January Newsletter

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New Forums Now Open

Get your questions answered in the forums for the newest Head First titles: Algebra, PHP & MySQL, Rails, and Web Design.

Head First Books Now Available in PDF

Newly available Head First PDFs feature in a major announcement from O'Reilly's electronic publishing initiative. Read it here.

What's coming in 2009 for Head First?

Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Tuesday, Feb 10 Permalink | Comments (13)

The dreaded EJB question... addressed

Lots of folks have been clamoring to know about the second edition of Head First EJB. Click Play on the video below to get a direct answer... I promise. We'll be posting a lot more of these video Q&A; sessions in the weeks to come, as we try and address your questions in an even more direct manner.

Posted by Brett McLaughlin on Tuesday, Jan 13 Permalink | Comments (4)

Three Things You Can Do (Today) to Improve Your Website

Jeff Siarto is a User Experience and Web Designer living in Chicago. He is a co-author of Head First Web Design and writes about design and technology at his blog: siarto.com.

1. Simplify Everything

Remove unnecessary and extraneous content

People come to your website to find information. It might be to look at your portfolio, read about a recent vacation or find out how to get in touch with you. Your job as a web designer is to make this information accessible and easy to find. The easiest way to help people find the important content is to get rid of the stuff that seems trivial and non-essential. The next time you make changes to your homepage, try taking things out instead of adding. Maybe that Facebook status widget or your most recent 100 Tweets aren't as essential to the core content of your site as you thought. Think about the main content areas of your site and concentrate on making them better before even thinking about adding more.

Downsize your markup

Just as content can become cluttered and unorganized, so can your site's underlying markup. In a perfect world, the HTML that your site's built on would be an exact semantic representation of your content. Unfortunately, we don't live in a perfect world and HTML (and it's variant XHTML) aren't perfect markup languages. With that in mind, it's important to try and make your markup as lean as possible. Is that extra container <div> really necessary? Do these items need to be in a list, or will a paragraph work just as well? Am I using tables for tabular data and not layout? Go through your markup — and just like you did with your page content — remove anything that isn't essential to the layout and semantics of your site. Organizing that tag soup will not only speed up your site, but also reduce browser inconsistencies and give clearer meaning to your content.

Reduce your site's download footprint

Believe it or not, not everyone is connecting to the Internet over a fast cable modem or DSL line. In areas where broadband is limited, some users still connect with dial-up, slow DSL or even satellite. These users can account for 5 to 15% of your total visitors and their experience on your site is just as important as those connecting from a super-fast campus LAN. Knowing that, files sizes and download times should always be considered when designing new pages or adding content and features to existing ones. Make sure you are using proper image compression for the given image type. Icons, fonts and logos typically perform best as GIFs while photographic images usually look best saved as JPEGs. Adjust the quality of your images to offer the best resolution and detail in the smallest possible file size. If you use Photoshop, the Save for Web feature will tell you how long a particular image will take to download at a given speed. Make note of these speeds so you have an idea of how long the site as a whole will take to download. In addition, using your browsers activity menu or web inspector (Safari/Webkit) can also help glean vital information on download speed and file size — often showing you exactly where you can expect bottle necks. Finally, see #1 and #2 above for ways to make your files smaller and faster.

Continue reading "Three Things You Can Do (Today) to Improve Your Website" »

Posted by Jeff Siarto on Tuesday, Jan 13 Permalink | Comments (0)