The Knowledge » Web Development

Color Stream: a Free iPhone App For Web Designers

TechDept — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:18:02 +0000

Color stream lets you create and store color palettes that are either created from scratch or generated from a photo, or even generated automatically using a built-in color schemer. The color schemer supports analogous, monochromatic, triadic and further color schemes. As usual, this iPhone app is released for free.

Download App.

By Vitaly Friedman for Smashing Magazine, 17 Aug 2010

7 FBML examples to rock your Facebook fan page.

TechDept — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 08:27:39 +0000

Facebook markup language or FBML for short is used in a variety of places within the social network. Anyone who has written any Facebook applications will already be pretty familiar with its tags, and will probably have used it to write data to walls, or share postings with others programmatically. If however you haven’t yet dipped your toe in the water of the Facebook API, or indeed haven’t actually needed to – there are some snippets of FBML which prove to be mighty useful when creating custom Facebook Fan Pages, and can easily and quickly out of the box be used with the FBML widget, which adds an extra much needed layer of customisation to an existing Facebook fan page. The static FBML widget can be added multiple times, and in multiple places (sidebar and tabs) to facilitate this. Once you’ve added it to your page, simply go to “edit page”, then under Applications click “edit” under Static FBML. This will give you the options you need to paste in your code.

By Web Distortion, March 22 2010

Unilyzer – Social Media and Internet Marketing Software

TechDept — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 08:24:13 +0000

Great for pulling data from sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Digg. In seconds the Unilyzer™ can tell you exactly what you need to know, so you can fine-tune your tweets and videos to generate more traffic.

Visit site

Launchlist – The one stop website check-list

TechDept — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 09:57:23 +0000

Launchlist is intended to help and encourage web designers and developers to check their work before exposing it to the world at large.

The product was born out of frustration. For too long we had been using archaic methods to conduct pre-launch testing and the web was an obvious choice to do it better.

The process is simple – Enter your name and email and the same for a recipient (not required – but it’s best not to test your own work), your project details and website URL, and then proceed through our list of provided fields

If a question is irrelevant, you can tick N/A and it will be disregarded. You can even add your own custom fields at the bottom of the checklist if required.

Once submitted, you and your recipient/s will receive a report of your checklist with a summary for your records.

Try it out

Luminosity Colour Contrast Ratio Analyser

TechDept — Tue, 25 May 2010 21:38:19 +0000

The old Accessibility Evaluation and Repair Tools (AERT) suggested algorithm for determining colour contrast now directs here. The AERT algorithm was never a recommendation, and WCAG 2.0′s luminosity contrast algorithm is recommended instead.

By Gez Lemon

Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS

TechDept — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:00:47 +0000

How do you answer the Internet Explorer 6 question?

1.Design for better browsers, then design alternative solutions to handle IE6 bugs?
2. Write a remedial IE6 stylesheet to address layout issues?
3.Use JavaScript to bootstrap CSS support in IE6?
4.Make your site look exactly the same in IE6 as in any other browser?
5.Develop to better browsers and spend no development time or testing for IE6?
6. Block IE6 users from seeing your site’s styles?

By Andy Clarke, For a Beautiful Web, May 5 2009

9 elements

TechDept — Fri, 30 Apr 2010 12:10:05 +0000

Amazing graphics + twitter = cool moment

Visit site

List of Best and Worst practices for designing a high traffic website

TechDept — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 12:00:07 +0000

Here is a checklist of the factors that affect your rankings with Google, Bing, Yahoo! and the other search engines. The list contains positive, negative and neutral factors because all of them exist. Most of the factors in the checklist apply mainly to Google and partially to Bing, Yahoo! and all the other search engines of lesser importance.

If you need more information on particular sections of the checklist, you may want to read our SEO tutorial, which gives more detailed explanations of Keywords, Links, Metatags, Visual Extras, etc.

By Webfonts.com

WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool

TechDept — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:58:48 +0000

WAVE is a free web accessibility evaluation tool provided by WebAIM. It is used to aid humans in the web accessibility evaluation process. Rather than providing a complex technical report, WAVE shows the original web page with embedded icons and indicators that reveal the accessibility of that page.

Web form design guidelines: an eyetracking study

TechDept — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 14:26:37 +0000

Forms can be found on almost every website; from contact or feedback forms in small websites to bank details in commerce websites, from registration to communication, from banking to searching.

What we wanted to do, and why we wanted to do it

At cxpartners, we have designed and tested numerous new and existing forms for websites from different companies. We use a set of golden rules that we use as a reference for form design that we have developed over the past six years.

We wanted to validate these rules and seek further insights into various aspects of web form design. This lead us to carry out an eye-tracking study to observe how people react to different form designs, and to find out where users look when they are presented with a big list of text boxes.

We also wanted to find out how we can optimise our layouts when designing a form, to ensure users understand what they have to fill in and ensure users focus on their primary task(s) when filling in a form.

Lastly, we want to provide a list of form design guidelines with supportive data that can help us, and other designers design a better forms.

By Chui Chui Tan, April 27 2009