Social media websites have made a huge splash on the Internet as we know it. No longer do editors dictate what is news, and what is important. The power belongs to the masses on social news sites, which is a huge reason for their traction and loyal users.
It’s no surprise that developing a niche social media site is a popular job request for web developers. When I first learned about brand new social site for financial news, ideas, and tips Tip’d, I was immediately impressed with the clean, sophisticated design and impressive functionality. Yet what was truly amazing about Tip’d was how fast the site was assembled by it’s rockstar development team.
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With Thanksgiving only a couple days away, it’s appropriate to look back on the things that we appreciate best about our jobs. Let’s face it: Web Developers have the best jobs around, right? We’re incredibly lucky to have the professions we do.
Here are 15 things that we all should be thankful for. These are the technologies that we couldn’t live without, or that have previously paved the way and allowed us to be web developers.
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Widgets are excellent for adding unique functionality to a web site. However, as the we becomes more “widgetized”, it’s starting to add strain on the web browsing experience for our users. The more widgets we add to our web pages, the worse it makes the web.
Widget Blindness
Banner blindness was discovered in the late nineties, and it shocked many people that users weren’t actually focusing on ads when a website was teeming with ad banners. Yet 10 years later, the problem isn’t so much with banners (that problem will always be around), but with web designers and site owners going out of control with adding widgets to their pages. Continue reading »
Every web developer has their own favorite platform to create in. Some prefer Linux, while other prefer Windows or Mac. One thing is for certain though: each platform has a passionate rabid community behind it. Those web developers who prefer the Mac are no different, and for good reason:
The Mac boasts some excellent software for web development.
Here are some essential bits of software that every Mac-owning web developer should have in their toolkits. From text editors to command line tools, here is the best Cupertino has to offer to aid the web developer, soup to nuts. Continue reading »
While more and more people are using faster Internet connections, there seems to be less emphasis by web developers on optimizing pages for faster load times. We’re seeing more and more widgets and javascript-heavy pages that take a long time to load, even on fast Internet connections. It’s a breath of fresh air when a website loads quickly and cleanly.
Web developers sometimes neglect some simple rules when it comes to developing a fast website, which really hurts the user’s experience. Continue reading »
It appears that the glory days of the homepage are almost over. Jakob Nielsen has been finding that web users are becoming more and more fickle. Instead of going to the homepage and nosing around the site using categories and site searches, people are instead using Google to find everything and landing on a very specific page. Web users have learned how to master the interactive environment of the web, and are becoming very good at finding what they want. Continue reading »
