Web Standards Article Archive

A Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Through Social News

June 20th, 2011 2 Comments

The modern web 2.0 landscape features dozens of amazing social networking projects. The most popular include brands such as Facebook or Twitter. Underneath these however lies an even larger industry centered around user participation and information sharing systems.

Useful Tips for Building Freelance Web Projects With WordPress

May 17th, 2011 6 Comments

Today We’ve got some useful tips for freelance project work. WordPress will help to advance not only your client’s websites but to save loads of time and patience during the process. The administration panel is easy as pie and even includes the possibility for new updates.

5 Ways to Be an Ethical SEO Expert

June 29th, 2010 49 Comments

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a huge buzzword among marketers for years. The reason for this is that search engines can be legitimate sources of mountains of traffic for your site and the higher you rank on them the better.

The problem that arose in the early days of SEO was a blatant abuse of the system. What began as a few innocent tricks to earn more visitors morphed into questions of etiquette and heated debates regarding what should and shouldn’t be allowed. The web design community has come a long way in the past decade but there are plenty of marketers that still follow the tactics of the 90s either through ignorance or defiance.

Today we’ll briefly look at how to engage in SEO in an ethical manner by pointing out five key techniques to avoid.

Entering the Era of Device Testing

May 5th, 2010 3 Comments

This article will discuss the history and future of the web and what implications that has for how device testing will begin to play a larger role in the obligations of web designers.

As the presence of web enabled devices increases the key question that will arise relates to not only whether or not your design will function on a given device, but also (and perhaps more importantly) how high the quality of the experience will be on that device.

Learning From Microsoft: 10 Design Pitfalls to Avoid

May 1st, 2010 57 Comments

Today we’ll look into the web design practices and trends of the single biggest name in software to see if we can learn anything about some mistakes to avoid in our own work.

Feel free to comment to either agree or disagree with the suggestions below. As professional designers your insight is valuable and I look forward to your thoughts.

12 Tips for a More Accessible Website

March 19th, 2010 35 Comments

Making your website accessible to everyone is not only a moral duty, it’s a legal obligation. Many organizations, including the International Olympic Committee, have been sued for not making their websites accessible enough. With 50 million Americans suffering from some disability or other, improving your site’s accessibility makes clear commercial sense too.

Why You Should Build a Front End Package

February 12th, 2010 20 Comments

How do you begin building a website?

The majority of developers probably start from scratch or pull in a few resources from previous sites. The more organized among us have developed a custom toolbox from which to begin a site that proves to be an essential part of their workflow.

Today we’ll discuss why you should consider building your own front end package to serve as a starting point for every single site you create.

HTML5: Get It Working Today (4 of 4)

October 26th, 2009 7 Comments

This will be the final article in our series on HTML5. This go around we’ll have a brief look at which new HTML5 technologies major browsers are officially supporting and go over some techniques you can use to take advantage of the new elements in your coding today. Finally, we’ll discuss how you should start preparing to support HTML5 in all the sites you build from here forward.

HTML5: Semantic Changes (3 of 4)

October 23rd, 2009 10 Comments

In the last article, we looked at a number of new elements introduced in HTML5 and how to implement them properly. In this article, we’ll again be discussing a set of new elements but this time we’ll be examining only those HTML5 elements that represent a significant semantic change to the way you structure your sites. This article will cover how to use each of these new elements in a way that will bring much needed relief to the div-itus that plagues the structure of so many sites today.

HTML5: New Elements (2 of 4)

October 21st, 2009 9 Comments

A couple of days ago we posted an introduction to HTML5 and briefly covered some of the content we’ll be outlining in this series. Today’s post, which is the second in the series of four, will take a look at how to use six of the new elements in HTML5: canvas, article, audio, video, meter, and mark.

Keep in mind that HTML5 is not exactly ready for widespread use – so don’t go changing anything on your site quite yet. Be assured that HTML5 is in fact coming soon, therefore these concepts may prove useful in the near future.