Blog

October 20th, 2011

Technology, Usability, Web Development

Broadband! Optical fiber! 4g! These are the keywords of today’s connectivity. But what do they really mean? They mean that we can now send more media-rich content to users. But…should we? Well, if it serves the most relevant content to the user and creates a good user experience, sure. But we need to remember that one of the basics of good usability is site performance. And with so many users now streaming video, music and other large amounts of data, we’re finding the Internet can often be pretty strained.

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Don Ruzek

March 17th, 2011

Insight Article, Project Management, Technology

The use of website analytics and reporting software isn’t new to most website owners. Tracking and analyzing the usage of your website by people and search engine ‘bots are obviously essential activities for validating your investment. Typical metrics tracked include number of visits by various user types, number of downloads or access to particular content, and navigation routes most commonly taken by visitors to, through, and out of your site.  These metrics, perhaps aggregated into meaningful reports (i.e. overall unique visits per month), tell you how your site is performing. But are these reports evaluated for the impact or opportunities they reveal with respect to your entire IT budget? In other words, do your web analytic reports support “Key Performance Indicators” (KPIs) for your entire IT Investment portfolio, not just the website maintenance budget?

If your answer to this is “no”, your overall organizational IT investment may not be properly balanced to deliver the maximum ROI from your website, resulting in a lot of money left on the table and accumulation of very real business risk.

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Ted McLaughlan

February 10th, 2010

Application Development, Web Development

I recently saw an innocent enough tweet about something that just happened to be exactly like something I’d been looking for for quite some time: a server-side ASP.NET CSS and JavaScript file concatenator and GZIP utility called Shinkansen. It’s from Milan Negovan and it’s hosted over at CodePlex. Looking over the documentation, it looks easy enough to set up and configure. He’s blogged about it here. (more…)

Rob Cherny

November 19th, 2009

Web Development

Most of the time the tools used when creating and compressing images for the Web do a good job, but some of them leave behind some excess metadata that can increase the file size while providing no particular benefit. In particular, I’m thinking of Photoshop’s “Save for Web” functionality when it comes to PNG images.  There’s a number of command-line tools that can be used to help with things like this, but ImageOptim (for Mac OS X) wraps them into a handy GUI to make handling them easier.

Michael Raichelson

October 6th, 2009

Application Development, Visual Design, Web Content Management, Web Development

At NavigationArts, the client-side development team focuses heavily on optimizing the performance of Web pages and how fast they load. Some of the leading research in the area is from the likes of Yahoo! and their front-end engineering team. (more…)

Rob Cherny