen size. Many of the “sheets,” though, are just pillow cases (too bad I can’t filter these out). In some cases, critical information such as color and thread count are missing, even on the “Full Details” page. One item comes in assorted colors, but I have no way to select the one I want. No wonder it has no reviews.

I find one option I like, but I’d like to compare it with others. I notice an “Add to TargetList” button in the “Quick info” window. I hope this marks the item as a strong candidate so that I don’t have to take notes. Unfortunately, I’m required to “Create a new list” before I can save the item. I want to keep shopping, but perhaps this won’t take long after all: it asks for my name, email address, reason for creating the list… and this is only step one of two! This is too much work. The retailer should let unregistered shoppers use this feature. Relatively few people must cross this high barrier to entry.

Once I’ve made my selection, I see a clear option to “Add to cart” or “Find it at a Target store.” This second feature is very good. It returns a list of nearby stores, showing the availability of the item along with address, phone number, hours and a map link: great if I wanted to do a little pre-shopping. Instead, I choose “Add to cart” to complete my online purchase. My “Quick info” pop-up refreshes, confirming my selection and recommending items that other guests have “shopped for.” Two buttons let me either “View cart + checkout” or “Continue shopping.” Choosing the latter simply closes the pop-up so that I can continue where I left off. Nice.

I liked the Target experience a bit better than Macy’s. Even though I was left with a long list of products to browse on both websites, Target allowed me to drill down a bit further. Also, the “Quick info” window made browsing quicker, freeing me from having to click through to successive product pages, as I had to do on Macy’s website.

Overstock

Unlike many of its competitors that have taken traditional brick-and-mortar businesses onto the Web, Overstock focuses exclusively on its online business. But has it taken advantage of this focus to create a better shopping experience for consumers?

The home page is simple, with a rotating promotional carousel featuring products intended to catch interest. With a specific task in mind, I easily locate the “Bedding & Bath” category among the primary navigation options near the top. On roll-over, a drop-down list presents sub-categories that are sufficiently distinguishable, and I select “Sheets.” So far, so good.

The main “Sheets” page is nice. Overstock.com has obviously considered the needs of the shopper. A set of clear filters displays the number of items in each category. It allows me to apply filters additively, with useful options such as size, thread count, color and material. The effect is a manageable set of relevant options. One nice feature is that the number of results in the unselected categories refreshes automatically whenever a new filter is applied. One can even remove a parameter by simply unchecking a box.

Large view

Another good feature is the prominent display of user ratings for each search result. This makes it easy to compare items without clicking into the full descriptions. But I would also like to see the number of reviews. For me a four-star rating averaged from 10 reviews holds more weight than a single five-star review.

When filtering by color, I expected only solid colors to be returned, but several had a clear pattern. Still, the images made it easy to distinguish between them. Also, I didn’t see any way to set multiple criteria within a category. For example, I couldn’t choose to see all options priced under $50. But price is one of many sort options, so this is less of a concern. And Overstock.com sticks to a single price, regardless of size, which makes items easier to scan; unlike competitors that present a range of prices. Despite minor issues, the page gets me very close to finding my new sheets.

Clicking an item on the results page takes me to a product detail page. At first I’m a little confused. I didn’t expect other products to be shown so prominently here. Then I notice the discrete “People who viewed this also viewed” label above the items in the right column. Seeing other products distracts me from the task at hand. Rather than provide an unobstructed route to my purchase, the website has introduced alternatives—and indecision—at the crucial moment of sale. Also, should I care about items that others have merely “viewed” and not actually bought (bought items being shown lower down on the page)?

I make my decision and select a product. The drop-down menu is fairly long, with all size and color combinations presented in a single list. A more usable interface would be to display these attributes in two separate lists, with the options in the second list updated according to what you select in the first.

Large view

The shopping cart page is presented very clearly, with the options to “Shop more” or “Continue checkout” prominently displayed. But when I decide that I need two rather than one set of sheets, I really have to search to find the “Edit” link. Making the quantity field editable and then updating the total price, as other websites do, would be much better.

I also notice the “Save for later” link. This sounds great for setting aside items that I am not ready to purchase now but might want later. But having to put the item in my cart first doesn’t seem right. I’d much rather be able to do this from the product page, where the function could act as a kind of bookmark, while I continuing browsing.

Now I’m ready to complete my purchase. Once I register, the checkout is contained on one page, with clearly numbered steps. Though a bit overwhelming, a quick scan shows that the page asks for only the necessary information. Moreover, I don’t need to worry about losing my order, which has happened a few times on other websites midway through their multi-page process.

Large view

Overall, using Overstock.com was a positive experience. Despite a few very minor issues, I was able to make my purchase quickly and easily with comfort and confidence. Other online retailers should aspire to its virtues: a concern for the needs of the consumer, intuitive and effective tools and a clean crisp layout.

Shopping Made Easier

It’s clear from my exploration of Macy’s, Target and Overstock.com that a “one size fits all” approach to e-commerce design leads to some user experience challenges when the product category is complex or varied. On the one hand, online stores shouldn’t be obliged to customize the shopping experience for each product category, which would be economically unfeasible. On the other hand, appropriate, well-presented product filtering options go a long way towards ironing out the bumps in an “uncommon” shopping experience.

Interestingly, all three websites I looked at seemed to be constantly changing their design and tweaking the language and navigation options to see what works best. I’m glad to see incremental improvements being made on major retail websites. But given how long these websites have had to improve their processes, it’s surprising more haven’t done so already. Hopefully, as retailers become more aware of best practices and see the value of engaging skilled usability experts, the online shopping experience will reach its full potential as a stress-free alternative to shopping in store.

Further Reading

• Search Results Design: Best Practices and Design Patterns
• Principles Of Effective Search In E-Commerce Design
• 15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design
• Best Practices for Designing Faceted Search Filters
• What People See Before They Buy: Design Guidelines for E-Commerce Product Pages With Eye-Tracking Data
• Revealing Design Treasures From the Amazon

(al)

© Janine Coover, Nick Gould for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: shopping, usability, ux

Go to Source

Tutorial Details

• Technology: ASP.NET (C#)
• Difficulty: Advanced
• Estimated Completion Time: 1 hour
• Part: 1 of 2

Before you Start

ASP.NET is no longer a Microsoft-only technology. Thanks to the hard work of the Mono project contributors, ASP.NET can be used on Linux and Mac platforms, as well as Windows.

They’ve even created an IDE within which you can write your web and desktop applications. Download a copy of MonoDevelop and install it. We’ll be using that IDE for this tutorial, as it offers some useful features to speed up development time. However, just like PHP, ASP.NET applications can be written in nothing more complex than a text editor.

ASP.NET and C# at a Glance

ASP.NET is Microsoft’s web development technology framework, and was originally designed as a replacement for the old Active Server Pages technology. If you’ve used classic ASP (normally using VBScript) you’ll find parts of ASP.NET very familiar. ASP.NET can be used with a wide range of programming languages, including VB.NET (the new version of Visual Basic), J# and C#. This tutorial will be using C#.

ASP.NET is available in two flavours:

• ASP.NET WebForms: the original framework allowing developers to create web applications using many of the same techniques used in .NET Windows desktop applications
• ASP.NET MVC: a newer framework offering Model-View-Controller architecture and more control over client-side code

As this tutorial is aimed at PHP developers, who a lot of the time prefer to get "closer to the metal," I won’t be using either of these. Instead, I’ll be rolling my own application based on the features of the .NET runtime and C# languages, with ASP.NET as a wrapper, rather than a framework as it was intended to be. Don’t worry if that doesn’t make sense, just continue with the tutorial and you’ll see what I mean.

I’m also running MonoDevelop in Xubuntu Linux, but it should work the same on other platforms.

Important: ASP.NET is very much built on object-oriented programming (OOP). If you have no experience with OOP I strongly suggest you read this introduction to OOP in PHP. You’ll need to understand words like "class", "instance", "method", "property" and "inherit".

Five Things to Watch Out For

C# can confuse PHP developers, especially if you switch between the two languages on a regular basis. Here’s my top five gotchas.

1. String concatenation

   In C# string concatenation is done with "+" rather than ".".

   // PHP
   "This is part 1 " . "and this is part 2!";
   // C#
   "This is part 1 " + "and this is part 2!";

2. Referencing class methods and properties

   To call a method or property in PHP you’d use:

   $myclass = new MyClass();
   $var = $myclass->var;
   $myclass->doMethod();

   In C# you use a "." instead of "->", like this:

   MyClass myclass = new MyClass();
   string var = myclass.var;
   myclass.doMethod();

3. Strong typing

   C# is a strongly-typed language, so you can’t, for example, just treat strings as integers like you can in PHP. In PHP, this is true:

   "1" == 1

   In C# it would cause an error. You need to convert one of the elements:

   Convert.ToInt32("1") == 1

   Or:

   "1" == 1.ToString()

   You’ll find yourself using that .ToString() method a lot…

4. Methods return types

   With PHP, the type of the return value of a function or method doesn’t matter. In C# methods must declare the type of value they return:

   protected string MyStringMethod()
   {
   	return "I am a string";
   }
   protected int MyIntMethod()
   {
   	// return an int
   	return 100;
   }

   Methods that don’t return anything must have the void keyword:

   protected void MyMethod() {  }

5. Scope

   Watch out for the scope of methods and properties. The three important keywords are "public", "protected" and "private". These work the same as they do in PHP.

   // this is public, can be called from anywhere
   public int MyInt;
   // this is protected, can only be called by the declaring class and any descendents
   protected int MyInt;
   // this is private, can only be called by the declaring class
   private int MyInt;

Creating your first ASP.NET Page

Open MonoDevelop.

Choose "Start a New Solution" in the main screen. A "solution" is a collection of one or more related projects. They can be projects of different types, for example a web application and a desktop application that works with it, and perhaps a web service as well.

Select C# ASP.NET Web Application, type a name for your application (I’m using "WebApplication1") and choose a location for your solution then click "Forward". Ignoring the options on the next page, click "OK" and a new ASP.NET application will be created at the location you specified.

The IDE will open the default page, called "Default.aspx" and you’ll see the following code:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="WebApplication1.Default" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head runat="server">
	<title>Default</title>
</head>
<body>
	<form id="form1" runat="server">
		<asp:Button id="button1" runat="server" Text="Click me!" OnClick="button1Clicked" />
	</form>
</body>
</html>

You’ll see it’s mostly standard HTML, with a few extra bits. There’s already a <form> element with a strange <asp:Button> element inside it. Let’s try running the application.

Running your Application in Debug Mode

MonoDevelop can run your ASP.NET application with one button. Rather than having to set up a local development server and configure your app, simple press F5. A development server will be launched on a non-standard port and you’ll see your application open in a browser. Note port 8080 in the URLs below.

Note: In Xubuntu I had to manually install the Mono web server named XSP2 with this command: sudo apt-get install mono-xsp2.

So, press F5 to run the application, you’ll hopefully see a browser window open that looks like this.

Clicking the button shows this.

What you’ve just done is clicked an ASP.NET button, which automatically wires-up events to server-side code. In other words, when the button is clicked the page knows about it – this is one of the main advantages of the WebForms framework, it works much like desktop application development. But we’re not going to use this feature as it leads to a world of pain (which is explained in Part 2 of this tutorial). Instead we’re going to do things a little more manually. It’s the PHP way.

So, we’re going to change this code slightly as we don’t want to use the WebForms framework. Edit the opened "Default.aspx" by removing the <form> element and adding a <h1> element so the code is:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="WebApplication1.Default" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html>
<head runat="server">
	<title>Default</title>
</head>
<body>
	<h1>This is the text</h1>
</body>
</html>

Browsing your Solution

On the left hand side of the IDE there are three views of the application. The first view is Classes, and shows the class diagram of the application.

The second view is Solution, and shows the projects and files which comprise the entire solution (you can have multiple projects in a solution).

And there’s also a Files view which shows you all the directories and files in the solution, including the "WebApplication1.csproj" file which is the C# project file for our application.

Choose the Solution view. You’ve already got "Default.aspx" open, which is the page you’ve just edited. Double-click the file called "Default.aspx.cs" to open it in the IDE. Here’s the first important lesson.

Code-behind Files

The "Default.aspx.cs" file is a code-behind file. Rather than peppering your .html (or in this case .aspx, and for PHP applications .php) files with server-side code, it’s possible in ASP.NET to put all your server-side code in a code-behind file. In the same way you don’t have to put all your CSS and JavaScript in every HTML page but can put them in separate files which are included, you can do that with ASP.NET code.

The neat thing is these code-behind files are automatically included in your .aspx page. (That’s why the code-behind is called "Default.aspx.cs", so it is associated with the "Default.aspx" file.) The code of "Default.aspx.cs" is pretty short. Here’s an explanation, line-by-line:

// reference the System namespace
using System;
// reference the System.Web namespace
using System.Web;
// reference the System.Web.UI namespace
using System.Web.UI;
// put this class in the WebApplication1 namespace
namespace WebApplication1
{
	// declare a new partial class called "Default" which inherits (":") from System.Web.UI.Page
	public partial class Default : System.Web.UI.Page
	{
		// NOTE: we're going to delete this method
		// declare a public void method which is called when button1 is clicked
		public virtual void button1Clicked (object sender, EventArgs args)
		{
			// set the text
			button1.Text = "You clicked me";
		}
	}
}

A Note About Namespaces

Wikipedia defines a namespace as:

a namespace is an abstract container providing context for the items (names, or technical terms, or words) it holds and allowing disambiguation of homonym items having the same name (residing in different namespaces)

Which is pretty complicated. I mean, homonym? I see namespaces as virtual directories for classes. Just as in a file system you can’t have two files called "test.txt" in the same folder, you can’t have two classes with the same name in a single namespace. Namespaces can be nested, just like directories (hence the System, System.Web, System.Web.UI references in the code above) and have to be referenced from your ASP.NET code-behind files so you can use the classes contained in them.

You’ll also have noticed that our application is in the namespace WebApplication1, which means any code we write is within that namespace. We’ll use that to our advantage later on.

A Note About Pages

In ASP.NET, a web page is actually a class. It belongs in a namespace in a project, and inherits from the System.Web.UI.Page class. In the code-behind file this is expressed as:

public partial class Default : System.Web.UI.Page { ... }

(The "Partial" keyword means that part of this class is also in another file, namely the "Default.aspx.designer.cs" file. As that file is automatically-created and maintained we don’t need to worry about it.)

Your "Default.aspx" inherits from the page we’ve just created, using this code:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="WebApplication1.Default" %>

In the "Page" declaration we’re setting the language for the page and the class it inherits from, in this case WebApplication1.Default. That means that if we create another page, for example "Contact.aspx", the "Page" declaration and code-behind file would be:

// code-behind file
public partial class Contact : System.Web.UI.Page { ... }

// .aspx page
<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="WebApplication1.Contact" %>

This can be hard to get your head round to start with, but by the time you’ve created a few pages it will be second nature.

Creating Some Custom Functionality

We’re now ready to write something ourselves. Remove the "button1Clicked" method and in it’s place add the following code:

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{

}

The "Page_Load" method is one of several life-cycle events that get automatically called when the page’s Load event fires. There are quite a few events that happen in the life-cycle of an ASP.NET page, see the full list here. Generally the "Page_Load" method is where you put anything you want to happen when that page is loaded (security checks, fetching data from a database for display, loading an advert etc.). We’re going to declare a new method for the page called "SetText" which is called from the "Page_Load" method;

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
	SetText();
}

protected void SetText()
{
	headertext.InnerHtml = "This is the changed text";
}

You can guess this sets the "InnerHtml" property on the element "headertext" to "This is the changed text". But what is "headertext"? Go back to "Default.aspx" and modify the <h1> element to this:

<h1 id="headertext" runat="server">This is the header</h1>

Then press F5 to run the application. If everything works OK you should see this:

Check the source of the page. You’ll see the runat="server" attribute has gone. What just happened? We turned an HTML control into a server-side control, that’s what.

Server-side Controls

My favourite feature of ASP.NET by far is the ability to turn almost any standard HTML control (elements are also known as controls) into a server-side control. This means that ASP.NET knows what the control is, and can change its properties and run methods on it from the code-behind page. In our example above, the <h1> element had two attributes added:

<h1 id="headertext" runat="server">This is the text</h1>

Now in our code-behind file ("Default.aspx.cs") we could access the control and change its properties.

headertext.InnerHtml = "This is the changed text";

One of the best features of using an IDE such as MonoDevelop rather than a text editor is Intellisense, which gives you a menu of options as you type. Properties of objects, system classes and methods, custom classes and methods, it’s all there:

(I believe "Intellisense" may be a Microsoft trademark, but I’m unsure what MonoDevelop call it!)

There are loads of other properties available for different controls (for example an input type="text" control has a "value" property), and they all appear in a list as you type. There’s also a massively useful property called Visible. This sets whether the control is visible in the source. Look at this example:

<div id="notloggedin" runat="server">
	<h1>You are not logged in</h1>
	<p>Please <a href="/login">log in to the site here</a>.</p>
</div>

<div id="loggedin" runat="server" visible="false">
	<h1>Thanks, you've logged in</h1>
	<p>Welcome back, user!</p>
</div>

Notice I’ve manually added the visible="false" for the loggedin element. When used with this server-side code we can make each <div> control visible or invisible.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
	User currentuser = new User();
	currentuser.CheckSecurity();
	if (currentuser.IsLoggedIn)
	{
		notloggedin.Visible = false;
		loggedin.Visible = true;
	}
}

You can imagine how easy that makes configuration of pages, and how much cleaner your code can be.

How about form elements? Let’s make a <select> control server-side:

<select name="genre" id="genre" runat="server">
	<option value="1">Jazz</option>
	<option value="2">Blues</option>
	<option value="3">Rock</option>
	<option value="4">Pop</option>
	<option value="5">Classical</option>
</select>

Selecting a particular option is as easy as this:

int chosengenre = 4;
genre.Items.FindByValue(chosengenre.ToString()).Selected = true;

Told you you’d use the ToString() method a lot. The <select> control Items property also has a useful method called FindByText() which does this:

string chosengenre = "Blues";
genre.Items.FindByText(chosengenre).Selected = true;

Intellisense will even give you a list of controls it finds, so you don’t even need to remember what you called all those different text boxes. As we’re using normal HTML controls converted to be server-side (rather than true ASP.NET controls) we lose some functionality, but nothing we can’t live without. In Part 2 of the tutorial we’ll be using a true ASP.NET control. But first, a word about configuration.

The Web.config File

In your PHP applications you have not doubt had a configuration file named "config.php" or similar. ASP.NET has a special file type for configuration files called ".config" which are automatically disabled from public view. Your ASP.NET application already has a "Web.config" file, open it from the Solution view in MonoDevelop.

You’ll see it’s a standard XML file. We’re going to add some application-wide settings, so edit the file adding this code just above </configuration>

  <appSettings>
    <add key="ApplicationName" value="My first ASP.NET Application"/>
    <add key="Developer" value="Chris Taylor"/>
  </appSettings>

Going back to our "Default.aspx.cs" file we reference the System.Configuration namespace:

using System;
using System.Web;
using System.Web.UI;
using System.Configuration;

And we can now access our "ApplicationName" setting using:

ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["ApplicationName"];

So to jazz things up a bit, let’s try:

headertext.InnerHtml = "Welcome to " + ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["ApplicationName"] + " by " + ConfigurationSettings.AppSettings["Developer"];

F5 to run the application and you’ll see:

As you’ll appreciate, this gives you a huge amount of power over site-wide settings.

Sessions, Cookies and Post/Get Parameters

You can’t get very far developing web applications without dealing with Sessions, Cookies and Post or Get parameters. ASP.NET handles these pretty well, with a couple of gotchas.

Sessions

To get the session ID use: Session.SessionID. Warning: if you don’t store anything in the session the SessionID property *may* change on every page request. Yes, I know, it’s madness. The fix is to store something in the session.

To store something in the session use: Session["var"] = "value";.

To retrieve something from the session use: string value = Session["var"];.

Cookies

To store something in a cookie use: Response.Cookies["name"].Value = "value";.

To retrieve something from a cookie use: string value = Request.Cookies["name"].Value;.

Note the different use of Request and Response and the fact you have to set the Value property. You can also set other properties of each cookie (check Intellisense for full details):

Request.Cookies[0].Domain = "http://domain.com";
Request.Cookies[0].Expires = DateTime.Now.AddMonths(1);
Request.Cookies[0].Secure = true;

In that last example you got your first look at the DateTime class. This, in a word, is fantastic. Although it lacks the "numbery-ness" of PHPs time() function, it provides a massive array of chainable methods to create and modify datetimes. This is a good introductory article.

Post/get Parameters

These are contained, like cookies, in the Request object. That object contains loads of stuff useful for application developers, and can be roughly compared with PHPs $_SERVER variable. Here are a few other useful things:

NameValueCollection headers = Request.Headers;
bool issecure = Request.IsSecureConnection;
string url = Request.RawUrl;
string scriptname = Request.ServerVariables["SCRIPT_NAME"];
string useragent = Request.ServerVariables["HTTP_USER_AGENT"];

For a full list of Request.ServerVariables this is a good resource.

Getting back to the point; to retrieve something from a post parameter (submitted by a form) use: string value = Request.Form["param"];.

And to retrieve something from a get parameter (in the querystring) use: string value = Request.QueryString["param"];.

For session variables, cookies, and post and get properties, always check the parameter is not null before trying to access it. This is the equivalent of PHPs isset() function. C# is very unforgiving when it comes to null objects, so in general it always pays to check something exists before trying to use it.

// session variable
if (Session["var"] != null) { ... }
// cookie
if (Request.Cookies["cookiename"] != null) { ... }
// post parameter
if (Request.Form["param"] != null) { ... }
// get parameter
if (Request.QueryString["param"] != null) { ... }

You can also put multiple parts in an if statement. So to check if the user has a cookie with the name "loggedin" with the value "true", this will work:

if (Request.Cookies["loggedin"] != null && Request.Cookies["loggedin"].Value == "true") { ... }

Just like PHP, if the first part of the if statement fails the second one is not run.

Quick Reference

Here’s a table of common code snippets in PHP with their equivalents in C#.

Click image to view at full size.

Over to You…

You now have the knowledge to build basic ASP.NET pages, and use the MonoDevelop IDE to create simple sites. In part two of this tutorial, you’ll be shown some of the more advanced features of ASP.NET including:

• MasterPages: page layouts on steroids
• Data sources and data binding
• Custom classes: getting all object-oriented on yo’ ass
• Custom controls: reuse to the max, baby!

• Follow us on Twitter, or subscribe to the Nettuts+ RSS Feed for the best web development tutorials on the web.

Write a Plus Tutorial

Did you know that you can earn up to $600 for writing a PLUS tutorial and/or screencast for us? We’re looking for in depth and well-written tutorials on HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. If you’re of the ability, please contact Jeffrey at nettuts@tutsplus.com.

Please note that actual compensation will be dependent upon the quality of the final tutorial and screencast.

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This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business.

With so many online productivity tools at our disposal, there’s never been a better time to check up on what’s out there to help optimize your work flow. One such class of tools that can help set up a dashboard of critical “at a glance” information is the personalized start page.

There are a number of different choices in this category, but the general gist is that a start page enables you to “stick” bits of the web like news feeds, interactive widgets and other specific blocks of information into a one-stop-shop destination you can use as your first port of call when starting a work session.

Why Use a Start Page?

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Like an RSS reader, a start page can help you stay on top of a large volume of information. What sets a start page apart is the ability to integrate far more than just news feeds, including everything from e-mail, to your calendar, to the weather report, to the current time in other places around the world where you do business.

After taking some time to set up your page with relevant feeds and resources, it can be the optimal place to check first to get a sense of what’s going on in your work and your industry. By aggregating multiple widgets and bits of information into a single interface, a start page can serve as a central hub for the most important information that’s always one click away from your regular browsing habits.

Let’s take a look at how to choose and use a personalized dashboard.

How to Choose a Start Page

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Both Google and Yahoo offer personalized start pages, the former at iGoogle and the latter with My Yahoo. If you or your business already uses web products from either company, the offered integrations with your start page might make either an obvious choice (Google Apps users tend to mesh well with the iGoogle start page, for example).

Another brace of popular options are Netvibes and Pageflakes, both of which offer full-featured start page alternatives to the big companies’ offerings. All four services offer the ability to add widgets to your pages that go beyond presenting mere news feeds (Google calls them “gadgets,” while Pageflakes refers to them as “Flakes”).

The best way to choose which start page fits is to give each one a quick try. Differences in layout, user interface, and style become apparent quickly, and you have the luxury of picking which one looks and “feels” right. Although the widget offerings tend to be fairly comparable between the platforms, you might want to spend some time browsing the available widget and gadget options as well to get a sense of which selections make the most sense for you and your business.

Alltop is a nice, clean interface that provides just that, and you can set up your own customized dashboard of feeds and/or make use of the pre-collected packages which are organized by hundreds of topics, industries and niches for a quick and pre-curated view into a number of sectors.

How to Set Up and Use Your Start Page

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Once you’ve picked your poison, as it were, you’ll want to spend a bit of up-front time setting it up for optimal use. Of course, it’s always easy to change things around on the fly as well, so as new sources become critical and you discover new widgets, it’s a simple matter to incorporate them into your start page work flow.

Each start page offers the ability to create a tabbed interface. Working much like tabbed browsing, it allows you to set up and toggle between multiple pages for different purposes (Netvibes even allows you to create multiple instances, similar to having multiple Gmail accounts versus simply forwarding multiple addresses to one inbox). Depending on your needs, you’ll want to take stock of what realms you might want to have at your fingertips. If you’re a frequent traveler, you might want a Travel tab with weather conditions, time zones, flight statuses, and news in your frequently-visited spots. If you need to monitor what’s happening in several industries, you might create a tab for each of them with appropriate sources and widgets. Multiple tabs means your personal dashboard can even live right beside your work dashboard(s) as well.

Once you have an idea which buckets you’ll want to keep track of, start thinking about what are the most high priority sources and bits of information you’d like to collect for each page. Since you can arrange your pages in any manner you wish, you’ll want to set up the highest priority widgets towards the top of the page and fill in the lower parts of the page with some of the lesser priority items.

Feel free to go nuts hunting down new, interesting, and useful widgets and gadgets and giving them a try on your tabs and pages. It’s always easy to move, re-order, or even remove them if they end up being not as useful over time. Each service offers a directory of widgets, most with suggestions of the most popular or essential tools for your pages. From note-taking to e-mail, from stocks to eBay auctions, from your Netflix queue to integrated online storage, there’s a lot of functionality that can be brought into one at-your-fingertips’ interface.

One other consideration when setting up your start page is choosing a theme — much like you can customize the look and feel of your Gmail account or your WordPress blog, you can “skin” your start page with colors and graphics that appeal to you. You’ll also want to consider whether or not you might want to make use of a public component to your start page. Netvibes gives you a public section by default, and Pageflakes allows you to create “Pagecasts” that can be public to the world or shared privately with a group. Setting up a valuable public page could be a novel way to position yourself as a resource in your niche or industry.

These are just a few ideas to help you get started on the road to personalized start page mastery. With more features and widgets being developed over time, there promises to be no shortage of information and functionality to enhance your start page. Plus, since most widgets and gadgets use existing web markup and standards, you could even build your own widgets if you need customized, business-specific information on your dashboard. Enjoy your one stop information shop!

More small business resources from Mashable:

- HOW TO: Implement a Social Media Business Strategy
– 9 Great Document Collaboration Tools for Teams
– 5 New Year’s Resolutions for SMBs
– HOW TO: Choose a News Reader for Keeping Tabs on Your Industry
– Top Mobile Productivity Tools for the Small Business
– 5 Advanced Social Media Marketing Strategies for Small Businesses
– 4 Ways Social Media is Changing Business

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, smartstock

Tags: business, how to, how tos, iGoogle, List, Lists, My Yahoo, Netvibes, organization, Pageflakes, productivity, small business

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Less is More, and the following examples you are about to see, prove this to be exact. Elements of design in a website that displays minimalistic entities serve multiple functions, not just one. This reduces the use of various un-needed elements and incorporates more of a “2 in 1” approach.

Below we have an Excellent Showcase of 40 Minimalist Website Designs that will serve as inspiration for your next minimalistic project. Please feel free to comment if we’ve missed any.

Trent Walton

Trent’s website is simple, attractive, and straightforward. The homepage is the latest article published, and when you visit the Articles link, every post is displayed in a large image that becomes faded when hovered over. The site contains very little sidebars and allows visitors enough breathing space, meaning nothing seems crowded.

The simplicity of the contact page is sophisticated and professional at the same time. This is an overall good example of a successful minimalistic design.

Helvetic Brands

Helvetic Brands has a website defined by its sections. Icons instead of images and screenshots are used to display a link for more work, and the content found on the site is nicely spread out. The design and use of subtle colors is easy on the eyes which makes it a swift to find what you need.

Miller Type Foundry

Simplicity, great usability, and a clean grid is what makes the Miller Type Foundry site a beautiful example. The most noticeable aspect of this design is the focus placed on the fonts (the main subject) within the Typefaces page. Every font is well aligned and contains a page of its own with a simple navigation at the top right-hand corner.

Typographic Desk Reference

The TDR site contains a one page layout. The content is well organized and perhaps the most obvious element of all would be the images lined up for visitors to use a quick preview. Every position of the image that pops up shifts towards the opposite direction. In other words, all of the images that pop up are “pulled” to the center. There is a good balance between visual and typographical representation.

31Three

31Three uses more imagery rather than text to grab a visitors attention. The site isn’t hammered with useless text, and it only demands that the user read when absolutely necessary. The site is set out to house the Portfolio of Jesse Bennett, and that’s exactly what it does. The portfolio area divides each project with a large screenshot, and site title paired along with a testimony on the left-hand side.

Nick Robinson

Nick Robinson’s site is a one-page design that contains a short intro and quickly tries to shift your attention to his projects. The site seems to have been designed on a small grid-system, and it puts JavaScript to good use.

Kyle Sollenberger

This site has more of a text based approach to its homepage, and has a simple 3 link menu. Five sections define the site as follows: the menu, short introduction, latest project feature, services offered and testimonials, and a quick search for projects using tags.

Astheria

Astheria is the simplest, most organized content-focused blog I’ve come across. The entire blog is geared towards minimal design and usability. The site is powered by WordPress and displays an unorthodox theme containing large easy to read headlines.

Pixelbot Webdesign

Pixelbot has a clearly defined navigation menu, prominent and consistent display of work, as well as different subtle colors for every page. Content is nicely laid out and separated into an aligned section.

On

On features a minimal design showcasing previous and latest projects in a large jQuery slider. The projects are properly aligned in the portfolio section, and they don’t look messy at all. The blog section reflects the overall simple design of the site, and uses simple widget bars with text links for navigating through latest tweets, categories, and archives.

Typejockeys

Typejockey’s site puts aligned elements to work for the best. This site is structured through a grid system and it displays beautiful navigation, every menu link is a different type or style. The main focus, typography, is the first thing you notice as you enter the site. The shopping experience and cart is simplified, you don’t feel overcrowded and pressured.

80/20 Studio

The 80/20 website is defined by a clean well organized one-page layout. Every section provides just enough details for you to move on to the next. You’re not plastered with over-the-top content and distracting elements of design.

Matt Bango

Matt has a beautiful layout nestled with more links than anything, which allow you to navigate all throughout the site. The portfolio area is tabbed for every type of work, all the projects are nicely spaced out and do not overlap each other.

idsgn

The idesn blog was designed for a large visual representation of the content. The featured post is placed at the top of the home-page with a large image and the rest of the posts trickle down as they are aligned and shown in their corresponding locations.

Klipp og Lim

This is a beautiful website that divides every section with a thick (I’d say 8pt) line that makes it easier to view the different elements and features. The portfolio area is almost like an image gallery, every project has a title and description all aligned to the left while the image is centered.

Berit Somme

Berit’s website is pretty minimal, as it displays the latest project dead-center of the layout and when you click on the link for more projects (either in the Boker or Generelt section), projects are showcased as if they were in a slider, but in reality a different page loads for every project.

Monk

As you can see, the monk website wastes no time in aligning its every image and making it easy for you to scroll through. This is a one-page layout that has no menu bar or links and is divided into 3 sections, the introduction, the showcased work, and the contact/more information area.

FindMeByIP

FindMeByIP uses stunning typography, beautiful colors, and a menu bar that doesn’t move as you scroll down through the different sections. For the most part, all of the elements are properly aligned and each given enough room apart from one another to keep your attention where they want it to be.

Lemon Oak

Lemon Oak is one of the simplest informational sites I’ve come across. The content is divided up evenly and gets straight to the point. There isn’t a need for a contact page or are, there’s just a contact icon at the footer of the site.

Sveinn Davidsson

Here the portfolio serves its purpose as the homepage, and every project perfectly aligned contains a different color as you hover over it. All the explanations for projects, and links to other work, as well as text on the about page is located on the right-hand side. The site pretty much utilizes the same layout throughout all of its pages excluding the home page.

Emptees

Emptees has a simple layout, nothing complicated, and displays its designs beautifully. For the most part, every element is aligned with each other, and the site as very easy to use and find navigation.

Poccuo

Excellent design with minimal qualities such as well spaced out menu bar. Cleanly dividing every seciton, elements within the sections, and menu is a plus for this site.

Nathan Carnes

Nathan Carnes has an elegant site with a set width and height that yells out minimalism as the front page is more than straight-forward and contains easily readable content.

Huge

The Huge site takes shelter in a well organized design and grat display of content. The site makes it easy for you to scan through with your eyes and the headings with a thick weight towards the bottom allows you to quickly find the information you need.

Jesse Dodds

Great use of colors of course, however, minimalism is beyond the use of correspondent colors but rather the details of how the elements are structured. Jesse has the most important links and information nicely aligned on all counts, the header, thumbnail, and text-based description within the home page.

Awesome Note

This is a nice iPhone application website that conveys simplicity and readability throughout the entire layout. The entire site is mostly structured by large images as examples, and some have a link for further info.

Mick Fanning

Mick Fanning’s website is themed professional and displays a large image slider in the center of the layout. The informational sections beneath the slider are beautifully aligned and use two different types of fonts that define the section title and content title.

GeeksPhone

Amazing site with stunning type and cleanly defined widgets in use. The menu bar, featured product, social widgets and footer are nicely divided amongst the layout.

Creative Online Media

This is a stunning website with effective use of whitespace. Its simple design makes it easy for you to read and navigate to where you need to go. Elements of design are large enough that they can’t be missed, and the footer is well organized.

Joe McDonald

This is a one-page site that took the challenge of knowing how to properly spread out and distribute the content throughout the layout for more visibility. This is something that is sometimes hard to achieve on a dark background. The structure of the site is fairly simple, and I must say it’s pretty hard to get lost here.

Kyle Steed

Kyles website uses images and Grey sections to separate the content. The sites elements titled Life, Design, and Faith are aligned at the top and the width, however, height wise, every section’s different and is dependent on how long the content may be.

Kim Burgess

Kim has a typographical based minimal site focused more on informing and connecting you with the proper links. The entire layout is divided within 3 sections, the logo, introduction (utilizing JS to unfold further text) and the footer that contains a line of icons that help you connect with Kim.

Ned

This site is simplicity at its best. The left sidebar contains the necessary links to display the projects to the right of that area, and even though there is no specific alignment within the elements they are well divided.

Susie McConnell

Susie’s personal website houses left and right aligned content. The site has a set width and sections are separated with a thick bold line for a more organized view.

BrandNew

The BrandNew blog divides the main content from the sidebar with a different color. Section titles are displayed with aligned icons and cap letters. The posts seem nicely laid out and maintain format.

Second And Park

This site focuses on well spaced out elements of design and great use of typography. Professionalism is kept throughout the entire layout, and I’d have to say the most noticeable aspect of the design would have to be the well organized contact area.

Martin Kristiansen

As you may know, defining specific elements within a dark background can be hard to achieve without the proper layout, use of colors, and type. Martin’s site fulfills these very requirements and manages to simplify the way the content is displayed at the same time.

Adlucent

Adlucent’s website is nicely aligned first at the section title followed by every sections conent. It’s hard to loose focus of the section you’re at since the alignment and distribution of content varies for each.

Anebstar Macht Webseiten

This isn’t the most complex site of all, but it’s definitely one of the simplest layouts we’ve seen so far. Forget hard to read content and unorganized display of projects, this site manages to demand attention from the start, and succeeds in engaging the user to visually interact.

Design Woop

Design Woop’s site is well designed and manages to divide the sites featured and main content with the use of highlighted type for the titles. Although the logo takes up a large portion of the sites front page, it makes way for the menu bar and the section for latest tweets along with the RSS subscribe button to all be aligned nicely with the rest of the sites content.

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Every web designer and developer should have a good and reliable wireframe (mockup or prototype) tool at there disposal. The importance of such a tool differentiates amongst web designers and developers, some use them, some don’t. Personally, I use them. It is in this initial stage of development that makes web design enjoyable, the coming together of the clients needs and your own creative ideas onto a blank canvas, allowing you to plan effectively the visual arrangement of the sites content.

The downside is that a good and reliable wireframe application can come at a heavy price, have you seen the cost of a good wireframe application? Prices can vary from as low as $100 all the way up to over $4000. Who has this kind of mine to throw around? Certainly no freelancer developer I know.

So, what options do you have? There are certainly a fair few free web apps and tools you can use, and that is what I have collated for this article – The Ten Best FREE Wirefame/Mockup/Prototype applications for designers and developers.

Pencil Project

The popular and fairly powerful Pencil Project is a free and opensource Firefox addon tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping with a multitude of features.
With its built-in stencils for diagramming and prototyping, the option for multi-page documents with background pages, its on-screen text editing with rich-text support and with its new cababiltity of exporting to HTML, PNG or Openoffice formats, makes this addon essential for any developer or designer.

Web Site Wireframe Tool

The key to this tool is the simplicity of usage, lending itself to speed, both in wireframe creation, as well as being able to quickly share the results without having to send anything more than a web address.
This particular tool allows the wireframe to be built in minutes, and if desired, a link to view the wireframe can be sent through email, instant message, or even the phone. With both parties able to view the wireframe even from different locations, the wireframe can then easily be updated based on feedback, discussion, ideas, suggestions, and so on.
It is free to register and use, and works in modern web browsers including Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox.

Hot Gloo – The Online Wireframe App

The first thing you need to know about Hot Gloo is that it is in Beta, the second thing you need to know is that it is currently free, but with plans to charge a fee later on this year, so, grab your chance now while its free, its worth it.
HotGloo is an easy to use and intuitive Flash built web-based wireframe app, that can create conceptual interactive prototypes of a website in the early development stages.
Features include drag and drop facilities, layers, grid and snap to grid, a fair rew preset elements, interaction between the elements and you get your own custom HotGloo URL that allow you to share your mockup/wireframe with your clients.

DUB – DENIM

DENIM is a free desktop application that is available for Windows, Unix, and Mac OS X. It describes itself well as "an Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design".
It is an outgrowth of the original SILK project, a pen-based sketching tool for designing user interfaces. SILK combines many of the benefits of paper-based sketching with existing electronic prototyping tools. It allows designers to quickly sketch an interface using an electronic pad and stylus. SILK preserves the important properties of pencil and paper: a rough drawing can be produced quickly and the medium is flexible. However, unlike a paper sketch, this electronic sketch is interactive and can easily be annotated and modified using editing gestures. SILK allows the designer to extend the interactivity of the recognized widgets using storyboards

Mockingbird

Mockingbird is an online tool that makes it very easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.
With its clean and clear interface, drag and drop functions, snap-to-grid, unlimited page linking and pretty much all the UI elements you could ever need, it all adss up to making Mockingbird our favorite wireframe app on this page.

MockFlow

Let me start by saying that MockFlow is not entirely free, there is a free package (limited to 1 Mockup with 4 pages and 10MB of storage) which, to be honest, really isn't much use to anyone. The premium yearly package costs $49 (reasonable price), which gives you unlimited mockups, unlimited collaborators, 500MB of storage and, most importantly it gives you access to the marvelous Mockstore.
MockFlow gives you everything you would expect from an online wireframe app, with one added bonus – its Mockstore. This is a large library of templates and presets that you can freely use (with the premium package) and will help speed up your workflow and give some added professionalism to your wireframe.

Prototype Composer – Free Prototyping Tool

Prototype Composer makes it easy for business users and business analysts to collaborate on requirements by building simple, high-fidelity prototypes that simulate a working application.
It is a tool for prototyping data, processes, activities and most importantly, user interfaces. The app also works as a Project Management tool, which is fairly simple to use, but a little bit too much for what I need, making this application more suited for a larger company.

fluidIA

FluidIA is an emerging agile design tool for prototyping rich user interfaces. This web based tool allows for rapid refinement and exploration of concepts using an object-oriented approach to design.
The big idea behind this experiment is whether a group of interaction designers, IA’s, UX professionals and developers can create there own prototyping tool in an open way. They have almost succeeded. FluidIA is still a little bit buggy, but looks very promising.

Cacoo

Cacoo is a user friendly online drawing tool that allows you to create a variety of diagrams such as site maps, wire frames, UML and network charts. It allows for multiple users to edit the same diagram in a simultaneous collaboration with all the tools and features you would expect from an online wireframe app
Diagrams created with Cacoo can be shared and allows you to paste the code into Web applications such as Wikis and Blogs, and when the original diagram is edited the pasted graphic will be automatically updated, removing the need to upload the diagram each time it is updated.

Lumzy

With Lumzy, you can create prototypes of how the site or application will function by adding events within your Lumzy controls. For instance, what happens when the user clicks a button? You can create Message Alerts, Page navigation or Links to external content, when your client interacts with your Mockup, yet with the hand drawn feel of a sketch.
With Lumzy, you can easily create your mockups and send to clients on the fly. It also features collaboration tools for team editing, a chat engine for deliberating over designs, file versioning and so much more.

iPhone Mockup Web App

This very simple web app allows you to create your own iPhone app mockups, share them with other people, and make changes which will by synced to everyone who has the mockup’s URL.
This app is currently in Alpha and offers no password protection (everyone with the mockup’s URL can access and change it), so use this app with care.

You might also like…

A Collection of Useful Web Design Wireframing Resources »
10 Online Tools and Apps to Help Optimize and Format CSS »
CSS References, Tutorials, Cheat Sheets, Conversion Tables and Short Codes »
The Blueprint CSS Framework – Tutorials, How-to Guides and Tools »
50 Essential Web Typography Tutorials, Tips, Guides and Best Practices »
50 Useful Tools and Generators for Easy CSS Development »
20+ Resources and Tutorials for Creative Forms using CSS »
24 CSS (in some cases with jQuery) Navigation and Menu Tutorials »
22 CSS Button Styling Tutorials and Techniques »

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BestFeedsnow is a RSS online, which allows you to read the feeds of every preferable sites or blogs.

BestFeedsNow allows you to create a personal page, with your preferable sites which you will be able to read in any place and at any time. For this is necessary to create you an account on this site. If you have a site, and you want that and your site visitors read the feeds of your preferable sites, you can create a Widget, which contain the news from your preferable sites.

http://bestfeedsnow.com/

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There’s a lot of powerful interactivity you can bring to your site to spice up just about any web page using one of the most powerful and modular javascript libraries—MooTools! It’s important to note that small and useful features can cleverly deal with hiding and showing important information in non-traditional ways.

Today, we will have a look at 20 creative techniques using MooTools javascript framework for rich UI in modern day websites.

1. Show/hide a nice Login Panel using Mootools 1.2

In this tutorial, we will see how to create a show/hide login panel on top of your page using Mootools 1.2.

2. MooGenda

MooGenda is a javascript calendar based on MooTools, that reads events from JSON requests. MooGenda supports double click on event to see the deafult event view, drag and drop event in month view, every change send a request to back end, to store when and what changed in the event.

Check out the demo here

3. Morph Effect on mouseenter/mouseleave with Mootools 1.2

In this tutorial, we will see how to add some amazing effects to an unordered list on mouseover with the Element Method: morph and to make the whole list item region clickable with Mootools 1.2. The goal is to take a boring unordered list and to turn it into something fun to click.

Check out the demo here

4. Create a Simple, Powerful Product Highlighter with MooTools

Create a flexible tool for highlighting your sites products or services using the MooTools javascript framework. Also, learn some of the many reasons why MooTools just might be the right javascript library for all of your future projects!

Check out the demo here

5. Jazz Up Your Forms With MooTools Pt. 1

A MooTools and contact forms with animated field highlighting, displaying/hiding instructions for each input field, live comment previewing and auto-resizing of both the comment preview and it’s corresponding textarea input.

Check out the demo here

6. Mootools CSS Styled Scrollbar

A small piece of javascript that creates a css styled scrollbar from the Mootools (version 1.2b2) Slider class. The example page shows three div elements with a styled horizontal and/or vertical scrollbars.

Check out the demo here

7. Delayed Image Preloading Using Mootools

There are possible scenarios that need image preloading. Most browsers only allow two concurrent requests at the same time to the same domain. When we do the image preloading on domready, it might hold up other resources that need to be loaded. Because we preload images that are not shown when the page loads, we can delay the preloading.

Array.each.delay(3000,this,[
	['foo.gif', 'bar.png','moo.png','tools.png', 'mootools.png'],
	function(src){var img = new Image();img.src = src;}
]);

8. Facebook-Style Modal Box Using MooTools

David Walsh took facebook’s imagery and CSS and combined it with MooTools’ awesome functionality to duplicate the effect of Facebook’s Modal box.

Check out the demo here

9. OmniGrid

The OmniGrid component is inspired by two similar components: FlexGrid jQuery and phatfusion:sortableTable and partly uses their source code.

Check out the demo here

10. MooTools Flashlight Effect

A nice neat effect inspired by the jQuery version found here.

Check out the demo here

11. FormCheck

FormCheck is a class that allows you to perform different tests on form to validate them before submission. FormCheck is lightweight, shiny and fast, supports skins (using CSS), 10 different languages, and shows errors as tips. It support basic validation (required, alpha, digit, alpanu, lenght, confirm…), regex validation (phone, email, url) and a lot of options that allow you to customize this class to fit exactly as you want.

Check out the demo here

12. Fancy Upload

FancyUpload is a file-input replacement which features an unobtrusive, multiple-file selection menu and queued upload with an animated progress bar. It is easy to setup, is server independent, completely styleable via CSS and XHTML and uses MooTools to work in all modern browsers.

Check out the demo here

13. AutoCompleter

This AutoCompleter script for MooTools provides the functionality for text suggestion and completion. It features different data-sources (local, JSON or XML), a variety of user interactions, custom formatting, multiple selection, animations and much more.

Check out the demo here

14. Fantastic News Ticker Newsvine-like using Mootools

This tutorial explains how to implement a Newsvine News Ticker, with news vertical scrolling, using mootools. It’s very simple and quick to implement in your web projects.

Check out the demo here

15. mParallax

mParallax is a MooTools implementation of the popular jQuery plugin: jParallax. “jParallax turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way”. You can create parallax effects while having the option to customize various settings.

Check out the demo here

16. BySlideMenu

BySlideMenu is a plugin for Mootools which allow you to easily create a beautiful accordion menu (sliding menu) on any element you want (ul/li, div, p …) using images and/or text. You have the option to create it vertically or horizontally, the container width/height can be adjusted automatically, Menu can be pinned or not, by mouseover or click and with Overflow support.

Check out the demos here

17. mooCSSChart

Create animated Bar Charts using the MooTools.

Check out the demos here

18. MavSelectBox

MavSelectBox is a simple-to-use form select replacement that allows for better customization. MavSelectBox mimics the GUI interactions of a normal select element as much as possible. Up and down arrows move the selection, tabbing to it and hitting alt+down shows the menu, tabbing to it and simply hitting up or down selects the next available option in that direction, focusing then start typing and the option that matches what you are typing is selected, enter selects, esc closes, and so on.

Check out the demos here

19. A Better Pagination

It is only a little script that can turn your ugly looking numbers into a nice looking Slider using MooTools. The script only contains a little fix for the Slider in mootools-more so the “knob” doesn’t jump around when clicking it and is also packed up a little example in PHP to see how you can integrate this script in your blog easily.

Check out the demos here

20. SlideItMoo

SlideItMoo is a MooTools 1.2 JavaScript plugin for sliding images, browser friendly and nicely degradable. All CSS styling is external. The plugin can slide the images from your photo gallery either by clicking the back – forward buttons or by mouse wheel. It supports continuous sliding when navigating, offers the possibility to set how the slider will slide ( from left or from right ) when used with the auto slide feature on, offers the possibility to give it the item width ( width of the slider’s items ) and let it display the elements according to that width and the visible items parameter.

Check out the demos here

Must Read Mootools Tutorials

- 30 Days of MooTools Tutorials

These tutorials will assume no previous Mootools or JavaScript experience, but will require basic knowledge of html and CSS.

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1. Achieving Rounded Corners in Internet Explorer with DD_roundies

Unfortunately, CSS3 border-radius is only supported by Safari and Firefox, leaving browsers such as Internet Explorer to gracefully degrade to square corners. DD_roundies library offers a new approach to bringing rounded corners to Internet Explorer. DD_roundies works with selectors – much like jQuery – this capability allows for a very convenient mapping to jQuery UI’s CSS Framework classes, and allows us to apply DD_roundies to jQuery UI in a few short lines.

Check out the Demo here

2. Setting Equal Heights with jQuery

Creating the visual effect of equal-height columns or content boxes has been a challenge. From a usability and performance standpoint, one smart solution is to use a simple JavaScript workaround: our equalHeights() function determines the heights of all sibling elements in a container, and then sets each element’s minimum height to that of the tallest element. When JavaScript is disabled, the boxes or columns appear with varying heights, but the content remains legible and the page is still completely usable.

Check out the Demo here

3. Cross browser text-shadow

Text-shadow is a neat little CSS3 (actually, CSS2) property that allows you to display a shadow behind your text. The only downfall is that it doesn’t work in Internet Explorer. One handy little thing of Internet Explorer is that it also gives you access to CSS declarations it does not understand, so we can simply request the text-shadow value of a given element and process that. This should work in Internet Explorer 5.5 to Internet Explorer 8.

Check out the Demo here

4. Rounded Corners

This jQuery plugin will create beautifully rounded corners. No images or obtrusive markup necessary. Support for padding ensures your layout degrades gracefully for users who have disabled javascript.

5. Position Footer

This little plugin will allow you to position a footer at the bottom of the browser viewport when the content doesn’t reach that far. It will not adjust the footer if the content goes below the viewport height.

Check out the Demo here

6. Link Control

A simple plugin designed to give the end user control over whether they want to open a link in a new window or not without having to right click and such.

Check out the Demo here

7. Page Peel

A jQuery plugin for the page peel ad effect used on quite a few sites now.

Check out the Demo here

8. Delaying loading of images in (long) web pages

Lazy loader is a jQuery plugin that delays loading of images in (long) web pages. Images outside of viewport (visible part of web page) wont be loaded before user scrolls to them. This plugin specially helps on long web pages containing many large images makes the page load faster. Browser will be in ready state after loading visible images. In some cases it can also help to reduce server load.

Check out the Demo here

9. Preload Images Sequentially With jQuery

This is a small code snippet you can use for preloading images for mouseovers. It uses $(window).bind(‘load’, function() {…}) to wait until all page elements have finished loading. This includes all images.

10. BGIframe

Helps ease the pain when having to deal with IE z-index issues.

11. Fixing IE overflow problem

IE has a different implementation of overflow compa(red) to Firefox or Safari. In particular, Firefox et al, when overflowing an element, it puts the horizontal overflow scroll bar on the outside of the element. Because the content overflows horizontally in IE, the new horizontal scroll bar means we can’t see all the content vertically, thus generating a vertical scroll bar.

Vertical overflow is always inside the element, so you need to apply the following in IE only:

• Find all elements whose contents is overflowing horizontally.
• Add 20 pixels of padding to the bottom of our element.
• Strip the vertical scroll bar.

(function ($) {
  $.fn.fixOverflow = function () {
    if ($.browser.msie) {
      return this.each(function () {
        if (this.scrollWidth > this.offsetWidth) {
          $(this).css({ 'padding-bottom' : '20px', 'overflow-y' : 'hidden' });
        }
      });
    } else {
      return this;
    }
  };
})(jQuery);

// usage
$('pre').fixOverflow().doOtherPlugin();

This fix results in IE conforming to putting the horizontal scroll bar below the element.

Check out the Demo here

12. Avoiding CSS hacks using Javascript

If you don’t have to code those ugly CSS hacks for those browsers that just won’t show you what you want them to, you can use one trick to ease the CSS writing: “Browser selectors”. So now you can preprend your styles with .msie, .mozilla, .opera, .safari or .other depending on the targeted browser.

Check out the Demo here

13. Increase the size of click targets

Say goodbye to boring ‘Read More…’ links by turning your entire content block into a clickable target!

Check out the Demo here

14. Vertically Center An Element

In this video tutorial, you will learn how you can vertically center an image in your browser by combining CSS with jQuery’s power

15. JSizes ― jQuery extension plugin for CSS properties

JSizes is a small plugin which adds support for querying and setting the CSS min-width, min-height, max-width, max-height, border-*-width, margin, and padding properties. Additionally it has one method for determining whether an element is visible. In total it adds six new methods to the jQuery element API.

Some examples of how the new methods can be used:

jQuery(function($) {
   var myDiv = $('#myDiv');

   // set margin-top to 100px and margin-bottom to 10em
   myDiv.margin({top: 100, bottom: '10em'});

   // displays the size of the top border in pixels
   alert(myDiv.border().top);

   // displays true if the element is visible, false otherwise
   alert(myDiv.isVisible());

   // set padding-right to 10px and margin-left to 15px using chaining
   myDiv.padding({right: 10}).margin({left: 15});
});

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subscribe to our RSS-Feed and visit my twitter page : nourayehia to get notified when our next post is here.

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Behavior:

• When the slider is dragged, a bubble will fade in, telling the current size.
• The text “current text size” will also appear with the current text size next to it.
• Make the text increase one px or decrease one px on the click of the plus or minus sign.

Download It Here | View Demo

The tool is great for people who feel that they maybe more effective with a verbal message.  The tool is also Free! It allows you to record your own voice and also allows you to use TTS – many voices to choose from and you can also change your message anytime.

Another tool that the developers of Audi Pal has is its Site Pal.  Site Pal enables you to have a talking head on your site.

SitePal is an easy-to-use service that allows you to create a speaking avatar for your website and empower your online communication.

• Upload your photo
• Over 250 customizable stock avatars
• Record your own voice or use built-in
  Text-To-Speech in multiple languages
• Unlimited audio & avatar updates
• Add an image or video background
• Built-in lead collection, FAQ, AI chat
• Publish to HTML page, Flash, emails
• Compatible with all server technologies
• Programming skills not required
• API for advanced users

SitePal is a fun and powerful tool, but it comes with a price of US$9.95 a month.  I have included a demo here for you to check out and see if its the right one for you.

Main Image Source

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If you planning to launch new online project or your new site then coming soon pages can be handy tools for you as under construction page proven to get most out of these early announcements.

Now days Creative Designs is one of the key aspects for improving your website’s future traffic and pagerank. Getting a site featured in some of the popular WordPress/CSS galleries can bring thousands of visitors and many valuable inbound links with excellent SEO benefits.

It’s always hard to think in right direction and even harder to find right inspiration. Here in this showcase below, you’ll find a comprehensive collection of Creative Coming Soon Pages which will give you better understanding of design capabilities as well as inspiration for your site’s coming soon page.

In this designs showcase we trying to present you exemplary design trends, new practices, creative ideas and designer’s skills. There are so many different Coming Soon Page designs out there that it’s always hard to decide which one to select. We spent last few weeks to compile this list of highly beautiful, creative and most importantly inspirational under construction page designs over web which might help you to get inspired with their work.

You may be interested in the following modern trends related articles as well.

• Creative 404 Error Pages Around for Inspiration
• 95 Fresh Examples Of Single Page Website Designs
• 77 Inspirational Example of Pricing Page Designs
• 90 Creative Back To Top Links and Best Practices
• 50+ Beautiful Website Designs Using Office Stationery
• 80+ Incredible Designs with Bird’s-eye View

Please feel free to join us and you are always welcome to share your thoughts even if you have more reference links related to other trends that our readers may like.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our RSS-feed and follow us on Twitter — for recent updates.

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The first thing that caught my eye was the huge bold heading “Creative Engaging Branding”, this instantly tells the reader exactly what the company specialize in.

To the right of this great looking title is a slideshow of recent work from the agency, giving anyone interested an idea of the style of work they produce and the sort of clients they have worked with. I particularly like the way the work slides in using an array of different techniques, making it interesting throughout. It would have been very easy to put the same transition on every slide but I’m glad they put a little extra effort in to make them all different.

I know the Charles Elena Design site uses a very commonly seen colour scheme of Red, White, Grey and Black but they have used it to great effect throughout the site to give the whole thing a very striking impact.

Every section in the site has a different background colour making each unique, with the supporting colours used expertly to give hierarchy to the page. The pages with the red background are my personal favourite.

I really love the use of huge graphics throughout the site, these are very much in-line with the big bold headings on every page. There are more and more sites online these days incorporating massive font and graphics and Charles Elena Design is a great example of why. As you travel down the page you are treated to some lovely shapes that really show off the agencies skills.

One point I would make though is that the speed at which the page scrolls down means that these graphics are shown too briefly in my opinion. While you can scroll to the graphics and take them in properly it wouldn’t hurt to slow down the scroll speed.

While I’m suggesting improvements that could possibly be made I’d like to highlight the very small copy font that is used on occasion. In the example above the copy font size is 10.67px which is very small for such a long paragraph of text. I would love to see this bumped up a pixel or two because it’s currently very hard to read.

One final improvement I would love to see would concern the presentation of their portfolio. They have used a scrolling carousel to display their work, which in my opinion, is difficult to use as it makes focusing on specific work very fiddly. An option to scroll through the work one by one would be my preference.

Also, their is currently no way to enlarge the work on offer. I’d love to have the chance to open their work up in a lightbox and see it in all it’s glory.

I don’t want to seem too negative here though because overall I really love this site and think it’s a great piece of work. With that in mind, I want to now go onto my favourite design feature on the site, the fixed logo and navigation. As you take a journey down the page the logo and navigation come with you staying in a fixed position on your screen.

This may not seem special but the designers of the site have thought about this journey and incorporated the logo into the background graphics. In the example above the logo merges with the curved graphic to make it look as if the curve is bleeding out. There are numerous examples of this as you go down the page and it is small touches like this that, in my opinion, makes sites stand out from the crowd.

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Click on the image below for a live demo.

Key Features

• Theme compatible with WordPress 2.8.x and 2.9.x
• 100% tableless css design.
• Advanced theme options panel.
• Integrated blog
• Fully customizable front page slideshow
• Widget ready right sidebar and widget ready front page bar.
• 4 level page oriented dropdown menu.
• Threaded comments
• CSS & XHTML valid.
• Cross-browser compatible.
• Additional full width page template.
• Delivered with .png source files (.psd files delivered upon request)

Download Republica

About Viva Themes

Viva Themes creates quality and professionally designed WordPress themes. They offer themes for your business, blog or personal sites.

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The graph below shows the average load time for this website. I had a high of about 12 seconds and low of about 5 seconds. Using the techniques below I was able to bring my page load time down under 5 seconds.

• First, remove any social media buttons that have active counts. Using add-ons like the “smart digg button” makes a call to another website and will increase the page’s load time. The more buttons, the longer the site will take to load, so go with static buttons for things like sphinn, stumbleupon, twitter, digg, facebook, and so on. In some cases this may work against you as it will get you less “votes.” If you depend on social media interaction for traffic, consider using a date based hook. Show buttons with the count when the post is new, then switch to static buttons or remove them entirely when the post is old.
• Two of the biggest offenders which deserve special mention are share this and tweetmeme. They make a disproportionately large number of connections for what they are doing. Worse, they throw a huge amount of validation errors. True you don’t need to be valid to rank but for a plugin to throw 40 validation errors is embarrassing and quite simply shows nothing less than gross incompetence from a programmer or team who should be fired on the spot. Those two plugins should be first two to go if you are concerned about speed.
• Look at your sidebar for any social widgets, plugins or javascript-based add-ons. Decide if  they are helping you bring in any traffic. Things like Google Friend Connect are almost never worth it and should be removed.
• Are you using plugins like shadowbox to give you a nice effect when people zoom in on a picture? Seriously consider whether it’s worth it: chances are good that the plugin and ones like it are having some detrimental effects on load time.
• Are you using any dynamic, on-the-fly image resizing, or are you cheating and using hard coded width and height settings for your images? If you are, chances are good that you’re affecting load time. Create a smaller image and link to the larger one. Starting with wordpress 2.9 there is a built in image editing feature. Take advantage of it.
• If you are using comments, set the default avatar to “blank.” It will show images for people who have registered but won’t show anything for people without avatars. if you have posts that get over 25 comments, the savings can be significant.
• Do a plugin audit. Use a page load monitoring tool to turn plugins on and off one by one to see if anything is adversely affecting load time. Some plugins like Page to Post converter don’t need to be enabled 100% of the time. Turn them on when you need them, turn them off when you don’t.
• WordPress used to have a GZip setting built in.  It was removed in version 2.5.  Add it back in if it’s compatible with your hosting plan because it’s worth doing.
• Caching is a tricky thing with wordpress. If you are playing the social game you want it running and everything set to lockdown. If you publish frequently you need to clear the cache to make sure everyone is getting new content. 99% of the posts I do here are scheduled, and I’m not convinced the setting “clear cache on post publication” works 100% of the time with scheduled posts. So use WP-Cache–just get in the habit of manually clearing it out every now and then(at least once a week at bare minimum).
• Install WP Minify. It reduces and combines the javascripts and CSS files. This one can be a bit tricky to get installed and sometimes has conflicts. It’s definitely worth trying though.

To conclude, what you want to do is look for scripts, add-ons, plugins,  javascripts, or social media tools with large load times or callbacks to external websites. Remove them whenever possible. Use basic file reduction techniques like using thumbnails instead of large images. Install compression and caching scripts to maximize the value from your first two steps. By themselves, none of these steps will have that much effect; however their cumulative effect will add up. In the case of this site, they reduced load time in half.

To be clear, at the time of this post’s publication, there is no evidence that page load time is currently affecting organic rankings. However, it is a part of the quality score in Adwords. When taking into consideration Google’s statement that load time will become a factor in the future, this presents an opportunity for you to take proactive steps now instead of playing catch up 6 months from now.

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By Robert Hartland

In this article, we’ll showcase website layouts and navigation structures that really break the mold. The designers of these websites have seen dozens of clone websites out there but have sought their own way. The unusual website layouts and navigation that results can either be very successful and innovative or disorienting for visitors. You decide. When you browse the showcase, think not so much about functionality as about why you design and develop the way you do.

Unusual Layouts

Breaking industry conventions is not always easy. Still, many designers push on to find fresh ideas and ways to innovate. Have you ever driven down a street where the homes perhaps have different-colored paint on the shutters but essentially look the same? The Internet can be the same, with designers cloning the same layouts day in and day out. But it is amazing what can be accomplished by a simple shift in the placement of website elements, while keeping the website familiar and easy to use.

Unusual Layout Best Practices

There are no “standards” for designing your own unusual layouts, only guidelines to keep you on track. The style is defined by freedom from conventional standards and by placing items where visitors are not trained to find them. Here are some ways to achieve an unusual layout:

Let your content articulate the design. Try even five or more columns without aligning everything perfectly. Prioritize usability, with layout as a secondary consideration. Let things flow naturally.

Let your users view content horizontally or vertically, without making additional content hard to find. Bring an element of surprise and excitement when presenting crucial content.

Keep in mind that users tend to focus on faces. Guide them with visual imagery to help them find content. Also, make sure the layout does not disorient visitors. The experience should be new and delightful.

India 60 has a layout that seems successful for every section of the website but “Videos.” Identifying the different content on the website is easy, but no matter how large your monitor (mine is 24″), you still seem to need to scroll.

Big Kid has a series of windows and photos that wrap to your browser window, helping you navigate the content. An effective yet slightly disorienting approach.

26000 Vodka takes an abstract and innovative approach to layout. Even with the parts moving constantly, you still manage to find content and enjoy your visit.

Red Mccombs Media has several different levels of navigation on its landing page and internal pages. While the page design is pleasing to the eye, it can be confusing and frustrating if you are not sure what you are looking for.

Tiny Team has a very simple layout that replicates how folders are opened on a computer. You can easily navigate back and forth through sections after some trial and error. One feature that is lacking is direct access to a specific part on the website.

Max Haus puts its navigation and search at the bottom of the website, with all options initially hidden. Once you leave the home page, returning is nearly impossible.

Webbli World has a very creative layout. All of the main content is hidden from non-members. The unique layout of the Webbli creator and registration form, though easily lost, get your attention.

Jan Sochor has a three-column layout that adapts to each section. The website feels very natural even though it contains at least four different layouts.

Sursly has an interesting take on horizontal navigation; each page contains only a small chunk of information. While the layout as a whole may not be unusual, the dark frame containing the content is.

Gavin Castleton’s layout has a split personality but helps you quickly identify your needs. Once on the website, you are presented with obscured content against a transparent background. The navigation transitions are appropriately nauseating.

FMCS has a five-column layout that is not often seen. While plenty of content is displayed, you are never overwhelmed or confused. Content is easily findable, even if a bit hard ro read when crammed into the left column.

AntiSweden has a full-screen video layout, accompanied by a two-box navigation to the right. When you navigate to a new page, the simple navigation scheme remains.

Samsung has stylized navigation to the right that changes with the photo. The layout is easy to use, though occasionally confusing when new elements are introduced.

Love Bento groups its navigation in the lower-left with the bento box of content. While the website may appear overwhelming at first, you quickly realize understand how to find what you’re looking for.

Unusual Navigation

Developing a unique navigation scheme that does everything but conform can be a huge task, almost the Mount Everest of Web design. Not many people take on the challenge, and not many who do succeed. In this section, we cover both the victories and defeats. Unusual navigation requires a balance between innovation and practicality. If you lean too far towards innovation, the navigation can become frustrating and even unusable. The goal is to make the navigation intuitive enough for the website to be perfectly usable.

Unusual Navigation Best Practices

Unusual navigation has no set rules. Just think differently and try something that does not look, feel or function like your everyday website. And follow these guidelines:

Let your navigation float freely within the content, rather than using the typical “Z pattern” that helps users scan. Make sure the navigation is still clear and self-explanatory, even if it doesn’t sit in the usual location at the top. Make it intuitive yet simple, maybe with just a few symbols that expand into many options.

Use imagery instead of, or in addition to, text. Allow users to use the mouse buttons and click wheel as alternatives (with instructions, of course). Also allow keyboard navigation as an alternative (instructions again, please).

Finally, include arrows that visitors can use to cycle through the main sections without using the main navigation. Allow users to drag items to reveal new content, while maintaining usability and accessibility.

Lucuma displays some great art, but the initial lack of content is a bit confusing. The horizontal scrolling is also interesting, although the pages are so short that you can see multiple pages at once.

Okay Dave puts its navigation at the bottom, while the different images point to the same content.

Marc Anton Dahmen combines mouse and keyboard options for navigation. Making the keyboard interact with the images and text is definitely unique. The configuration stands out while remaining practical.

Andreas Smetana lets you use your mouse wheel or the arrows to navigate through photo thumbnails.

Snuggle Fux takes a curious approach to layout and navigation, with functional expandable windows and no main navigation to be found. If you are looking for something in the 15 most recent topics, you should be fine; otherwise you will certainly give up and move on to another website.

Cypher 13 has expandable navigation supported by photos and text. This style is interesting, functional and at times comical.

Im Design lets you use your keyboard arrows and a few other keys to navigate the on-screen portfolio items. Some of the keys are not Mac-friendly, and visitors are forced to use the mouse on several occasions.

Mandchou offers a small content area designed mainly for viewing the portfolio, complemented by thumbnails at the bottom of the viewport.

Studio Stemmler has a plain landing page. But as soon as you select a category, the interface changes and you have multiple ways to access content.

Lab for Culture has a unique and very interactive style of navigation for its case study section. After clicking through several types of navigation, the final presentation is useful and interesting.

Salinas has a great “Wow” effect when you first select a section. Upon leaving the landing page, the appeal is lost, with the slow-loading content and awkward page transitions.

Got Milk puts its navigation front and center and never budges, although the icons become text on hover.

Ian Wharton uses a combination of navigation and arrows to let you cycle through content, with the option to view full-screen. The interface changes on interior pages, with the main navigation disappearing, leaving only a “Back” button.

Eric Johansson lets you drag the slider at the bottom not only to access different pages but to discover content, too.

Johnny Slack has a fun interactive navigation style that shows all of your options up front and then gives you the option to identify an item by category. When viewing projects, you are presented with expandable images.

Yodabaz has a fresh and pleasing feel for its navigation, and you can find all the controls you would expect from a portfolio.

OFIS borrows from the periodic table of elements for its navigation. It is minimalist yet useful, and it adapts when you enter a new section.

SensiSoft has a familiar-looking information stand to help users connect with its unique style of navigation.

Thibaud not only lets you drag with your mouse but takes a page out of the Pantone color book. Designers are familiar with this and know what to expect.

When Unusual Becomes Unusable

Not all unusual designs are as intuitive as their designers would like to believe. SOme can be more of a nuisance than a convenience. MIT offer some usability guidelines for websites, which are not detailed but still useful as a quick checklist. If your website’s purpose and content are not immediately understood, you may want to rethink your design. Your content’s structure does not have to be conventional, but it should be logical. Few things are more frustrating to a user than not knowing how to navigate content.

Think of your website like a brand new vehicle. It has some things you are used to: a steering wheel, gears, a seat, etc. When you first sit in it, you immediately recognize certain items, but not others. If the gear shift has been moved from between the seats to behind the steering wheel, you might be confused at first. Not knowing how to shift detracts from the vehicle’s functionality. So, the vehicle’s controls should be clearly labeled and feel natural to use. The relocation of the gear shift is one of the more drastic advancements in the usability of automobiles in recent years and feels quite different from the “layout” of typical car.

While creativity, uniqueness and pushing boundaries always benefit the Web community as a whole, usability is far more important. Your layout and navigation must be intuitive and easy to use to be successful.

About the author

Robert Hartland is a professional designer and photographer with over seven years of experience. He owns his own clothing company Envee Apparel, a creative theme-based lifestyle t-shirt company and accepts freelance work through his portfolio web site Aether Design.

(al)

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Let me know what one you like the best. I think the Heinz empty bottle is one of the most creative. Also, I’m sure there are many other cool error 404 pages out there and we would love to hear about them. If you find any more creative ones, please drop us a comment!

Error 404 Compilation…

Heinz

* * * * *

Martin Korner

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Suspended Animations

* * * * *

404 Train

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Red Tag

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Error 404

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Renet Web

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Error 404

* * * * *

404 Not Found

* * * * *

CSS Tricks

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Home Star Runner

* * * * *

404 Error

* * * * *

24-7 Media

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WP Beginner

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Fotolia

* * * * *

Frye Wiles

* * * * *

Jack Fig

* * * * *

Fortune Cookie Error

* * * * *

iStock Photo

* * * * *

Apartment Home Living

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How do you do that? It’s not nearly as hard as you think, and it’s the way all the masters get their pages to the top for their selected keywords.

Here’s the way anyone can rank for a certain keywords at the top of Google. And why do you want to do that?

• Traffic!
• Targeted traffic!
• Money Making traffic! The traffic YOU want!

If the person types in “red umbrellas” and you have a good offer for red umbrellas then you want them to find you right at the top of the Google organic listings…FREE!

Free targeted traffic …it really doesn’t get any better than that.

So, here’s the plan. You have picked a keyword. Now you set out to get put at the top of Google Page One for that term.

• First – Put the keyword in your domain name! Or, at least do it this way…http;//www.yourdomainname.com/keyword.
• Second – Put a bunch of relevant content on your page with the keyword in it several times but not over 1%.
• Third – Now that that page is up, you can write an article describing the benefits of the offer on that page while using your “keyword” in the Title and Body of the article.

Fourth – This is the “coup de gras” as the French like to put it or “the biggie” as Americans are fond of saying. You write an authors resource box that asks the reader to click back to your offer for more information and the clickback (not Clickbank) hyperlinks have to look just like this example… “For the best in [rain umbrellas] selection and accessories go to my page on [rain unmbrella] (I use the singular and the plural) and NOW you have what Google wants to see. Keyword links back to YOUR site!

Getting ranked for a keyword is largely a popularity contest. The more “rain umbrella” text links pointing to your “rain umbrella” page that has your “rain umbrella” offer on it, the higher goes your ranking. One day you’ll write that last article who’s text link pushes you to the top.

One way to get a lot of the anchor text backlinks you need for Google to see fit to put your offer page at the top of Page One is to write an article and put those text links in your resource box. Everybody does this. It works.

Still, if you only submit one article to one place you are going to get only one backlink or maybe two if you go for two different keywords.

I like to write one article and get dozens to hundreds of backlinks. So would you!

And before I go off topic too far, let me suggest that you look into one of these “mass submission” article outfits. It’s what I use and I have thousands of links going all over and growing.

Even better than that is the fact that I’m on page one for some of my terms and I’m picking up more and more targeted Google traffic all the time.

This is something that works and it’s something you can do!

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

How Keyword Ranking Can Make You Money

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Originally posted at Technically Incorrect

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This showcase will consist from 50 3D Flash websites, which really stood out from crowd, have received unique attention and got awards! Don’t think this is just another list – you’ll find here endless inspiration in these websites, where each one of them is a huge masterpiece!

1. Element

Hard to describe how cool this website is! Very stylish intro and superb 3D animations combined with great looking website.

2. Ge

Cool website with beautiful 3D objects and animations. Every page has its own good looking 3D objects.

3. Gears Of War – Emergence Day

Brilliant peace of art! Massive 3D scene with animations. Beautifully made 3D fade-in, fade-out transitions for every page.

4. Audi A6

Simple but very good looking website with 3D menu and 3D transitions.

5. Summer Festival

Good looking website with fantastic 3D balloons and stunning animations. And also it has a great feature – if you just wait for some time and do nothing, then after some period of time a jet-man will run out of fuel and will fall from the sky with interesting animation. This website was awarded as “site of the day” on FWA.

6. Coca Cola

What’s that? Hey, it’s Coca Cola! Very creative website which consists of many different sub-websites where every website is different from each other with its own style, design and animation.

7. Optus Whale Song

Beautifully made website. Great underwater 3D scene. This website was awarded as “site of the day” on FWA.

8. Martini Asti

Very classy website with 3D graphics and animations. Also it has cool 3D transitions.

9. White Void

Very beautifully made 3D menu. This 3D portfolio is very good representation of the style called “minimalism”.

10. The Eco Zoo

Well made 3D website. This website consists not only of some 3D elements but whole website is like a 3D world and almost every animation is in 3D. Good work.

11. Premiyum

Beautiful 3D website with great 3D effects. Fantastic. This website was awarded as “site of the day” on FWA.

12. Get the Glass

Interesting Flash website with brilliant Flash intro which has tons of 3D elements.

13. Sensi Soft

Beautiful work with beautiful 3D scene and animations. Consists of many different 3D scenes where each scene is like a different period of time.

14. Plantate

Beautiful and cartoon style website. A 3D planet in the middle of website which you can rotate using your mouse.

15. Soft Whiteroom

Beautiful website. Everything is in 3D and very nicely responds to mouse movements.

16. Ha-py Island

Very cheerful website. Whole website is in 3D where you can walk around with bear. It feels like you are playing some 3D game. This website was awarded as “site of the day” on FWA.

17. Hatica

Beautiful and simple website with 3D object in the middle of website.

18. The Egg Republic

Beautifully made website. It has great 3D animations and transitions from one page to another. It’s also great that every page responds to movements of your mouse. This website was awarded as “site of the day” on FWA.

19. Foxtel I am uniQue

Social networking website where you can create your own unique 3D portrait. Fantastic idea with great work of 3D.

20. Cortex Design

Good looking 3D photo gallery with beautiful reflections. Just clean and simple.

21. The Morph

This website is brilliant! Turn on your webcam and see how all 3D objects follow your motions. Or if you don’t have a webcam then this website also responds to movements of your mouse.

22. Twist and Drink

Cartoon style 3D website with mini games and that kind of stuff for children. Very well made, amazing!

23. Chuyue

Great piece of work! Beautifully made 3D menu and animations. You can even choose 4 types of 3D menu layout.

24. Mr A

Very cool website with awesome 3D work. Great 3D reflections and effects and there is also a mini game in the background of this website.

25. Dasai

A simple website with 3D navigation menu as a planet. Good use of Papervision3D.

26. Orange

Great piece of work. Everything is in 3D. You walk from one page (room) to another. Well made 3D animations.

27. TBC

Very simple website with pretty cool 3D menu as a library. And also it has a cool animation when you choose something in this 3D menu.

28. New Work City

Pretty interesting corporate website with some 3D animations. It also has a stunning design. Great work.

29. Off The Street Club

Interesting website with many 3D objects which can be rotated.

30. Eight Interactive Studio

Just clean and simple website with 3D animations, beautiful!

31. Ecsw

Great 3D website with cool Flash intro, and one of the coolest 3D features this website has, is that you can walk around the building by yourself.

32. Zeebee visual communications

A small website with 3D effects which looks brilliant. This website was awarded as “site of the day” on FWA.

33. Thinking Space

Flash website which has a menu with very interesting 3D effect. Good looking 3D transitions.

34. Domenico Tedone design

Clean and simple 3D website. Very well made. This website was awarded as “site of the day” on FWA.

35. Silenzio

This is like a 3D movie library with beautiful 3D transitions. Every animation is very smooth. Good work.

36. Philter Design

Simple and clean 3D website.

37. Rule the Stars

Interesting way of how to draw something – draw it in the sky with stars! Great 3D work. Can also be like a nice little present for your girlfriend/boyfriend (your drawing of course) – she/he will like it, I promise. This website was awarded as “site of the day” on FWA.

38. LBi Atlanta

Good looking website with very cool 3D navigation menu. Just hit “Browse” on the right side of the website to see 3D navigation menu.

39. 3spin

Very good looking website with awesome 3D navigation menu where you fly from one page to another.

40. Comcast Town

Very big and cheerful flash website with many interesting 3D elements.

41. Fendi

Website with 3D photo gallery. Looks very good.

42. Roca Meridian

Cleand and simple website in 3D cube.

43. Air Canada Leaveless

Beautiful corporate style website with some 3D elements. Very smooth 3D animations, for example, smooth animation when the card flips over.

44. Grillhelden

Website with 3D background which responds to mouse movements. Good looking website with greeat use of Papervision3D.

45. 13flo

Good looking website with 3D menu. You can choose 4 different layouts of this menu.

46. Inavi 3D

Great piece of work. Almost whole scene is in 3D with awesome 3D transitions.

47. Njoore

Completely 3D website with very cool and entertaining loading as a mini game. I really enjoyed this little cheerful mini game. This website was awarded as “site of the day” on FWA.

48. Cristof Echard

Portfolio website with beautiful 3D transition effects.

49. X-Prime

Very cool Flash website with 3D elements. It has an interesting 3D menu.

50. 3 Words Game

Very cool 3D navigation menu. You can choose even a layout of this menu.

Related posts:

1. 50 Gorgeous Flash Websites You Definitely Should See
2. Beverage companies: Excellent artworks and Flash designs
3. 30 Sources To Get Your Web Design Inspiration
4. 35 Websites To Teach You How To Use CSS Effectively
5. Showcase Of 50 Best Inspiring Gaming Websites

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Website performance is a hugely important topic, so much so that the big companies of the Web are obsessed with it. For the Googles, Yahoos, Amazons and eBays, slow websites mean fewer users and less happy users and thus lost revenue and reputation.

In your case, annoying a few users wouldn’t be much of a problem, but if millions of people are using your product, you’d better be snappy in delivering it. For years, Hollywood movies showed us how fast the Internet was: time to make that a reality.

Even if you don’t have millions of users (yet), consider one very important thing: people are consuming the Web nowadays less with fat connections and massive computers and more with mobile phones over slow wireless and 3G connections, but they still expect the same performance. Waiting for a slow website to load on a mobile phone is doubly annoying because the user is usually already in a hurry and is paying by the byte or second. It’s 1997 all over again.

Performance is an expert’s game… to an extent. You can do innumerable things to make a website perform well, and much of it requires in-depth knowledge and boring testing and researceh. I am sure a potential market exists for website performance optimization, much like there is one now for search engine optimization. Interestingly, Google recently announced that it will factor performance into its search rankings, so this is already happening. That said, you can do a lot of things without having to pay someone to point out the obvious.

Know Your Performance Blockers

Performance can be measured in various ways. One way is technical: seeing how fast a page loads and how many bytes are transferred. Another is perceived performance, which ties into usability testing. This can only be measured by testing with users and seeing how satisfied they are with the speed of your interface (e.g. do they start clicking on your JavaScript carousel before it is ready?).

The good news (and hard truth) about performance is that 80 to 90% of poor performance happens in the front end. Once the browser gets the HTML, the server is done and the back-end developer can do nothing more. The browser then starts doing things to our HTML, and we are at its mercy. This means that to achieve peak performance, we have to optimize our JavaScript, images, CSS and HTML, as well as the back end.

So here are the things that slow down your page the most.

External Resources (Images, Scripts, Style Sheets)

Every time you load something from another server, the following happens:

1. The browser opens up the Internet’s address book and looks up the number associated with the name of the server that’s holding the things you want (i.e. its DNS entry).
2. It then negotiates a delivery.
3. It receives the delivery (waiting for all the bytes to come in).
4. It tries to understand what was sent through and displays it.

Every request is costly and slows down the loading of the page. This is also caused by browsers loading things in chunks (usually four at a time) rather than all at the same time. This is akin to ordering a product from a website, choosing the cheapest delivery option and not being at home between 9:00 am and 5:00 pm. If you include several JavaScript libraries because you like a certain widget in each, then you’ll double, triple or even quadruple the time that your page takes to load and display.

Scripts

JavaScript makes our websites awesome and fun to use, but it can also make for an annoying experience.

The first thing to know about scripts that you include in a document is that they are not HTML or CSS; the browser has to call in an expert to do something with them. Here is what happens:

1. Whenever the browser encounters a <script> block in the document, it calls up the JavaScript engine, sits back and has a coffee.
2. The script engine then looks at the content in the script block (which may have been delivered earlier), sighs, complains about the poor code, scratches its head and then does what the script tells it to do.
3. Once the script engine is done, it reports back to the browser, which puts down its coffee, says good-bye to the script engine and looks at the rest of the document (which might have been changed, because the script may have altered the HTML).

The moral of the story is to use as few script blocks as possible and to put them as far down the document as possible. You could also use clever and lazy JavaScript, but more on that later.

Images

Here is where things get interesting. Optimizing images has always been the bane of every visual designer. We build our beautiful images in Illustrator, Photoshop or Fireworks and then have to save them as JPG, GIF or PNG, which changes the colors and deteriorates the quality; and if we use PNG, then IE6 arrives as the party-pooper, not letting us take advantage of PNG’s cool features.

Optimizing your images is absolutely necessary because most of the time they are the biggest files on page. I’ve seen people jump through hoops to cut their JavaScript down from 50 KB to 12 KB and then happily use a 300 KB logo or “hero shot” in the same document. Performance needs you!

Finding the right balance between visual loss and file size can be daunting, but be grateful for the Web preview tool, because we didn’t always have it. I recall using Photoshop 4 and then Photoshop with the Ulead SmartSaver, for example.

The interesting thing about images, though, is that after you have optimized them you can still save many more bytes by stripping unnecessary data from the files and running the files through tools that further compress the images but are non-lossy. The bad news is that many of them are out there, and you’ll need different ones for different image formats. The good news is that tools exist that do all that work for you, and we will come back to this later. For more advanced optimizaition techniques feel free to take a closer look at the Smashing Magazine’s articles Clever JPEG Optimization Techniques, PNG Optimization Guide and Clever PNG Optimization Techniques.

Simple Tools You Can Use Now To Improve Performance

All of those companies that obsess about page performance offer tools that allow you to check your own website automatically and make it easy to work around problems.

Test Your Performance

The first thing to do is find out how your website can be optimized. Here are three great tools (among others that crop up all the time) to use and combine.

Yahoo’s YSlow

YSlow is a Firebug add-on from Yahoo that allows you to automatically check your website for performance issues. The results are ranked like American school grades, with A being the best and F being the worst. The grades are cross-linked to best practice documentation on the Yahoo performance pages. You can test several settings: “classic YSlow,” which is targeted to Yahoo-sized websites, “YSlow 2″ and “small site or blog.” Results are listed clearly and let you click through to learn.

In the components view, YSlow lists all of the issues it has found on your website and how serious they are:

The statistics view in YSlow gives you all information in pie charts:

The tools section in YSlow offers a lot of goodies:

• JSLint
  Checks the quality and security of your JavaScripts by running them through JSLint.
• All JS
  Shows all JavaScript code in a document.
• All JS Beautified
  Shows all JavaScript code in a document in an easy-to-read format
• All JS Minified
  Shows all JavaScript code in a document in a minified format (i.e. no comments or white space)
• All CSS
  Show all CSS code in a document
• All Smush.it
  Automatically compresses all of your images (more on this later).
• Printable View
  Creates a printable document of all of YSlow’s results (great for showing to a client after you’ve optimized the page!)

Google’s Page Speed

Like YSlow, Page Speed by Google is also an add-on for Firebug. Its main difference is that it does a lot of the optimization for you and provides the modified code and images immediately.

Page Speed’s other extra is that it monitors the overall activity of your page, allowing you to see when a document loads other resources after it has been loaded and to see what happens when a user rolls over elements or opens tabs and menus that load content via AJAX.

Be careful with this feature, though: it hammers your browser quite hard.

AOL’s WebPageTest

Rather late to the game, AOL’s WebPageTest is an application with some very neat features. (It is also available as a desktop application, in case you want to check Intranets or websites that require authentication.)

WebPageTest allows you to run tests using either IE8 or IE7 from a server in the US or the UK, and it allows you to set all kinds of parameters, such as speed and what to check for:

Once you have defined your parameters and the testing is completed, you will get in-depth advice on what you can do to optimize. You’ll get:

• A summary,
• Detailed results,
• A performance review,
• An optimization report,
• The content breakdown,
• The domain breakdown,
• A screenshot.

One very cool feature of WebPageTest is the visual recording you get of how long it takes for page elements to show up on screen for users. The following screenshot compares the results of this blog, Ajaxian and Nettuts+:

You can even create a video of the rendering, which is another very cool thing to show clients.

Once you get the test results, it is time to fix any problems.

Use Image Sprites

Image Sprites were first discussed in an article published by Dave Shea and based on the work of Petr Stanicek. They have been covered extensively here before, but understanding their full benefit is important before you start using them:

• All of your images will be available as soon as the main image has loaded (no flickering on roll-overs or other annoyances).
• One HTTP request is made, instead of dozens (or hundreds, in some cases).
• Images have a much higher chance of staying cached on the user’s machine because they are contained in a single file.

Shea’s article points out a lot of cool resources for creating CSS Sprites but misses one that was released not long ago. Sprite Me was produced by Google (under the supervision of Steve Souders) and allows you to create Sprites automatically from any website, even via a bookmarklet. It analyzes the images on a page and offers you various options before generating the Sprite and CSS for you.

Here’s a video of Steve showing Sprite Me in action:

Optimize Your Images

You know now that Page Speed can automatically optimize your images. Another way to do this is with Yahoo’s Smush It, which is a set of image optimization tools that analyze your images, create the smallest possible versions and sends you a ZIP file of them all.

You can use Smush.it directly in the browser or automatically from YSlow. The website tells you how many bytes you can save by optimizing your images. This is yet another cool thing to show potential clients when pitching for a job.

Collate Scripts and Load Scripts on Demand

As noted, try not to spread your <script> nodes all over the document, because the browser stops whenever it encounters one. Instead, insert them as far down in the document as possible.

You could even collate your scripts automatically in one single include using back-end scripts. Edward Eliot wrote one of these in PHP a while ago. It lets you create a single JavaScript include for all of your scripts and one for your CSS files, and it even versions them for you.

JavaScript can be added dynamically to the page after the page has loaded. This technique is called “lazy loading,” and several tools are available to do it. Jan Jarfalk has one to lazy load jQuery plug-ins.

Some JavaScript libraries let you import only what you really need, instead of bringing in the whole singing-and-dancing library. YUI, for example, has a configurator that allows you to pick and choose what you need from the library and either gives you a single URL where you can get the different scripts or creates a JavaScript that loads them on demand:

Notice that a tab tells you what the overall size of the library will be.

The main trick in lazy loading is to dynamically create script nodes with JavaScript after the page has loaded and only when they are needed. I wrote about that two years ago on 24ways, and it has been a best practice for displaying badges and widgets for a long time now.

Use Network Distributed Hosting

If you use a library or CSS provided by a library, make sure to use the hosted versions of the files. In the case of YUI, this is done for you if you use the configurator. And you can pick from Yahoo or Google’s network.

For other libraries, there is a Google code repository of AJAX libraries. This is useful for a few reasons:

• Visitors to your website will get the JavaScript and CSS from the server that is as geographically close to them as possible and won’t have to wait for your server to send the information from around the globe.
• There is a high probability that these servers are faster than yours.
• Visitors who have visited other websites that use the same includes will already have them on their computers and won’t need to load them again.
• You save on bandwidth and can easily upgrade the library by changing the version number of the include.

While you probably wouldn’t be able to afford distributed hosting for your own files, Coral makes an interesting offer to distribute your data onto a network of servers for an affordable $50 a month.

Watch Some Videos

If you want to see how some of this work, check out the following videos, especially Nicole Sullivan’s, which shows some very cool CSS tricks:

• Using YSLow 2.0
• Using Google Page Speed
• Nicole Sullivan tells you not to blame the rounded corners but to design for fast websites
• Steve Souders showing Sprite Me
• Douglas Crockford on AJAX performance.

Follow The Leaders

To learn more about website performance, here are some resources and people to follow. (Be warned: some of the content is technically tough.)

• The Yahoo Developer Network Performance Section
  Home of YSLow and probably the first official performance research website.
• Performance Planet
  A collation of all performance blogs and posts in one RSS feed.
• Steve Souders (@souders)
  Ex-maintainer of the performance section of Yahoo, now at Google. Author of the biggest performance books. And organizer of the Velocity conference.
• Nicole Sullivan (@stubbornella)
  Ex-team member of the performance group at Yahoo and co-creator of Smush.it. Also CSS performance goddess with great tips for designers. Currently working on making Facebook perform better.
• Stoyan Stefanov (@stoyanstefanov)
  Coder of Smush.it and member of the performance team at Yahoo. Created his own advent calendar of performance tips this year, and runs Performance Planet, as mentioned above.
• Ed Eliot and Stuart Colville
  Builders of the CSS Sprite Generator.
• Jake Archibald (@jaffathecake)
  Lead developer of the BBC’s Glow library. Delivered a great talk on performance at this year’s Full Frontal conference.
• Phillip Tellis (@bluesmoon)
  Performance junkie at Yahoo.
• And me, their fanboy and person asking for features: Chris Heilmann (@codepo8).

(al)

© Christian Heilmann for Smashing Magazine, 2010. | Permalink | 50 comments | Add to del.icio.us | Digg this | Stumble on StumbleUpon! | Tweet it! | Submit to Reddit | Forum Smashing Magazine
Post tags: optimization, performance

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You investigate, and you find that beneath the surface your beautiful boat has a number of slow, silent, leaks. None of them are big enough to sink you on their own, so there’s no obvious immediate crisis – just a constant drain on your efficiency and your speed.

I’ve been reviewing Web traffic reports for over 10 years, and I believe that this analogy applies very well to almost all business websites. Very few sites are so terrible or have something so wrong with them that they’re clearly a disaster. Yet just about every site has some area where it’s quietly losing traffic, losing potential business or the opportunity to create relationships – or failing to attract visitors in the first place.

If you’re not regularly reviewing your traffic analysis, you can’t know for sure if your site is leak proof. In this article, I’ll show you a few of the most common areas where you can look for – and fix – those silent leaks.

1. Leaks in your Brand & Positioning

The excellent folks at MarketingExperiments online research laboratories have shown that clearly articulated and differentiating value propositions have a critical effect on Website conversion rates. (The conversion rate is the measurement of visitors fulfilling your desired outcomes – which might include calling you, buying a product at your site, signing up for your newsletter or blog feed, etc.) Your value proposition should be front and center on your home page. It should answer the classic question: “Why should we do business with you instead of your competition?”

Although this question isn’t a Web strategy issue in itself, it is one that many people struggle to answer. But the lack of a compelling opening message can be a major impediment to your online success.

How to check for this leak: Even if they don’t enter your site at the home page, most visitors who don’t know you will go there as the second page they look at to find out more about you and your business. If visitors are taking a quick look at your home page and then immediately leaving, something is wrong. Your copy is failing to pique their curiosity or to answer their questions: “Can this company meet my needs?” and “Should I explore further?” You have a leak!

2. Leaks in Visitor Engagement

Popular theory says that you have 10 seconds to engage a visitor – i.e. convince them to stay on your site before they click away in search of something more interesting.

While I don’t believe that it’s quite that simple, there are some definite ways to get rid of visitors fast before they’ve had a chance to really check you out. The best of these is probably the infamous splash page – the entry page to your site that your Web designer persuaded you to have because it “does cool stuff”. Hopefully there’s a “Skip Intro” button somewhere on the page! In all my reviews of traffic reports I’ve seen a consistent leak of up to 30% of visitors leaving from this page alone – before they’ve ever seen who you are or what you offer.

How to check for this leak: Easy – look for the splash page in your traffic reports and see how many visitors exit at that point. If it’s more than a small percentage, you have a leak – take the page out today!

The other major area where you should watch for leaks in visitor engagement is in what are called “landing pages”. These are inside pages of your Website which turn out to be the first page that a visitor sees, usually because you have some well-indexed content that they’ve found in a search engine.

Here it’s absolutely critical to understand the visitor’s mindset. Each visitor is at your site looking for something specific, they may well have found you by accident, so they may have no idea who you are – and worse, no interest in you.

The first page that they see on your Website must engage them immediately in accordance with their needs, and it must have enough context to draw them into other areas, and to want to find out more about you. It’s not enough to give great information on this page – they’ll soak that up, and then leave.

How to check for this leak: Hopefully your traffic reports are sophisticated enough to show you which keywords bring visitors to each specific page of your site. This shows you each visitor’s “mindset”.

If visitors are leaving a page very quickly, then it probably isn’t satisfying their informational needs, so you should review the content.

If visitors are reading the page (your traffic reports should show the time spent at each page) and then leaving, you’ve given them what they wanted but failed to draw them into the rest of your site. This can be fixed with more compelling navigation and calls to action.

Either way, you have a leak!

3. Leaks in Directions & Outcomes

I’m constantly amazed by the number of Web pages that give great information and content – and then just end abruptly – perhaps with some navigation tabs if you’re lucky!

Steve Krug in his excellent book “Don’t Make Me Think!” describes how crucial it is to direct visitors to the next step that you want them to take. If you don’t do this, and rely on your visitors to figure this out for themselves, there’s a strong chance that they’ll make a different choice than the one you want – or they’ll leave your site altogether, creating leaks in your potential revenue stream.

Every page of your site needs strong calls to action that stand out visually and click directly to where the visitor can fulfill the outcome that you want (e.g. “buy now!”, “sign up for our newsletter / RSS feed”.) Pages can have more than one call to action, and there’s nothing wrong with repeating them on longer pages so that they’re always within eyeshot.

And by the way, “Back to top” is not a call to action!

How to check for this leak: If your traffic reports show this information, look at the paths that visitors take through your site – where do visitors go next from each page? If many of them are exiting the site and / or they fan out across many pages with no clear pattern or direction, you have a possible leak.

4. Leaks in your Credibility Building

MarketingExperiments research has also shown that powerful, specific, and authoritative testimonials can have a major impact on your site’s conversion rates.

Consider this statement: “Documented results show that just a few hours with [ expert ] can increase lead generation by 125%”. Imagine how much stronger that assertion would be if there were some examples of the “documented results” and some customer quotes to that effect.

However, including a page on your site called “What Customers Say” doesn’t do it – I can safely say that visitors don’t go to those pages. And it’s not just traffic reports that tell me this – whenever I ask a live audience “Would you click this link?” there’s always a resounding “No!”

How to check for this leak: This is a much more subtle leak to detect, but it’s an important one. The question here is whether you are potentially losing business because your site fails adequately to establish your value and credibility.

My recommended approach is to review your site for credibility-building content such as client lists, testimonials and case studies. You need to spread your testimonials through your site, using short one or two line excerpts that are relevant to the content of each page – whether it’s about a product or a service, or the value of subscribing to your newsletter or blog.

Make sure that all of this material is linked to from other pages so that it’s easily found by visitors. If you then experience an increase in calls, or in the quality of your leads, then you might have just fixed a leak!

© Philippa Gamse. All rights reserved. Publication rights granted so long as article and byline are reprinted intact, with all links made live.

Philippa Gamse is a Web strategy expert who spends much of her time fixing leaky Websites and other website problems. Would you like your own “Leaky Boat Website” Review? Visit http://websitesthatwin.com/leaky-boat-report.html for more information.

© Philippa Gamse. All rights reserved. Publication rights granted so long as article and byline are reprinted intact, with all links made live.

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Is Your Website Springing a Leak?

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I’d been trying to use a combination of  the Customize Your Community plugin, which puts the login, registration, password reminder and profile pages into your theme, but Create Your Community was having a conflict with the custom user meta data display. After a number of attempts to get around that problem, I decided to go ahead and do it the other way – customize the core file responsible for the ‘edit profile’ page, which is /wp-admin/user-edit.php.

Now this work only effects the ‘edit profile’ page, it has no effect on the login/registration/password reminder pages. For that, I found the Theme My Login plugin. Works well, puts those functions right into your theme, and is oretty easy to style with CSS.

So now I’m a happy camper. I wish there’d been a way to easily make the profile page work with my theme, but going this route was not that big of a deal. I simply took the header and footer sections from my theme and replaced the “include(‘admin-header’.php);” and “include(‘admin-footer.php’); statements in /wp-admin/user-edit.php. It took only about 5 minutes to get this looking right, and now I’m just doing a little bit of styling on the form itself.

Of course, whenever WP updates I’ll have to replace the two code snippets in the new user-edit.php file. That’s not a huge deal. But eventually perhaps WordPress will have a feature that enables one to keep all the user accessible pages in the theme rather than on the admin side.

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The solution? Well, there really isn’t any clearcut solution but the closest you’ll come to one (without hiring your own copyright lawyer) is Myows [mee-o-s]. Myows is probably the easiest and fastest solution as well. It’s a new service but none-the-less promising.

Today we’ll take a look at Myows, their site’s functionality and sexy design.

Presentation Quality

You can generally get a decent idea for how serious a service’s creators are by the quality of their presentation (their website). While this isn’t always the case, it tends to be a good starting point. Right off the bat, I’ll say Myows has taken the time to create an interface that isn’t intimidating — it’s straight forward, simple and looks fantastic.

Myows Home

To add a little weight at proving they aren’t messing around, they add some news clippings from very reliable and trusted sources in the industry. This is some great information to display along with the straight forward home page.

News Clippings

Signup

Generally, I’m heavily critical on the ease of signup at websites like this. Myows doesn’t let me down either. I’m not a big fan of scrolling within a popup window but I do love the fact that the page doesn’t require reloading, and, let’s face it — we’re all used to scrolling so a bit of it won’t hurt.

Signup

Popup JavaScript windows don’t have close buttons. That’s okay, you don’t need one — just click the dark overlay area to close the popup.

Signup is quick and painless, requiring only the necessary information. You’re sent an activation email, which, once activated, takes you straight to logging in. This is how signups should be. Easy.

Login

Your Account

Once you’ve logged in, Myows keeps it straight forward and sharp looking — which is a refreshing start to handling copyright.

Account Home

You may have noticed the sidebar information in the screenshot above. Information like this is available on almost all pages, including additional features like search forms. This is great for situations where you have a basic question, which you will.

OWs

Myows actually stands for “My Original Works” with your uploads called “OWs” (Original Works). In my opinion, this is creative use of branding that ties things together nicely.

Register a new OW (Original Work)

Registering a new OW, is pretty basic. Select the type (file or flat text), select your file(s) to upload and the form uploads your work. You’ll then be asked for some additional information to help further protect your work. You’ll notice the form requires no page reloads and sports lots of great JavaScript implementation for a seamless user experience.

OW Registration

Your OWs

Once you’ve registered a new OW, you’re taken to the OWs page which is where you’ll browse and manage your OWs.

Your OWs

Search, sort, view and edit your OWs here. Hovering over a registered OW will display links to view/edit, file a new case, create a new license or delete the OW. This might be a touch confusing at first but it keeps the design uncluttered of unnecessary information until it’s needed.

OW on Mouse Hover

View/Edit OW

Clicking the view/edit link on an OW gives you a closer look at your OW information with several additional options in the sidebar including licensing your OW and opening a copyright violation case.

OW Details

As you can see in the above screenshot, I’ve added several additional supporting files for my OW including Photoshop designs, documentation, etc. This will further help protect your OWs.

Again, Myows maintains the straight forward user interface and great looking design elements. For many, this may not be important but it does make using the site more of a pleasure. However, I would very much like to have the ability to upload multiple supporting files at once. Clicking the “upload another” link should automatically open the file selection dialog, effectively eliminating an extra click.

Multi-file uploads are on the way (along with other features), see Account Options below.

License Your OW

Attempting to license your OW, will leave you feeling a bit empty handed after the great user experience so far. However, the service is still in beta and while they don’t have any example licenses to offer yet, they’re on the way after being approved by their legal team (a very good sign of legal review).

Licensing

You can rest assured, this area will be quite filled in with licenses and sidebar help before Myows leaves the beta stage.

Creating Licenses

Once you’ve created custom licenses, you’ll be able to view and edit them via the Licenses page.

Custom Licenses

Get a OW Certificate

Getting a certificate simply brings you to a certificate page, unique to your OW, with the option to email the certificate to anyone of your choice. The certificate includes basic information such as OW title, author name, date registered and some legal info. stating Myows attests to the validity of the certificate.

OW Certificate

Each OW certificate is protected by a unique (and long) password, which you (the author) can change if you want.

The certificate includes a download link at the bottom-right of the page (with password), for comparison purposes. This is something you would only give to a court, attorneys, or the support staff for a site like ThemeForest.net to verify copyright information.

While this may not be enough to save you in a serious copyright infringement case, it will go a long ways towards helping you fight your case and will stop most disputes in their tracks.

Your OW’s Banner

Myows generates a banner for your OW with your OW’s ID. Include this in places you show or sell your work as a form of warning or verification that your work is copyright protected by Myows.

OW Banner

This alone will help in deterring some from doing more than thinking about infringing on your copyrighted work.

Copyright Cases

Creating a new copyright case is pretty straight forward. Select the OW in relation to the case you’re opening and enter some basic details to build your case. You’ll also have the option of grabbing a screenshot of the infringing website.

Build Your Case

Then you’ll enter your infringer’s details with the option of running a WHOIS search on their website or attempting to determine who the web host is if you can’t find the website owner.

Infringer’s Details

Next, you’ll be able to view a cease and desist letter to send to the infringing parties.

Cease and Desist

Once you’ve done that, you’ll wait for a response from the infringer and log it. If the case has been solved, you’d simply click the button to mark the case as solved.

Infringer’s Response

Myows maintains a complete (and downloadable) case history for your records or if the case develops into something more serious. Now imagine trying to do this all yourself or paying legal fees to accomplish this!

Once you’ve created a case, you can also go back and add files or additional information to help support your case if necessary.

Account Options

Currently Myows offers 512MB of data storage with no options for more. However, as previously stated, Myows is in beta so some leniency is deserved here. In addition to that, paid accounts are on the way. Paid accounts will be very reasonably priced and will offer additional storage, multi-file uploads, multi-users and more features well worth the price.

Max Guedy, director and designer for Myows, has been kind enough to offer a special treat for Web.AppStorm readers which we’ll be releasing the details of in a competition later this week. So stay tuned!

Final Thoughts

In terms of web applications, Myows does a fantastic job of presenting a straight forward and sexy design that is very easy to use and implements the power of JavaScript where and when it’s needed. The overall user experience is pretty seamless and makes handling copyright actually somewhat pleasurable (which I thought was impossible).

The service is still in beta so you can expect to see many more improvements and new features soon — but for a start, these guys definitely have something great going here.

In terms of the service Myows provides, it’s somewhat of a niche market being an all-online copyright solution — and as far as I can tell, they’re doing their absolute best to make sure they do it right the first time keeping legality first and foremost in mind. There are a few missing features I think could be implemented such as an API and infringement detection, but what they have is a fantastic start.

For U.S. citizens, this isn’t quite a replacement for the U.S. Copyright Office but will go a long ways in aiding you in fighting your copyright battles. For people who don’t proactively take copyright protection seriously, Myows is going to be a lifesaver, not to mention a massive time saver.

Stay tuned later this week for the Myows competition!

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Your customer may believe they are purchasing something based on need, but in reality, they are buying a “feeling.” The feeling that ownership gives them. This is a 100% emotional act.

Being friendly and honest in your sales letter is only the beginning to keeping your customer’s interest. And, although you can address the “WIIFM” with a clear list of benefits for buying, the tone of your sales page must also deliver the same message.

Writing a successful sales page is not difficult if you treat it as though you are writing to one person…not to a crowd of strangers. The tone and feel of your sales copy must make your customers feel as though they are part of your business. This is not difficult if you treat them as though you were talking to a close friend.

Never write your copy as though you were talking “at” someone. That’s a sure fire way to loose your prospective customer early on. You must talk “to” your customer. You must be personal and make them feel special.

Pay attention to any sales copy that stimulates you into buying. That’s the easiest way to become adept at writing great sales copy. What is their approach? Start noticing the tone used on the websites that you frequent…including your competition. Pay attention to the ones that make you consider buying a product or any that keep your attention long enough to read the entire page.

What emotional appeal does their sales copy stimulate in you? That’s what you are looking for. Determine what was said by reading the sales page over a few times…what emotional trigger was used to tempt you to buy. Whether you buy or not is irrelevant…it is enough that you were tempted.

In order to deliver a passionate response from your customers, your marketing copy needs specific attention to every word and every sentence. Allowing your personality to show through is a large part of this process. Note your own reaction to sales pages that are cold and impersonal.

Infuse your personality into your sales page. It is not difficult to be friendly and passionate when writing riveting sales copy. Remember, selling and buying is an emotional act and must be treated as such.

Should your sales copy or emails concern solutions to problems, you can make your sales copy personal by admitting that you have experienced a similar problem many times. Reveal how you handled the situation, add details about the problem and how it affected your life or business.

Never be afraid to admit failure, frustration or any self doubt you may have experienced. Admitting these things will only make your more human and approachable by your audience.

When you open up on a personal level, your customer starts bonding with you and that creates loyalty and a sense of belonging. Don’t be afraid to explain how your product or service solved your problem or made your life easier. Rather than just listing benefits, present them as tools that will make your customers life easier, fulfill a need they have or solve a problem.

Whatever you do, never emulate those late night TV commercials. High pressure may work in that environment, but it is death to an online marketer.

Keep it real, write as though you are speaking to one individual…make it personal, address a need and you will experience success.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

Each Customer Is Unique

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The following screenshot shows what we’ll end up with by the end of the tutorial:

Getting Started

First, let’s create the underlying HTML page for our content viewer; in a new file in your text editor create the following page:

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">
		<title>Bullet-proof Content Viewer</title>
        <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="contentviewer.css">
	</head>
	<body>
    	<div id="viewer">
        	<ul id="nav">
            	<li class="thumb1"><a href="#panel1" title="Panel 1">Panel 1</a></li>
				<li class="thumb2"><a href="#panel2" title="Panel 2">Panel 2</a></li>
				<li class="thumb3"><a href="#panel3" title="Panel 3">Panel 3</a></li>
				<li class="thumb4"><a href="#panel4" title="Panel 4">Panel 4</a></li>
				<li class="thumb5"><a href="#panel5" title="Panel 5">Panel 5</a></li>
			</ul>
			<div id="panels">
				<div id="slider">
               		<div id="panel1">
                    	<img src="img/image1.jpg" alt="Image 1">
						<p>Supernova 1994D, visible as the bright spot at the lower left, occurred in the outskirts of the disk galaxy NGC 4526.</p>
	               	</div>
 					<div id="panel2">
                    	<img src="img/image2.jpg" alt="Image 2">
						<p>Radiation from hot stars off the top of the picture illuminates and erodes this giant, gaseous pillar.</p>
					</div>
					<div id="panel3">
	               		<img src="img/image3.jpg" alt="Image 3">
	 					<p>V838 Mon is located about 20,000 light-years away from Earth at the outer edge of the Milky Way.</p>
					</div>
					<div id="panel4">
	               		<img src="img/image4.jpg" alt="Image 4">
						<p>The Sombrero Galaxy is an unbarred spiral galaxy in the constellation Virgo approximately 30 million lights years away.</p>
					</div>
               			<div id="panel5">
	               		<img src="img/image5.jpg" alt="Image 5">
						<p>This region of active current star formation is part of a diffuse emission nebula about 6,500 light-years away.</p>
					</div>
				</div>
			 </div>
		</div>
		<script type="text/javascript" src="jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>
		<script type="text/javascript">
		</script>
	</body>
</html>

Save this as contentviewer.html. We’ll start off with some clean and semantic HTML, using no more elements than is strictly necessary. We have an outer container for the viewer in its entirety, which contains a navigation structure for selecting which content panel to view and a second container for the content panels themselves.

Within the content panel container, we have another container used to enclose all of the content panels (this is needed to display the content panels correctly) and the content panels themselves. Each panel contains an image and a span describing the image.

The main images are added to the document as proper HTML images using the <img> element – this is because they are content and should be visible to assistive technologies or users with both scripting and CSS disabled or otherwise not available. The navigation structure will also contain images, but as these are not classed as content they do not need to be visible in all situations and can therefore be added using CSS, hence the additional class names on the <li> elements.

Right now the page should appear like this:

It doesn’t look great, but the document flows correctly and the elements are all clearly visible and usable.

Making it work with CSS

We can now use CSS to transform the content viewer into a functioning interface that doesn’t look terrible. W already linked to the style sheet in the head of our page so let’s create it now; in a new file in your text editor add the following selectors and rules:

#viewer { width:700px; margin:auto; }
#nav { width:200px; float:left; margin:0; padding:0; list-style-type:none; }
#nav li { width:200px; height:100px; padding:0; }
#nav li a { display:block; width:100%; height:100%; text-indent:-9999px; overflow:hidden; background:url(img/thumbs.png) no-repeat 0 0; }
#nav li a:hover, #nav li a.on { background-position:-200px 0; }
#nav li.thumb2 a { background-position:0 -100px; }
#nav li.thumb2 a:hover, #nav li.thumb2 a.on { background-position:-200px -100px; }
#nav li.thumb3 a { background-position:0 -200px; }
#nav li.thumb3 a:hover, #nav li.thumb3 a.on { background-position:-200px -200px; }
#nav li.thumb4 a { background-position:0 -300px; }
#nav li.thumb4 a:hover, #nav li.thumb4 a.on { background-position:-200px -300px; }
#nav li.thumb5 a { background-position:0 -400px; }
#nav li.thumb5 a:hover, #nav li.thumb5 a.on { background-position:-200px -400px; }
#panels { width:500px; height:500px; overflow:hidden; position:relative; float:left; }

Save this as contentviewer.css in the same directory as the HTML page. I’ve kept the design minimal so that we can focus on what makes it work; the navigation and viewing panel are floated next to each other and the individual list items are given their background images and hover states. We’ve also added on states as well. This part of the CSS is purely for layout/presentation and does not affect functionality.

What’s important is how the containers and content images are arranged. The outer container (#panels) is given a fixed size that matches the height and width of a single content image and has its overflow property set to hidden to ensure that only a single image is displayed at any one time. This is the only really required CSS for the content viewer to work to a basic degree. If you look at the page now, you’ll see that you can click any of the thumbnails and the corresponding full-sized image will be displayed in the viewing panel:

This is great because it remains functional and accessible without relying on JavaScript. We’ll move on to use jQuery to add some smooth transitional effects in just a moment, but first we should add a few more styles that are required for the animations, and to display the paragraphs correctly. Add the following code to the bottom of contentviewer.css:

#slider { width:2500px; height:500px; }
#slider div { float:left; position:relative; }
#slider p { position:absolute; bottom:0; left:0; color:#fff; font:16px "Trebuchet MS"; margin:0; width:90%; height:45px; padding:5px 5% 10px; background-color:#000; }

The inner container (#slider) is given a fixed height equal to a single content image, but a width equal to all of the images. Then the individual containers holding the images and paragraphs are floated to the left to make them stack up horizontally. Finally, the paragraphs are styled and positioned as well so that they overlay each image:

Floating the individual content panels to the left and setting the size of the slider is not strictly necessary, without these the images will just stack up vertically. This would mean that any animations we added would have to move the content panels vertically as well, but we’ll be animating them horizontally.

One point I should make here is that the code so far does not work in Opera; for some reason, Opera cannot use the anchors on the page to show the different content panels when one of the navigation items is clicked. This is a big fail and seems to be a problem in more than one version of Opera. There is a fix apparently and anyone that uses Opera as their main browser will have hopefully implemented this fix already. It isn’t a problem when the JavaScript has been added though.

Adding the jQuery Effects

As the page now works on its own, we can add the JavaScript that will turn this from a functional page into an attractive interface. We left an empty <script> element at the bottom of our page, let’s fill it up now; start with the following code:

(function($){
	//code here...
	})(jQuery);

What we’re doing here with this first bit of code is ensuring that the $ character will always refer to the jQuery object; if this code is to be used on a page with another JS library which also uses the $ character we can be sure that within our code $ will always refer to jQuery. We’re creating an alias for jQuery that matches the $ character by passing the jQuery object into a self-executing anonymous function. This is a tip I picked up from Cody Lindley’s excellent jQuery Enlightenment book.

Within our self-executing anonymous function add the rest of the code:

//object containing margin settings
var margins = {
	panel1: 0,
	panel2: -500,
	panel3: -1000,
	panel4: -1500,
	panel5: -2000
}

//handle nav click
$("#nav a").click(function(e){

	//stop browser default
	e.preventDefault();

	//remove on states for all nav links
	$("#nav a").removeClass("on");

	//add on state to selected nav link
	$(this).addClass("on");

	//set margin of slider to move
	$("#slider").animate({
		marginLeft: margins[$(this).attr("href").split("#")[1]]
	});
});

First of all we define a simple object that is used to hold the margin positions of each of the different panels; to show the first panel, the left margin of the #slider container should be at 0, to show the second panel it should be at -500px, and so on and so forth. Using an object like this is an easy way to store the values for each panel.

Next we add a click-handler for the navigation items; we want to show the panels using a nice animation so we have to prevent the browser from following the anchor. We do this using the event object (e) which we pass into our click-handler. The event object has the preventDefault() method built into it, so we call this on the event object and it stops the browser from executing its default action.

We use this part of the script to set the on class for the currently selected navigation item; this is the only part of the script that relies purely on JavaScript to function and simply removes the on class from any of the items on which it already exists, then adds back to the item that was clicked. There may be a way of doing this purely with CSS using the :active pseudo class, but as it is purely for a visual aid I don’t think it matters as much if this aspect doesn’t work with scripting disabled.

We now need to show the correct panel by animating the #slider container. Remember, we do this by setting the margin-left style property of the slider. In order to get the correct value for the marginLeft depending on whichever navigation link is clicked we just get the href attribute using the $(this) reference (which will point to whichever link was clicked) and perform a standard JavaScript split based on the # symbol.

We’re doing this the most semantic way – by using information we already have available, in this case the href attribute. We could add id attributes to each of the navigation links, but then we’re adding unnecessary extra information purely for our script which really we should avoid doing. Using the href makes sense but we can’t use # at the start of our object keys (panel1, panel2, etc) so we need to get rid of this character from the value that is returned.

Save the page and view it in your browser; you should find now that when one of the navigation items is clicked, the corresponding panel will slide smoothly into view. There’s just one more thing we need to do – the descriptive paragraphs don’t need to be visible all of the time (as long as JavaScript is enabled) so we can set these so that they are initially hidden from view and are shown when the content image is moused-over. We can add this behaviour easily using just a little bit more script; directly after the click-handler add the following code:

//hide descriptive text
$("#slider p").hide();

By hiding the paragraphs with JavaScript we ensure that the content is only hidden if scripting is enabled. This means that the content remains accessible even if JavaScript is disabled on the client. Next we just need to show the text when the main image is hovered over, to do that we can use jQuery’s hover() method; after the code we just added continue with the following:

//show descriptive text on mouseover (hide on mouseout)
$("#slider").hover(
	function() {
		$(this).find("p").slideDown();
	}, function() {
		$(this).find("p").slideUp();
});

All we do is use the slideDown() and slideUp() methods within the hover() method to show and hide the paragraphs when appropriate.

Summary

This now brings us to the end of this tutorial; we’ve seen how we should build our interfaces so that they work even when JavaScript is disabled, and that, instead of relying on JavaScript for functionality, we’re just relying on it to add attractive effects. We also saw that when we want to show content using JavaScript, such as the descriptive paragraphs, we first hide it using JavaScript so that it is only hidden when scripting is enabled which ensures the content is accessible even without scripting.

Your thoughts?

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Did you know that you can earn up to $600 for writing a PLUS tutorial and/or screencast for us? We’re looking for in depth and well-written tutorials on HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. If you’re of the ability, please contact Jeffrey at nettuts@tutsplus.com.

Please note that actual compensation will be dependent upon the quality of the final tutorial and screencast.

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Original Article: Reports and screenshots have surfaced indicating possible further design changes to the Facebook home page. These changes would include an altered header with drop-down menus for things like chat, messages, and notifications (Via SAI).

There would also be greater emphasis placed on the search box. It would be moved further to the left, and more into the center of the page. Such emphasis on search would make sense, as Facebook has greater real-time search functionality these days than what it once had (particularly since its acquisition of FriendFeed).

Screenshot from French publication PCInpact.com (they have several more).

Let’s not get too carried away though. These changes are only tests at this point, and may or may not ever see the light of day for Facebook users at the mainstream level.

A Facebook spokesperson tells WebProNews, "We are continually experimenting with new designs on the site that are meant to simplify and improve the user experience. These are just a couple of the many changes we’re testing."

Whenever Facebook makes design changes, there is usually some amount of backlash from users. That doesn’t stop them from continuing to make tweaks, however. In the end, users are likely to get used to or accept the changes either way. I don’t think the world is ready to abandon Facebook for the next big thing just yet.

Do you like what Facebook has been doing with its design so far? Share your thoughts.

Related Articles:

> Facebook Makes Some Changes

> Facebook Redesign Emerges

> Facebook Responds To Users Complaints

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Meet Mike

Mike’s a smart guy. He knows a great browser when he sees one. He uses Firefox on his Windows PC at work and Safari on his Mac at home. Mike asked us to design a Web site for his business. So we did.

We wanted to make the best Web site for Mike that we could, so we used all of the CSS tools that are available today. That meant using RGBa colour to layer elements, border-radius to add subtle rounded corners and (possibly most experimental of all new CSS), generated gradients.

The home page Mike sees in Safari on his Mac

Mike loves what he sees.

Meet Sam

Sam works with Mike. She uses Internet Explorer 7 because it came on the Windows laptop that the company bought her when she joined.

The home page Sam sees in Internet Explorer 7 on her PC

Sam loves the new Web site too.

How could both of them be happy when they experienced the Web site differently?

The new WYSIWYG

When I first presented my designs to Mike and Sam, I showed them a Web page made with HTML and CSS in their respective browsers and not a picture of a Web page. By showing neither a static image of my design, I set none of the false expectations that, by definition, a static Photoshop or Fireworks visual would have established.

Mike saw rounded corners and subtle shadows in Firefox and Safari. Sam saw something equally as nice, just a little different, in Internet Explorer. Both were very happy because they saw something that they liked.

Neither knew, or needed to know, about the subtle differences between browsers. Their users don’t need to know either.

That’s because in the real world, people using the Web don’t find a Web site that they like, then open up another browser to check that it looks they same. They simply buy what they came to buy, read what what they came to read, do what they came to do, then get on with their lives in blissful ignorance of what they might be seeing in another browser.

Often when I talk or write about using progressive CSS, people ask me, “How do you convince clients to let you work that way? What’s your secret?” Secret? I tell them what they need to know, on a need-to-know basis.

Epilogue

Sam has a new iPhone that Mike bought for her as a reward for achieving her sales targets. She loves her iPhone and was surprised at just how fast and good-looking the company Web site appears on that. So she asked,

“Andy, I didn’t know you optimised our site for mobile. I don’t remember seeing an invoice for that.”

I smiled.

“That one was on the house.”

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In this article I will show you how you can create a JavaScript implementation checker and that will give you more time for drink based activity as your web site and apps are launched quicker and with less unwanted drama!

An all too frequent occurrence

You’ve been working on a project for weeks, fixed all your bugs and send it to be implemented. You hear nothing and assume all is going well then a few days before it’s meant to launch you get an email from the implementation team informing you of bugs in your code that you need to urgently fix.

The 24ways website with a misspelt ID for the years menu

Being paranoid you trawl through the preview URL, check they have the latest files, check your code for errors then notice that a required HTML attribute has been omitted from the build and therefore CSS or JavaScript you’ve hooked onto that particular attribute isn’t being applied and that’s what is causing the “bug”.

It takes you seconds drafting an email informing them of this, it takes then seconds putting the required attribute in and low and behold the bug is fixed, everyone is happy but you’ve lost a good few hours of your life – this time could have been better spent in the pub.

I’m going to show you a way that these kind of errors can be alerted immediately during implementation of your code and ensure that when you are contacted you know that there actually is a bug to fix. You probably already know the things that could be omitted from a build and look like bugs so you’ll soon be creating tests to look for these and alert when they are not found on the rendered page. The error is reported directly to those who need to know about it and fix it. Less errant bug reports and less frantic emails ahoy!

A page with an implementation issue and instant feedback on the problem

JavaScript selector engines to the rescue

Whether you’re using a library or indeed tapping into the loveliness of the new JavaScript Selector APIs looking for particular HTML elements in JavaScript is fairly trivial now.

For instance this is how you look for a div element with the id attribute of year (the missing attribute from top image) using jQuery (the library I’ll be coding my examples in):

1. if ($(‘div#year’).length) {
2. alert(‘win’);
3. }

Using this logic you can probably imagine how you can write up a quick method to check for the existence of a particular element and alert when it’s not present — but assuming you have a complex page you’re going to be repeating yourself a fair bit and we don’t want to be doing that.

Test scripts

If you’ve got a lot of complex HTML patterns that need testing across a number of different pages it makes sense to keep your tests out of production code. Chances are you’ve already got a load of heavy JavaScript assets, and when it comes to file size saving every little helps.

I don’t think that tests should contain code inside of them so keep mine externally as JSON. This also means that you can use the one set of tests in multiple places. We already know that it’s a good idea to keep our CSS and JavaScript separate so lets continue along those lines here.

The test script for this example looks like this:

1. {
2. "title": "JS tabs implementation test",
3. "description": "Check that the correct HTML patterns has been used",
4. "author": "Ross Bruniges",
5. "created": "20th July 2009",
6. "tests": [
7. {
8. "name": "JS tabs elements",
9. "description": "Checking that correct HTML elements including class/IDs are used on the page for the JS to progressively enhance",
10. "selector": "div.tabbed_content",
11. "message": "We couldn't find VAR on the page - it's required for our JavaScript to function correctly",
12. "check_for": {
13. "contains": {
14. "elements": [
15. "div.tab_content", "h2"
16. ],
17. "message": "We've noticed some missing HTML:</p><ul><li>VAR</li></ul><p>please refer to the examples sent for reference"
18. }
19. }
20. }
21. ]
22. }

The first four lines are just a little bit of meta data so we remember what this test was all about when we look at it again in the future, or indeed if it ever breaks. The tests are the really cool parts and firstly you’ll notice that it’s an array – we’re only going to show one example test here but there is no reason why you can’t place in as many as you want. I’ll explain what each of the lines in the example test means:

• name – short test name, I use this in pass/fail messaging later
• description – meta data for future reference
• selector – the root HTML element from which your HTML will be searched
• message – what the app will alert if the initial selector isn’t found
• check_for – a wrapper to hold inner tests – those run if the initial selector does match
  • contains – the type of check, we’re checking that the selector contains specified elements
    • elements – the HTML elements we are searching for
    • message – a message for when these don’t match (VAR is substituted when it’s appended to the page with the name of any elements that don’t exist)

It’s very important to pass the function valid JSON (JSONLint is a great tool for this) otherwise you might get a console showing no tests have even been run.

The JavaScript that makes this helpful

Again, this code should never hit a production server so I’ve kept it external. This also means that the only thing that’s needed to be done by the implementation team when they are ready to build is that they delete this code.

1. <script src="sleuth.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
2. <script type="text/javascript">
3. $(document).ready(function() {
4. sleuth.test_page.init(‘js_tabs_test.js');
5. });
6. </script>

“View the full JavaScript:/examples/self-testing-pages-with-javascript/js/tests/test_suite.js

The init function appends the test console to the page and inserts the CSS file required to style it (you don’t need to use pictures of me when tests pass and fail though I see no reason why you shouldn’t), goes and grabs the JSON file referenced and parses it. The methods to pass (tests_pass) and fail (haz_fail) the test I hope are pretty self-explanatory as is the one which creates the test summary once everything has been run (create_summary).

The two interesting functions are init_tests and confirm_html.

init_tests

1. init_tests:function(i,obj) {
2. var $master_elm = $(obj.selector);
3. sleuth.test_page.$logger.append("<div id='test_" + i + "' class='message'><p><em>" + obj.name + "</em></p></div>");
4. var $container = $('#test_' + i);
5. if (!$master_elm.length) {
6. var err_sum = obj.message.replace(/VAR/gi, obj.selector);
7. sleuth.test_page.haz_failed(err_sum, $container);
8. return;
9. }
10. if (obj.check_for) {
11. $.each(obj.check_for,function(key, value){
12. sleuth.test_page.assign_checks($master_elm, $container, key, value);
13. });
14. } else {
15. sleuth.test_page.tests_passed($container);
16. return;
17. }
18. }

The function gets sent the number of the current iteration (used to create a unique id for its test summary) and the current object that contains the data we’re testing against as parameters.

We grab a reference to the root element and this is used (pretty much in the example shown right at the start of this article) and its length is checked. If the length is positive we know we can continue to the inner tests (if they exist) but if not we fail the test and don’t go any further. We append the error to the test console for everyone to see.

If we pass the initial check we send the reference to the root element, message contains and the inner object to a function that in this example sends us on to confirm_html (if we had a more complex test suite it would do a lot more).

confirm_html

1. confirm_html:function(target_selector, error_elm, obj) {
2. var missing_elms = [];
3. $.each(obj.elements, function(i, val) {
4. if (!target_selector.find(val).length) {
5. missing_elms.push(val);
6. }
7. });
8. if (missing_elms.length) {
9. var file_list = missing_elms.join('</li><li>');
10. var err_sum = obj.message.replace(/VAR/gi, file_list);
11. sleuth.test_page.haz_failed(err_sum, error_elm);
12. return;
13. }
14. sleuth.test_page.tests_passed(error_elm);
15. return;
16. }

We’re again using an array to check for a passed or failed test and checking its length but this time we push in a reference to each missing element we find.

If the test does fail we’re providing even more useful feedback by informing what elements have been missed out. All the implementation team need do is look for them in the files we’ve sent and include them as expected.

No more silly implementation bugs!

Here is an example of a successful implementation.

Here are some examples of failed implementations – one which fails at finding the root node and one that has the correct root node but none of the inner HTML tests pass.

Is this all we can check for?

Certainly not!

JavaScript provides pretty easy ways to check for attributes, included files (if the files being checked for are being referenced correctly and not 404ing) and even applied CSS.

Want to check that those ARIA attributes are being implemented correctly or that all images contain an alt attribute well this simple test suite can be extended to include tests for this – the sky is pretty much up to your imagination.

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