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External JavaScript files block downloads and hurt your page performance, but there is an easy way to work around this problem: use dynamic scripts tags and load scripts in parallel, improving the page loading speed and the user experience.

Tags: javascript, ajax, front-end, performance, Yahoo, best practice on 2008-07-25 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromyuiblog.com

Eight years on, is HTML stuck in a rut? James looks at the underlying causes of its eight-year sleep, dispels some myths, and considers the XHTML options open to the standards-aware developer in the meantime.

Tags: HTML, XHTML, XML, best practice on 2008-07-09 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.sitepoint.com

If you want to maximize the revenue of your service you need to maximize completion rates of your web forms. Unless you have some revolutionary ideas to impress your visitors at first glance, it is not enough to simply enable users to sign up on your site. To make it possible for the service to reach a maximal exposure we, designers, need to provide users with a good user experience. We need to invite them, describe them how the service works, explain them why they should fill in the form and suggests the benefits they’ll get in return. And, of course, we should also make it extremely easy for them to participate.

Tags: form, sign-up, sign-in, log in, best practice on 2008-07-04 and saved by18 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.smashingmagazine.com

Most developers don’t know about—or don’t care enough about—binding in JavaScript. Yet this single issue is responsible for a sizeable portion of the questions on most JavaScript-related support channels, and thousands—if not millions—of hairs being tortured away from developer heads every single day. Yet with a little attention to this oft-overlooked subject, you can avoid wasting your time, energy, and patience and move on to more powerful, efficient scripting.

Tags: javascript, binding, best practice on 2008-07-02 and saved by7 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.alistapart.com

A new study from the University of Illinois confirms what many of us may have suspected privately: "personalized" marketing communication online can often make us actively dislike the message's sender.

Tags: personalisation, best practice, e-marketing on 2008-07-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.readwriteweb.com

There is perhaps no challenge greater than tracking offline impact of your online presence (campaigns or other activity). It is perhaps one of the last few complex nuts left to crack. Why? Because it is hard. Not impossible. Just hard. And for now it is equal parts quantitative, qualitative and faith.

Tags: conversions, tracking, offline, online, best practice on 2008-07-01 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.kaushik.net

The modern database server provides a wealth of features that provide robust and reliable storage. Understanding how these features work is vital if you want fast performance for your databases. This week we begin a series on performance by looking at "ACID" compliance and how it affects our handling of large operations. Welcome to the Database Programmer blog. This blog is for anybody who wants to see practical examples of how databases work and how to create lean and efficient database applications. There is a Complete Table Of Contents that is updated each week, and a Master list of table design patterns that is updated whenever a new design pattern is presented.

Tags: database, performance, inserts, best practice on 2008-06-23 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromdatabase-programmer.blogspot.com

Cross-browser compatibility is one of the most time consuming tasks for any web designer. We’ve seen many different articles over the net describing common problems and fixes. I’ve collated all the information I could find to create some coding conventions for ensuring that your site will work first time in every browser. There are some things you should consider for Safari and Firefox also, and IE isn’t always the culprit for your CSS woes.

Tags: css, compatibility, browser, reference, best practice on 2008-06-20 and saved by24 people -All Annotations (1) -About

more fromanthonyshort.com.au

In the last big Matt Cutts interview, Eric Enge managed to get Matt Cutts to say PageRank Sculpting (or siloing, for you Bruce Clay fans) was okay to do on your site and that noindex pages still have PageRank attributed to them. Well . . . Eric Enge did another interview with Matt Cutts this month that he posted moments ago. As usual, Eric managed to get Matt Cutts to tell us some juicy info and he did it all so nonchalantly. ;-) Take these, for example:

Tags: SEO, tips, Matt Cutts, best practice, linking, widgets on 2008-06-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.seomoz.org

Character encoding and character sets are not that difficult to understand, but so many people blithely stumble through the worlds of programming without knowing what to actually do about it, or say "Ah, it's a job for those internationalization experts." No, it is not! This document will walk you through determining the encoding of your system and how you should handle this information. It will stay away from excessive discussion on the internals of character encoding. This document is not designed to be read in its entirety: it will slowly introduce concepts that build on each other: you need not get to the bottom to have learned something new. However, I strongly recommend you read all the way to Why UTF-8?, because at least at that point you'd have made a conscious decision not to migrate, which can be a rewarding (but difficult) task.

Tags: UTF-8, encoding, best practice, xml, php, database, byte order on 2008-06-17 and saved by5 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromhtmlpurifier.org

There are two popular approaches to positioning with CSS: float and absolute positioning. Both approaches have their pros and cons. My teammates and I have developed a new positioning approach that gives us the best of both worlds. After quite a bit of experimenting and testing, it’s time to share the technique with the rest of the world and see how we can work together to improve it. I’m calling it “faux absolute positioning” after the faux columns technique that simulates the presence of a column.

Tags: css, positioning, holy grail, columns, layout, clearance, best practice, liquid, fixed on 2008-06-17 and saved by21 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.alistapart.com

Including articles, spreadsheets, links, and other resources related to usability metrics. We're adding to this site regularly, so please check back!

Tags: user experience, best practice, tools, survey, usability, analysis, tests, card sorting, accessibility on 2008-06-16 -All Annotations (0) -About

more frommeasuringuserexperience.com

Tags: accessibility, checklist, best practice on 2008-06-16 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromcameronmoll.com

n our last issue of Usability News, we reported on the general usage of breadcrumb trails as a method of navigation on web sites (Lida, Hull & Pilcher, 2003). The term “breadcrumb” derives its name from the Grimm’s fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel. Hansel left a trail of breadcrumbs through the woods as a strategy to find his way back home. Since today’s internet user often has a need to navigate back through a website path, the cyber-version “breadcrumb trail” was named1.

Tags: usability, user interface, breadcrumbs, navigation, study, best practice on 2008-06-16 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (1) -About

more frompsychology.wichita.edu

This study examines eye movement patterns of users browsing or searching a 1-column and 2-column news article on a web page. The results show a higher number of fixations for information in the second column of an article than for the same information in the lower portion of a single column. In addition, the typical "F" pattern appeared in the left column of the 2-column layout, but not in the right column. Users also fixated more on other page elements, such as ads, when they were browsing than when they were searching.

Tags: usability, eye-tracking, study, columns, column, webpage, eye movement, best practice, article length on 2008-06-16 and saved by4 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.surl.org

Kris Kowal dropped us a line pointing us towards his year-long labor of love: modules.js, a stand-alone dynamic JavaScript module loader. As the module-loading space is quite crowded at the moment (e.g., Google, Dojo, Yahoo, JSModule, etc.), we asked Kris to explain what makes modules.js different. He had some interesting things to say. Existing Module Loaders Fall Short of Traditional Language Import Semantics

Tags: javascript, module, loader, dojo, GWT, JSModule, best practice on 2008-06-16 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromajaxian.com

After realizing I’ve never covered privacy policies here in much depth, I thought it would make a decent blog topic. I sat down to brainstorm a list of what would make for privacy policy usability. What I usually do is go hunting for examples from a variety of online retailers to illustrate the best-practices.

Tags: privacy policy, privacy, usability, best practice on 2008-06-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.getelastic.com

Hedger Wang has been scanning a lot of Chinese blogs lately for solutions to IE6 and memory leak issues. One of the things he stumbled upon is a pretty nifty way of nulling the objects to stop memory leaks by using the try ... finally construct. So instead of this solution which leaks memory:

Tags: ie6, memory leak, javascript, fix, best practice on 2008-06-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromajaxian.com

In a recent study involving frequent travelers, we had an opportunity to see first-hand how the sign-in functions worked when placed on different portions of the page. There doesn't seem to be much consistency across travel organizations in how they locate their log in capability.

Tags: user interface, location, sign in, login, log in, form, place, best practice, usability, expectations on 2008-06-09 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.uie.com

A Google Groups thread reports an issue (or a feature, depending on your view) with Google's Sitemap handling. In short, a webmaster used one Sitemap file for all his content. In that file, he specified the geo data by using <geo:format> tags. When the Sitemap was produced in Google, Google returned an error that read, "Status: Invalid XML tag." This confused the webmaster, because the tag is valid.

Tags: google, google sitemap, seo, sitemap, goe, getoag, best practice on 2008-06-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

more fromwww.seroundtable.com