Allthingsdev.com » Web Standards

Great Mobile Testing Website

Jeff Purcell — Sun, 30 Sep 2007 15:53:01 +0000

So I’m reading through Cameron Moll’s book Mobile Web Design, which I love by the way, and came across a few mentions of Ready.mobi. So I thought I would check it out.

Ready.mobi allows you to test your mobile website against common problems and short comings that mobile web users have. Such as page size, display abnormalities and loading time and then gives your page a score from 0 – 5 (5 being the best). Also, while the software is crawling your mobile site, they display some very helpful mobile web design tips. What nice gentlemen.The scan runs several tests to make sure your mobile website is as optimized as possible for all mobile web users. Here’s a list of some of the tests it runs:

MIME types
Character encoding
Pop up windows
Alt texts
Image maps
Specify image sizes
Page title
Use of stylesheets
Stylesheets dependency
Redirection
Default input mode
Page size limit
Large graphics
Caching
External resources
Avoid free text
Structure
Form submit buttons

A visualization module is also provided. So you can see your site loaded in a handful of popular mobile phones.

Ready.mobi is a quick, simple and cheap way to test your mobile website against many different variables we face as web designers.

Tags: mobi, mobile, mobile web design, web design, web standards

Book Review: Mobile Web Design

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 08 Sep 2007 20:02:43 +0000

You’ve probably seen many reviews on Cameron Moll’s book Mobile Web Design around recently. I thought I’d add my own.

I purchased Cameron’s book on Wednesday and have been thumbing through it off and on. I find it extremely enlightening. Not only is the book well written, he provides links to some very informative pages about mobile standards and good mobile design practices. I’ve added quite a few new feeds to my reader after reading this book.

The book is 104 pages long, comes in pdf format and will set you back 19 dollars. This book is well worth the small fee. Cameron has posted a sample of the book(pdf). I suggest taking a gander, you won’t be disappointed.

FYI: If you purchase a copy of the book by September 14th, you’ll be entered into a drawing for an iPhone.

Safari on Windows!

Jeff Purcell — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 22:05:48 +0000

Its official! Apple has released a beta version of their web browser, Safari.

This is an exciting time for web designers married to their windows boxes, myself included. Safari is, in my opinion, the fastest rendering modern browser available. Not to mention the first of only a handful of browser to pass the Acid2 Browser Test.

Today is a good day!

Tags: apple, safari, beta, windows

Is There a Standard for Tracking Website Visits?

Jeff Purcell — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 23:06:43 +0000

At work I’ve been asked numerous times “How man unique visits do we get?”. To which I reply, “It depends who you talk to.”

We run a handful of traffic software packages to help get a handle on all the different statistics incorporated with running a successful website. Google Analytics, Mint and a very simple page view counter I developed in house. Each package takes a different approach to computing unique visits:

Google Analytics declares a visit as:

Visits represent the number of individual sessions initiated by all the visitors to your site. If a user is inactive on your site for 30 minutes or more, any future activity will be attributed to a new session. Users that leave your site and return within 30 minutes will be counted as part of the original session.

“30 minutes of inactivity” seems to be the norm among a few other statistical packages I’ve used in the past.

Mint takes a different approach:

The timeframes represented in the Visits pane are independent of each other meaning that the sum of total and unique visits of the hours in a day will not necessarily equal the total and unique visits in that same day.

Confused? Me too. From what I gather, the visit is based on which ever time frame you want. Hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or yearly. And technically it isn’t a visit at all, but more a visitor per (insert time frame here). Either way, the numbers look dreadfully small and that’s never fun.

I can’t help but feel like both packages leave something to be desired. Who’s to say that if I visit the same website multiple times in less than 30 minutes or an hour, that shouldn’t be counted as a separate visit?

I always think of ebay when looking at visits. I use ebay many times throughout any given work day to get a ballpark figure on the cost of random items and the occasional dream truck. Great way to avoid GTD. My searches on ebay may be random, but I guarantee that once I leave, my interested has dwindled and ultimately my “visit” has been completed. I may return in a few minutes interested in a different product, at which point a new “visit” has begun.

So I guess what I’m getting at is that the idea of visits needs to be looked at in comparison with the information being accessed during that visit. In my opinion, a news website should probably adopt the Google approach and base their visits on a 30 minute basis. Shopping and product based websites should count a visit as the user visiting, leaving, and then returning and searching for something different.

Either way, there needs to be a standard. Hmm, that’s what this post started out to be about. I think I got a little off track. Oh Well. Later days.

stats, analytics, mint, google, ebay, standards

WordPress as A CMS

Jeff Purcell — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 23:05:42 +0000

Yes, I know this isn’t anything new, but I’m quickly becoming a big advocate of using wordpress as a CMS for client websites. Here’s a few reason’s why I do this:

Rapid Development

Layout design time has been dramatically reduced by utilizing WordPress’s theme abilities. I now only have to create one html page which I then modularize to fit with wordpress’s theming system. This single html layout is then applied to all of the site’s pages.

Added Functionality

With WordPress’s simple yet robust administration area, I can give my clients control of certain areas of their website. They can now manage their own content and not be so dependent on me to make changes. This added functionality is a feature that is nonexistent among the other local web designers in my area.

Less Time Equals More Money

With the added functionality that wordpress’s admin area offers, I can charge more while lowering my overall time involved in the project.

Easily Add Additional Features

With the large community following that WordPress has, chances are someone has developed a plugin for that added feature or functionality that your client needs. For example, WP-ContactForm takes the headache out of programming a contact form. Once again adding that needed functionality while lowering development time.

Tags: wordpress, cms

Tableless Web Design

Jeff Purcell — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 06:18:45 +0000

Just out of curiosity, has anyone read the book by Rachel Andrew and Daniel Shafer entitled HTML Utopia: Designing Without Tables Using CSS? I’m tempted to take a look at it as I’m always looking for new CSS resources.

Tags: css, html, web design

Some Great Material

Jeff Purcell — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 08:12:30 +0000

First off, please accept my humblest apologies for neglecting this blog. It was never my intention to go this long without posting something. In my defense, I’ve been super busy redesigning a client’s website and cleaning up my resume for a job opening at Washington State University. I know, it’s still no excuse.

I haven’t come across anything worth devoting an entire post to lately. So I thought I’d just throw up a few quick links to some excellent reading material I’ve come across this week:

Internet Explorer 7 Beta

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 04 Feb 2006 18:00:02 +0000

Has anyone installed and played with IE 7 Beta yet? After viewing some of its new features at the Microsoft CES Keynote, I’d thought I’d give it a chance.

“My first impression, the logo is uglier than before (see above image). Over all though, the interface is a little better than before. Atleast they FINALLY picked up tabbed browsing. As far as adhering to web standards, I haven’t noticed any major quirks, but I haven’t put it through the ringer yet.

One really cool feature that I just love is the Tab Preview Button. If you have multiple tabs open, you can look just to the left of the left-most tab and you’ll see and icon of 4 boxes. Clicking on that icon takes you to a page of preview shots of all the tabs you have open. I’m surprised I haven’t seen this implemented into Firefox as an extension yet. If you can’t seem to go on with life until you have Internet Explorer 7 Beta installed on your machine, you can download it here.

Tags: IE 7 Beta, Firefox, extension

Internet Explorer and Forms

Jeff Purcell — Sat, 24 Dec 2005 05:28:48 +0000

I ran across this little quirk with Internet Explorer the other day. It appears that when a form is submitted by actually clicking the submit button, an element in the PHP array $_POST is created for the button. Simple enough, right? Well I noticed that when the form was submitted by pressing the Enter key instead of clicking the submit button, an element in the $_POST array was not created for the button. It’s not an exceptionally large quirk, but definitely caused me to rethink my form submission checking. Firefox and Safari created the array element for the button regardless of how the form was submitted.. This occured with Internet Explorer 6.0 and PHP version 5.0.3

Tags: Internet Explorer, PHP, forms

New Layout

Jeff Purcell — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 19:50:28 +0000

If you hadn’t noticed yet. I did a little redesign. I know its not much but atleast now it’s Valid Markup. Having only a Windows machine, I’m unable to test on some browsers. If you own a mac, please let me know of any bugs or quirks you run across along with what browser you were using.