We live in a world of short attention spans. Attention span is the amount of time that a person can concentrate on a task without becoming distracted.

• In order to keep your website visitor’s attention sustained, you need to present novelty every second.
  
• How you structure the content on your pages matters. Start with a clear introduction to explain what it’s all about (value proposition promise), followed with the body of your presentation (sales copy) and finish with a conclusion, direct your audience to what’s next (call to action).

• We know that&people don’t read everything&on our website. There’s no way of making them either.&What you can do is enable them to scan better, so they’d be able to grab the most important parts quickly.

It’s always been important to make your website fast. Not only is it obvious visitors are going to prefer it but it’s now well-known that Google uses loading speed as a ranking metric. The initial page load of your website is perhaps the most important. The longer it takes to load the more visitors are going to press back and find an alternative. A slow website is something that could potentially frustrate visitors so it’s important to try and remove it from the equation.

How to make your website faster?

• Page size -&If you hand control of your content over to a CMS you also lose a lot of control over the code which can severely negatively impact your page size.
• Serve your pages compressed -&GZip
• Put your Javascript at the bottom
• Use sprite sheets -&All the images in one file mean there’s only one HTTP request, so the cost of the overhead is only paid once. You can use this image as a background image for a div
• Cookieless Domains and Multiple Domains -&If you’re hosting your images on the same domain as your webpage and you have cookies of some description (don’t forget sessions still use a cookie!) then with every request to image files, CSS files, JS etc the cookie data is also sent with the request. This adds to the amount of data that needs to be uploaded from the client.
• External JS
• Caches -&Check that browsers correctly cache static resources.
• 
  
• Always specify your image sizes

Interesting report about technologies used by websites.

Prefixed classes guide developers towards a simpler and more maintainable direction for building an extensive CSS design system. Here’s what we have if we take away the generic base class and scope things per component with prefixes:

.btn-success { ... }
.alert-success { ... }

This way, the base class is at the component level and not the entire system level. In other words, our base classes have become .btn and .alert, not .success. There’s no bleeding of styles or behavior from one component to another here because we treat components in a “successful state” as an idea across the design system. 

Clever idea. How did i just discover this, so useful.

Usability and user experience testing is vital to creating a successful website, and only more so if it’s an e-commerce website, a complex app or another website for which there’s a definite ROI. And running your own user tests to find out how users are interacting with your website and where problems might arise is completely possible. But using one of the many existing tools and services for user testing is a lot easier than creating your own. Free, freemium and premium tools are out there, with options for most budgets. The important thing is to find a tool or service that works for your website and then use it to gather real-world data on what works and what doesn’t, rather than relying purely on instinct or abstract theories.

Solr is the popular, blazing fast open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. Its major features include powerful full-text search, hit highlighting, faceted search, dynamic clustering, database integration, rich document (e.g., Word, PDF) handling, and geospatial search. Solr is highly scalable, providing distributed search and index replication, and it powers the search and navigation features of many of the world's largest internet sites. Solr is written in Java and runs as a standalone full-text search server within a servlet container such as Tomcat. Solr uses the Lucene Java search library at its core for full-text indexing and search, and has REST-like HTTP/XML and JSON APIs that make it easy to use from virtually any programming language. Solr's powerful external configuration allows it to be tailored to almost any type of application without Java coding, and it has an extensive plugin architecture when more advanced customization is required.

Stripe makes it easy for developers to accept credit cards on the web.

Apache Hadoop is a scalable, fault-tolerant system for data storage and processing. Hadoop is economical and reliable, which makes it perfect to run data-intensive applications on commodity hardware. Hadoop excels at doing complex analyses, including detailed, special-purpose computation, across large collections of data. Hadoop handles search, log processing, recommendation systems, data warehousing and video/image analysis. Unlike traditional databases, Hadoop scales to address the needs of data-intensive distributed applications in a reliable, cost-effective manner.

You might not have heard about Mobify, but it’s helped 20,000 customers optimize their websites for mobile, and clients include Starbucks, Bonobos, Threadless and many others. The company said it had 167 million unique visitors visit Mobify-powered mobile websites last year, about 20 percent of all smartphone users. That’s interesting by itself and falls in line with other reports about how much traffic is going mobile. But in talking with Mobify’s CEO Igor Faletski, one thing that stood out to me was that almost all of Mobify’s work has been to optimize sites for smartphones last year. Very few customers have thought to optimize their websites for tablets like the iPad. Instead they have relied on native apps or just a desktop version of their website. Compuware came to a similar conclusion when surveying 30 of the top retailers’ sites and finding that none were optimizing their sites for tablets.

Trendy, time to think about mobile and tablet optimization...

"APIs should not be geeky 'science projects,'" reads the first paragraph of Chapter 4. "They are critical business tools. Successful APIs need clear objectives that relate directly to business objectives and track closely to key performance indicators for the business at large."

ICE wraps changes and user-generated inserts and deletes inline in the DOM and stores a sufficient amount of data about each change in node attributes.

We went with the “inline” approach because other implementations, which use placeholders and store data (really metadata about a change or the content of deleted text) outside of the editor or in a reserved DOM element, had nasty bugs. With all of the data packed into each node, we used ranges, position markers in the DOM, to examine the change nodes and get an understanding of the current context — for example, are we in an insert or delete, and is it by the same user? — before adding more changes.

Where can ICE be used?

ICE can be initialized to listen for events and track changes on any HTML element that is content-editable. Since it is not a text editor itself, ICE has to be plugged into other text editors that provide the core text editing functionality. So far, we have developed plugins for TinyMCE and WordPress. Over the last several months, with great success, we have been piloting the TinyMCE plugin in our newsroom.

demo: http://nytd.github.com/ice/demo/

HTML KickStart is a ultra–lean set of HTML5, CSS, and jQuery (javascript) files, layouts, and elements designed to give you a headstart and save you a lot of hours on your next web project.

Wow, this is impressive. And makes good looking sites easy to build.

Feedback Army is a cheap website usability testing service built on Mechanical Turk. Submit your questions and get feedback from 10 people for $20.

Looks like a nice solution. Would be nice to start using this type of plugin more to move informative text into tooltips to clean up pages, yet provide the info users need.

Thoughts?

Foundation looks awesome. Buttons, modals, forms, it really looks sharp.

• The future of the industry is component based development
• Only 7% of open-source projects are actively maintained.
• Discovery is a problem – due to the long tail of abandoned projects and varying quality, unless the project is visible and well known, many developers will prefer to develop a solution themselves.
• The future of development is via Commercial open-source

Very interesting read.

Source: http://www.sitepoint.com/software-development-doing-it-wrong/

Screen resolution nowsaday ranges from 320px (iPhone) to 2560px (large monitor) or even higher. Users no longer just browse the web with desktop computers. Users now use mobile phones, small notebooks, tablet devices such as iPad or Playbook to access the web. So the traditional fixed width design doesn't work any more. Web design needs to be adaptive. The layout needs to be automatically adjusted to fit all display resolution and devices. This tutorial will show you how to create a cross-browser responsive design with HTML5 CSS3 media queries.

Perform speedy site and link prospecting using SiteSkout by Michael King(iPullRank).

Spiders a site, retrieves social metrics, scrapes the page title and meta description and pings Textwise for concepts and categories then showing you all that awesome information as it happens and then exporting it to a CSV file for download and Excel ninjitsu.

The Simple Screenshot API

1,000 $10/mth 4,000 $37/mth 8,500 $60/mth 20,000 $150/mth

This is important stuff. It's going to become as important, if not more, to integrate closely with google plus.

Google+ is the rapidly growing seed of a web-wide social backbone, and the catalyst for the ultimate uniting of the social graph.

Good stuff to keep in mind.

Websites can do a MUCH better job of helping visitors find what they want; the 404 'not found' capabilities of most web servers is one powerful way.

Great advice from Leo. There is really no excuse for not handling 404 errors better.