The move towards developing responsive websites has introduced a set of new tools that help can developers learn the ropes fast and start producing cross-browser and non-device specific websites quickly and more efficiently. Let us see some of these tools and resources that you can leverage as we get deeper into responsive web design: Adaptive Images ... Your website is increasingly being viewed on smaller screens that consume low bandwidth. In addition to other challenges associated with developing...
The web development industry is one that is always growing because of how we use the web. No longer do we expect the Internet to simply host a digital pamphlet for a business. The expectations nowadays are for a site to be rich with content, provide the means for visitors to interact and be dynamic in every interaction. With the demand at an all time high, freelance web developers may think that there is little they could do to harm their career. Unfortunately, there are many ways that people in this industry...
The rising global popularity of smart phones and other small-screen Internet devices has created a number of dilemmas for web developers. Among the most pressing is the issue of serving the proper image files for widely divergent screen sizes. The industry has responded with a variety of solutions, including separate mobile websites that are much leaner in terms of shown images. A new attribute, <img srcset>, has the potential to resolve some of the issues by enabling the desired image size,...
A memorable Al Pacino line from the popular sports movie “Any Given Sunday” states that, in essence, “Life is just a game of inches”. In other words, success in any endeavor can depend on the smallest details, because they can end up having a major impact. When it comes to SEO, I am constantly amazed at how paying careful attention to tiny, often overlooked factors can significantly assist in boosting a website’s online presence, thus gaining its owner a competitive advantage. As web developers,...
In the first part of this tutorial, detailed information was provided on utilizing RSS (Really Simple Syndication) coding to incorporate free news content and links into any web page. It is recommended that you review Pt. 1, because it explains more about RSS and reveals how to integrate a basic newsfeed module using Google Feed API. The goal of this tutorial is to furnish instructions on adding a larger news content module, a horizontal newsfeed, and a list-format style feed. Let’s get started....
Knowing if your website is working properly is the first step in catching potential problems before they blow up. But unless you have time to check your site every five minutes or you want to wait for your visitors to tell you there’s a problem, you need some kind of monitoring service. Monitor Scout provides web-based monitoring that lets you know when your site is having problems, twenty four hours a day and seven days a week. You’ll know about issues before your visitors notice, and in time to fix...
A faster website leads to happier visitors. While you can make a million changes to your site’s code to speed up load times, there are some things that are just beyond your control. Things like network issues between where your site is hosted and where your visitors are. So what can you do to overcome things like network latency? Easy! You can use a service like MaxCDN which is a Content Distribution Network. We recently teamed up with MaxCDN to deliver even better performance to our blog. MaxCDN delivers...
A challenge that many website owners face is how to supply continuously fresh content for new and repeat visitors to peruse. It can be a very time-consuming task to manually upload regular updates. Fortunately, there is an easy way to showcase free, readily available news content on a wide variety of topics. We will examine a quick and effective method of incorporating RSS (Really Simple Syndication) coding in order to add news content to any site. First, let’s look at what RSS is, and how it works....