Browsing all articles tagged with web
Aug
21
5

Adding Pizazz to Your Blog Posts

Author Dale Hogan    Category Design and Development     Tags , , , , , , , , , ,

Making your blog posts snazzy can be a chore when you’re an active blogger.  With all of life’s demands, it’s hard enough to just find the time to string together a few coherent sentences and get them published to your blog with any consistency.  What’s needed is a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ solution for adding great, legally licensed images to your posts.  Adding the right images to a post can really make it pop!  Well placed thematic photos and illustrations can aid in garnering the type of attention and traffic you want. read more…

Jul
5
0

Announcing SlideShowPro Mobile

Author Dale Hogan    Category Cool Links     Tags , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

For all of you out there that have either a photo slideshows or video on your websites this is great news!  Many of you may even already use SlideShowPro; if not check it out.  By the end of month SlideShowPro will be rolling out a Beta program that will have all the slide shows showing up on Apple devices such as the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.  With mobile browsing on such a rapid rise, this is good news.  Check out the announcement from the folks at SlideShowPro.

Apr
26
1

Browser Testing Made Easy

Author DavidM    Category Cool Links, Design and Development     Tags , , , , , ,

Any web designer will tell you that one of the biggest headaches in development is making sure that what you code looks good across multiple browsers. We all know the quirks and workarounds for some of the mainstream browsers, but testing a site in several different ones can be frustrating and time-consuming.

To simplify the process you can use a tool like Adobe BrowserLab that lets you see how your design is rendered across multiple browsers. Just enter your URL and select what browsers you want to view and BrowserLab renders it. To compare, you can view side-by-side, switch between single views or overlay using onion skin mode. This is an excellent tool that Adobe offers for free and all you need to do is sign in with or create a free Adobe ID account.

Apr
24
1

Site Performance Testing with Pingdom

Author DavidM    Category Cool Links, Design and Development     Tags , , , , , , ,

Whether you are tweaking the design or working on a complete overall, checking how your site is performing is a critical step. Not only can you see where delays are occurring, like externally linked images or affiliate programs, you can also see some not so obvious errors. There are several tools out there to test the performance of your website and it is a good idea to build a collection in your designer’s toolbox.

One such tool is Pingdom’s free Full Page Test which loads the full page and all it’s objects then displays bars representing the time taken for each item to load. It will also highlight items that exceed recommended times or generate errors. Along with the time bars there is also a complete page summary with some very useful information.

Pingdom also offers monthly fee based site uptime and performance monitoring for critical web sites.

Apr
23
1

Accurate Image Placeholding with Dummy Image

Author DavidM    Category Cool Links, Design and Development     Tags , , , , , ,

Dummy Image is a simple script that lets anyone place a properly sized image into a web design just using a link. Lifehacker calls it the lorem ipsum of images.

Just a simple call to the server using an image source of “http://dummyimage.com/325×123″ alt=”A Dummy Image” or any other image code creates a dummy image of whatever dimension you specify in the url, complete with dimensions inside the box. What’s even cooler is you can download the php files and set up your own image generator on your own site.

It may not be the prettiest image, but it is a great way to mockup a layout without having to create individual images or set width and height values.

Sample 50px by 75px dummy image