Handy Resources for Web Designers
During the research, planning, and design phases of website development, there are a few tools that help us identify the "why" and "how" of other sites. Learning the tips and techniques used by other sites is an effective way to improve your own designs. While it is okay to learn from and be inspired by other sites, it is never okay to take graphics, code, or content from another site without that site owner's permission!
Here are a few tools we currently use:
Firefox has become the second most popular browser in a very short period of time. Based on the original Mozilla open source project, Firefox is a fast, efficient browser that offers an improved browsing experience to users. In addition to features such as tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking, the browser can be customized with "extensions". There are currently 100's of extensions available!
- Firefox Web Developer Extension
If there was ONE reason to download and use Firefox, this extension is it! With the Web Developer Extension, you have quick access to source, CSS, and site layout details, one-click access to validate HTML, CSS, and web feeds, and more.
One particularly-handy feature is the ability to disable images and scripting on a page. I use this feature to demonstrate to clients how their site would look to a search engine or screen reader ... a very effective way to demonstrate the limitations of using "graphics as text" or Flash-only sites.
As much as us techie-types prefer more web standards-compatible brosers, IE is the market share leader for web browsers. I've been playing with the beta release of
IE7 lately, and predict is will help keep IE as the market leader. However, Microsoft has done it again by refusing to support web standards in the browser, and I'm finding many quirks when displaying CSS-based websites in
IE7 (our own site included, as of Feb/06).
In addition to a new rendering engine,
IE7 offers new bookmarking and RSS features (called Web Feeds by Microsoft - hopefully they will remain RSS compliant, and not try to introduce a Microsoft-exclusive web feed schema). However, by making RSS / Web Feeds easily available to the masses, adoption of RSS by the general public is set to jump dramatically.
If you build sites using CSS for style or layout, and want to insure that
IE7 users will be able to subscribe to your RSS feeds, then I suggest downloading the
IE7beta.
Note, though, that IE7 replaced my IE6 installation when downloaded ... fortunately, we run multiple systems here, so site rendering can still be checked in IE6 on another system or using a service such as BrowserCam.
While my day-to-day browsing is done with Firefox, I use Internet Explorer in the research, planning, and development of sites. Since most of the traffic in IE is to "friendly" sites, I use the Alexa Toolbar to track rankings and provide quick access to staistical information. A side benefit is, using the Alexa Toolbar improves the traffic ranking of the sites I am viewing, i.e. those of my customers and myself.
The Alexa Toolbar is a marketing tool of Amazon.com, and is considered by some to be Adware or Spyware. Personally, I feel comfortable using it for my development-specific browsing (again, it has no effect on my daily browsing with Firefox), and it can always be removed manually or with an anti-spyware program such as Ad-Aware.