The Documenting Your Life Series is presented by Western Digital. We believe your life’s most valuable moments should always be close and accessible. My Passport 2 TB portable hard drives let you dream big and carry small.

Rafflecopter is the best thing that's come out for hosting giveaways since blog giveaways themselves. I was a little skeptical at first, but you have great customer service and answered my questions! Darcy Zalewski, DarcyAndBrian.com Not only do I sing praises as a blogger who does giveaways... but also as an active participant in entering giveaways on other blogs. Saves me so much time! “Libby” Neas, Libby's Library I love Rafflecopter! It makes setting up giveaways fast, easy, and painless for bloggers! Jerri, Simply Sweet Home

Made with HTML/CSS (no images, no JS*) this is a simple interactive experiment with responsive design techniques. Use the buttons top-right to toggle between desktop and mobile layouts.

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As everyone in the world knows by now, Apple bumped the iPad's screen to retina-display density, quadrupling the number of pixels to a whopping 3.1 million. That's fantastic news for iPad owners—the display will be gorgeous—but it also means more headaches for designers and a potential blight on your bandwidth bill and download speed. In bandwidth terms, pixels are heavy, and four times the pixels means four times the image size for bitmap images, give or take. If you want to take advantage of this gorgeous screen, every image you push down the wire is about to put on a ton of weight. That has implications in lots of places.

 Start an HTML5 Boilerplate project in 15 seconds!

Initializr is here to kick-start the development of your new projects. It generates templates based on HTML5 Boilerplate by allowing you to choose which parts you want or don't want from it. A responsive templatehas also been added to start from a basic design instead of a blank page.

"H5BP" is here to handle the boring stuff you don't want to deal with. It provides a rock-solid default code that improves the cross-browser compatibility for HTML5 projects and handy tools to help their development.

If I want to put up a menu, I can just use their [Boostrap} code that does menus. Sure, my menu looks like all the others, and that's a good thing, for users. No need to learn a second or third way to use a menu.

I cannot agree more. Today, users are used to Facebook, used to Twitter, now used to Pinterest. They do things one way and when you take it away from them, they are confused.

Do yourself a favor and don't try re-inventing the wheel when your primary goal is for people to use your product.

With Colllor it is much easier to generate a consistent color palette with just a few clicks. You should use colors consistently, so you have a common look and feel throughout your design. All the alternative proposals produced by Colllor derive from the same color and they all have a common denominator sharing hue, lightness or saturation values. This tool will let you find the exact value of darker shades of any color, not just something that 'looks darker'.

Clean, simple web designs have become a popular trend. This article will cover the subject through a two-part discussion. First, we’ll talk about a few traits that clean designs tend to have in common. Secondly, I’ll share some tricks and techniques that can be helpful when trying to achieve a clean design.

• Solid Web Page Layout Structure
• Good Typography
• Limited Color Palette
• Consistent Imagery

Since publishing this yesterday, I’ve revised the post in response to many people saying that this is simply a stop-gap for browsers without background-sizesupport. That’s true to a point, but the method proposed here offers several advantages to the CSS-only approach.

Responsive web design, we have a problem.

We apply percentage-based widths to our img elements to get fluid images and this is a very good thing. But what about background images? Support for background-sizeis pretty abysmal right now and still isn’t bulletproof, even when it is supported (I’ll get to that in a second), so we’ve been hacking our way around it, usually by using inlineimg elements and absolutely positioning them behind the content. This is all well and good, but at certain browser widths, it breaks.

The HTML5 specification has added quite a few interesting and useful tags for structuring your markup. For a majority of everyday uses, these tags will replace many of our typical entries from our code. So let’s dig in. A is a thematic grouping of content, typically preceded by header, possibly with a footer after. s can be nested inside of each other, if needed, and can hold any amount of typical markup. The of a , typically a headline or grouping of headlines, but may also contain supplemental information about the section.

<section> <header> <nav> <footer> <article>

 i think this is awesome. It is time for structural tags ot mean something, not just using DIVs around.

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

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.

This plugin uses XHR for uploading multiple files with progress-bar in FF3.6+, Safari4+, Chrome and falls back to hidden iframe based upload in other browsers, providing good user experience everywhere.

Bring Bootstrap's components to life—now with 12 custom jQuery plugins. All plugins Modal Dropdown Scrollspy Tab Tooltip Popover Alert Button Collapse Carousel Typeahead A streamlined, but flexible, take on the traditional javascript modal plugin with only the minimum required functionality and smart defaults. Add dropdown menus to nearly anything in Bootstrap with this simple plugin. Bootstrap features full dropdown menu support on in the navbar, tabs, and pills. Use scrollspy to automatically update the links in your navbar to show the current active link based on scroll position.

great presentation/layout of the items.

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...

My wife (and it seems every woman in America) is now addicted to Pinterest. It’s the new magazine. I think it’s replacing time spent on TMZ. It’s graphical, beautiful, simple to consume, and has a wonderful layout. But that product is the perfect example of perfectly suited for the web given the real estate available.

Ah Pinterest, they do it all right...

Try to think about how leveraging the web will do the following:

• Create a differentiated product versus your mobile-only competitors. Use that as a source of competition.
• Have the ability to enable “content creation” and “content curation” in a way that makes all of the mobile consumption by other users a better experience. If you have a fashion-sharing product, wouldn’t viewing collections of outfits on mobile devices be a richer experience if there were more content and deeper content because your web product enabled your power users to more easily create it?
• Conversely allow your mobile products to shine on the web. Using the fashion-sharing example, imagine turning your shared fashion photos into beautiful magazine-like collages that can be scrolled through, Pinterest style.
• Build features that make using native-phone apps pointless. Case in point: Text messaging. If you use the native device your messages get purged eventually on most devices. You also lose them if you lose your actual phone. Having a web product abstracts the text message from the device and makes it a truly cloud service. When consumers realize this – who in their right mind would keep their text messages locked on their mobile device?

Travel comparison site Kayak.com has redesigned its Web site so it looks like its mobile app — not the other way around. “We run the iPhone and iPad teams separately from the Web team, and the Web team had fallen behind,” said Paul English, co-founder and CTO. The goal with the site’s design has always been to provide a simple layout, so that users can easily sift through thousands of flights, hotels and car rentals to find what they are looking for quickly.

This is an interesting approach, make your website look as close as it can from your mobile app. Simple layout, easy usability, if it works for mobile, makes sense it will work for the web.

Good tip.

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.

Eyetracking visualizations show that users often read Web pages in an F-shaped pattern: two horizontal stripes followed by a vertical stripe.

Examples of what the function can return;

• Today
• Yesterday
• Tomorrow
• In 2 days
• In 6 days
• 5 days ago
• Thursday 17 January
• Tuesday 4 January 2005

• Don’t overwhelm
• Keep it simple
• Actions on the right
• Avoid Flash, for the most part

When choosing a navigation bar type, start simple. Evaluate your content thoroughly and ask yourself what your users need to access quickly. More often than not, a complex navigation system is an indicator you need better content planning and organization

Designed http://www.itsnicethat.com

It's pretty cool, they redesign their site every month in a few hours. Clever.