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Archive for the ‘web-development’ Category

devenv – development environment

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

It’s quite common when developers share information about environment, libraries or tools that they use. And it should be work practice for every good software engineer, manager or architect to constantly evaluate new technologies, ideas, fraimworks, etc.

As CTO I always look into new things and want to share my current understanding of important things in Java and Ruby development, architecture design, and performance.

All the companies are telling us that they are developing the best products to support the development of the software but we will rely on a variety of awards, and statistics of usage whenever possible + my experience. This does not mean it will be possible to do without investing your own time but will hopefully make this job a little easier. I will be glad to get your thoughts, critics, and information about things that empower your IT development process.

So, welcome: http://devenv.in

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Posted in general programming, web-development | 7 Comments »

How to finish with differences in renders of HTML in browsers

Thursday, August 18th, 2011

preamble

When there is no standard there is no same approach for same things and we have chaos.
But we have standards for HTML and CSS, we can find them all on W3C pages http://www.w3.org/MarkUp/ and http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/.
And still we hear from users “Why does my website look different on different browsers?” or “I want to kill developers of Internet explorer” from web-developers.

complexity of standards

First problem is the complexity of standards that should take into account many different things. It’s hard for developers to understand and develop products appropriately.
As W3C can’t simplify standards it should put special effort to develop and provide special set of test-cases like famous set of Acid tests but it should provides not just set of randomly picked features but complete cover of specifications – XHTML, CSS, DOM, SVG. There will be standard way to test browsers and someday we will finally have same picture on all browsers.

human nature

The problem not only in the standards but in human nature that incite some people to use evolving versions of HTML/CSS to get fantastic features. But I believe when W3C begins to provide tests it will be evident for anyone that developer is guilty for bugs or using of experimental features.

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Posted in be smart, internet, web-development | 1 Comment »

Don’t use Google recaptcha

Friday, June 10th, 2011

preamble

Google reCAPTCHA is a great idea originally developed at Carnegie Mellon University by Guatemalan computer scientist Luis von Ahn. It uses captcha to help digitize the text of books while protecting websites from bots. According to Google reports it displays over 100 million captchas every day. Among its subscribers are such popular sites as: Facebook, Twitter, CNN.com, and StumbleUpon.

main drawback

So, main drawback is complexity of captchas. Captchas are getting more and more complex or even unreal to deal with. Just check twitter with query like “recaptcha” and you’ll see amazing amount of people that wonder what is going on.

number to think about

A number is 14%. According to my research on 2 our sites: http://prices.by and http://shop.markets.by we were loosing about 14% of users on services sign-up while using REcaptcha.
The test was conducted using A/B testing where I vary our captcha and Google REcaptcha on sign-up page.

hint to google

Provide some parameter to select level of hardness, use of native languages is also a way to simplify solving while keep great security.

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Posted in be smart, web-development | 4 Comments »

WebP – 39% more compression than JPEG

Wednesday, June 1st, 2011

WebP is a lossy compression method proposed by Google. The degree of compression is adjustable so a user can choose between file size and image quality. WebP typically achieves an average of 39% more compression than JPEG without loss of image quality.

You can check gallery that compares JPEG and WEBP (The WebP images are more than 30% smaller than the JPEG ones): http://code.google.com/speed/webp/gallery.html. The only problem with this method is bad browser support. At this time it’s just Google Chrome 9+ and Opera 11.10 beta.

You can create WebP images in ImageMagick, and XnConvert. You can also use WebP command line utility to convert.

Find more information about WebP: http://code.google.com/speed/webp/

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Posted in internet, web-development | 1 Comment »

3 great ways to improve website usability

Monday, April 12th, 2010

web heatmap systems

They have been used for displaying areas of a Web page most frequently scanned by visitors, and allow you to understand how people are using your website. This is quite useful to find layouts that don’t work as intended or areas that should be changed.

heatmap screenshot

There are many open-source tools that you can integrate into your site, free solutions and paid services with enormous amounts of features. Just make a Google search, and check few most appropriate solutions.

user testing

There are few steps:
1. Understand what are your users, find out target group.
2. Establish use cases of your system, main flows of your system like: site sing-up, password recovery, post search, etc.
3. Ask some users from target group to go thru all use cases.

Few notes:
Check where users stuck and simplify the flow.
Ask simple questions, let them explain why they made something and if the result corresponded with the idea they had in mind.
Ask them what functionality your site lack?
Ask them what was hard to use on your site.

It can be hard to estimation how many users you may need for testing. Jeff Sauro wrote great article where explained why five users should be sufficient to find most of your interface problems.
Check it: http://www.measuringusability.com/five-users.php

log analysis/analytics

You can get a lot of useful information that can make your site better by analyzing information from logs or by installing external tracking tools.

Features that can help to improve site usability:
Visiting by days of week and rush hours,
Domains/countries of hosts visitors,
Most viewed posts and exit pages,
Browsers used,
HTTP errors,
Screen size, etc.

related links

Scrolling and Attention : http://www.useit.com/alertbox/scrolling-attention.html
Do users fail a task and still rate it as easy? : http://www.measuringusability.com/failed-sat.php

also I want to recommend 1 book that impressed me:
Steve Krug’s “Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems”

Posted in design, web-development | 1 Comment »

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