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Archive for the ‘Web Design’ Category

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Cross Browser Testing

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008
I recently started using a new service called CrossBrowserTesting, and it’s so incredibly awesome I felt compelled to write a review.  First some background… Browser compatibility is a difficult challenge for all web designers and developers.  The process of debugging HTML, CSS, or Javascript problems that only occur on specific platforms is both tedious and frustrating.  At Sitening we run either Parallels or VMWare on our laptops so we can launch Windows and test the sites we’re working on.  Unfortunately, this is a time-consuming process, and the results are often suspect.  While it is possible to install multiple versions of IE, ...

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/2578/cross-browser-testing

Bounce rates affecting rankings? Or SEO for SEO’s sake?

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008
Over at SEO Black Hat, QuadsZilla demonstrates correlation between traffic, specifically Google traffic, and bounce rate, claiming that bounce rate is being used to determine quality and factoring into rankings. Except his or her graphs show direct, rather than inverse, relationships between traffic and bounce rate. In other words, in those graphs, on days when Google traffic (and traffic overall) was down, the bounce rate was down, too. This runs counter to what one might expect if bounce rate were being used to determine quality from a SERP perspective. A poorly designed or ill-thought-out landing page might cause irrelevant traffic to ...

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/3077/bounce-rates-affecting-rankings-or-seo-for-seos-sake

Google introduces SearchWiki; SEO heads explode

Friday, November 21st, 2008
If you’re signed in to Google this morning and have performed a search, you’ve no doubt noticed that they’ve introduced interaction elements that allow you to move results up or down or suppress them from your display. Google is calling this feature SearchWiki. According to the Google Help Center article on SearchWiki, your modified results persist whenever you are signed in to Google and search for those same terms. Naturally, this feature has implications for both search engine optimization and user experience. Having been on both sides of search: designing the search itself, and optimizing content for display in result sets, ...

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/3076/google-introduces-searchwiki-seo-heads-explode

How to Grab a Screenshot of an Entire Web Page

Saturday, March 15th, 2008
Web designers and marketers often need full-size screenshots for before-and-after shots and also for portfolio pieces. Fortunately, there’s many ways to create website screenshots. However, among all of the options, my favorite way to make full-length screenshots is by using Screengrab! — a Firefox Add-on. Using Screengrab! is about as easy as it gets. Simply bring up the page you want to grab and then click on the Screengrab! icon on the status bar. The result is a full-sized screenshot of the Web page. I used it to take a screenshot of Snipplr, our public code snippet repository for designers and programmers.

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/2873/how-to-grab-a-screenshot-of-an-entire-web-page

Microsoft Gives Away Early (or Late) Christmas Present to Web Designers

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008
It is no secret that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 6 (and anything before it) is the bane of all Web Designers’ existence. If you’re a Web Designer and you don’t agree with that statement, then you are most certainly delusional and you probably hate Web Standards (assuming you’ve heard of them). IE 6 is best known for it’s inability to render transparent PNG images correctly and its poor handling of cascading stylesheets (CSS). It’s also known as the hack browser, because so many HTML and CSS hacks have been created to make it render Web pages correctly. To this day, Web ...

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/2855/microsoft-gives-away-early-or-late-christmas-present-to-web-designers

A Third (Smaller) Option for Embedding Flash Using JavaScript

Thursday, December 27th, 2007
In January (2007), I wrote a howto for embedding Flash using JavaScript. The examples I gave were for SWFObject and Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) — the howto was for UFO. Now there’s a third viable option for embedding Flash using JavaScript. It’s called FlashReplace and was written by Robert Nyman. The unique feature of FlashReplace is its size. Compared to SWFObject, it’s about three times smaller, and compared to UFO, it’s about five times smaller. Instructions are available on the main FlashReplace page.

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/2851/a-third-smaller-option-for-embedding-flash-using-javascript

How to View the Generated HTML Output from JavaScript Web Widgets

Thursday, December 27th, 2007
One of the best things to come from social networking and the so called Web 2.0 is the Web widget. Web widgets allow users to easily drop JavaScript code into their own website and instantly add content and features. Most Web widgets contain CSS ids and classes that allow the webmaster to alter the look-and-feel of the widget. However, most Web widget documentation is lacking or missing, and Web browsers won’t display the HTML output in the page source. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to view the HTML code created by these widgets. Using Firefox and the Web Developer Add-on, you ...

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/2850/how-to-view-the-html-output-of-javascript-web-widgets

sIFR 3 Beta is Getting Closer to its Final Release

Wednesday, December 26th, 2007
Mark Wubben announced on Wednesday (December 26, 2007) that sIFR was getting closer to its final release. In a message to all of the developers and beta testers, he said: Good news, I’m running out of bugs to fix. Pretty much the only thing left to do is support page zoom in Firefox 3, IE 7 and Opera. I believe page zoom is the future, as opposed to font resizing, and therefore font resizing won’t be supported. As of right now, the latest version is 350. If you could have a look and test it on your sites, that’d be great. You can ...

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/449/sifr-3-beta-is-getting-closer-to-its-final-release

New Flash Player Breaks sIFR

Friday, December 14th, 2007
Adobe’s new Flash Player (version 9,0,115,0) does not work with earlier versions of sIFR 2. Mark Wubben, the current maintainer of the sIFR code, sent out an alert early this morning notifying everyone on the sIFR developer list. The problem arises when a designer has specified a hover color to a link. If they have, it breaks. Mark wrote the following to everyone on the list: sIFR 2’s links do not work with the new Flash Player 9,0,115,0 if a hover color is specified. This has been resolved in sIFR 2.0.4. If you use sIFR 2.0.3 and have a hover color specified ...

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/445/new-flash-player-breaks-sifr

Implementing Contextual Feedback and Help to Improve the Usability of Web Applications

Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
Traditionally, communication between developers and users has been sparse. Developers have always provided limited help through a single help window and users rarely get the chance to offer feedback and bug reports. However, those limitations have been changing in recent years. Many software developers have created help forums where users can discuss issues with other users and support personnel can also participate. In fact, in the past few years we’ve also seen the addition of feedback forms, which allow the user to send feedback to the developers. Overall though, things haven’t changed much – especially in the world of Web ...

http://raven-seo-tools.com/blog/443/implementing-contextual-feedback-and-help-to-improve-the-usability-of-web-applications

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