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March 06, 2009: Grid Systems On The Web

When I get a sense of “wow” regarding web design, some of my first observations tend to focus on the use of typography, simplicity, clear and sometimes bold appearance and the sense that everything seems to fall into place. Along with the understanding of a set of design principles more and more web designers have turned to the typographic grid and its series of vertical and horizontal axes to structure content. The typographic grid or grid system can be thought of as a guide to bring all elements of page layout together to create order and help designers achieve coherence in their workflow.

November 26, 2008: Room For Improvement: Web Standards Support in Popular Email Clients

Last month I wrote about recent statistics regarding email marketing which contained a listing of email clients and their percentage of the market share. I’m going to stay on topic, and cover a few key points about producing HTML messages and the level of web standards support found in popular email clients.

October 29, 2008: The State of Email Clients

Email Marketing has become a large part of my workload lately. I felt a refresher course in HTML email was needed in order to sort out all the confounding aspects of producing an effective HTML email message. Before setting out on the design phase of a couple recent HTML email campaigns I needed up-to-date answers to these two questions: What email clients are people using? and What is the current state of email clients regarding standard support for HTML email?

September 25, 2008: OtherInbox: The Answer to Email Overload?

If you are like many Web users who have signed up for numerous online newsletters, subscriptions and social networking sites throughout the last few years, you may experience email overload in the form of seemingly unmanageable messages within your work or personal email inbox.

Released earlier this month, OtherInbox beta, currently an invite-only Web application, offers free automated email management for Web users to fight spam and organize email messages such as notifications and solicited email marketing.

August 29, 2008: Mozilla Labs Experiments with Ubiquity

Mozilla Labs recently introduced an innovative project called Ubiquity that enables the use of simple language to further connect the Web and empower users. Ubiquity comes in the form of a prototype Firefox extension and its interface is a simple command-line overlay in which a user can type such things as “email this to Joe.”

July 23, 2008: Phasing Out Internet Explorer 6

There has been recent discussion about the dwindling market share of IE6 from its peak around 2002-2003 of 95 percent, to around 25-35 percent this year. The current IE6 market share percentage may seem relatively high, but the amount of support that vendors, Web frameworks and developers are giving this last-generation Web browser this year may signal an even sharper drop in its usage. This change could not come soon enough.

May 12, 2008: Accessible Rich Internet Applications

Following the enormous growth of Ajax powered rich internet applications like Google Maps there has been much concern about accessibility and the need–in many cases–to ensure fully accessible content for users with assistive technologies such as screen readers and screen magnifiers. A solution to these inaccessibility problems called ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) is currently being developed and standardized.

April 19, 2008: CSS Gradients in WebKit

Recently on Surfin’ Safari, WebKit—the engine used for Apple’s Safari browser—introduced CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) gradients in their latest nightly builds. The ability to create gradients with code and without the need for Photoshop or other image editing applications is a great enhancement in giving developers more flexibility when it comes to adding depth found in modern web design.

February 03, 2008: Version Targeting: the Answer to Web Site Compatibility?

Version Targeting is a mechanism conceived by Microsoft to ensure greater compatibility among it’s future Internet Explorer 8 browser. The issue came about shortly after the release of IE7 when Web developers and Web site owners found their IE6 sites broken in IE7. The Internet Explorer team, with their mantra “don’t break the web,” decided that something must be done.

September 20, 2007: A Blueprint for Style

For a Web developer, starting any new Web project usually begins with reusing universal markup, styles and scripts that have worked well on other projects. To keep yourself from wasting time pulling a snippet of code from here and a snippet of code from there it would be best to start off with a good base. Like any other programming language that relies on libraries and frameworks (like JavaScript for example), your Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) can follow the same concept.

July 31, 2007: Performance Tuning according to Yahoo!

A few days ago, Yahoo! released YSlow, a free Firefox add-on integrated with Firebug built to analyze Web pages and tell you why they’re slow, according to the Yahoo! Developer Network. The Firefox Web browser and some of its helpful add-ons like the Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug can be used to quickly dissect a Web site. With the addition of YSlow, you can get a quick heads-up on speeding up your site.