Best Practices
When to Use Events vs. Pageviews for Google Analytics
How to set up a schema for tracking certain things on a website is a polarizing topic. I’ve seen numerous schema that rely solely on pageviews to track everything—outbound link clicks, downloads, modal dialogs, etc—and the creator is dogmatic about the approach. But, semantically speaking, one of those three actions is a legitimate pageview; two … Continue reading … Continue reading A List Apart: The Survey 2010
For the past couple of years, A List Apart has run a survey for those of us who create the Web. They collect stats about location, type of work, etc. It's quick to take, and the information is helpful. Go take it or view the findings from last year. … Continue reading The Many Faces of the Hyperlink
The World Wide Web is built on links. It thrives because links are everywhere. There are links to the various pages on individual sites. There are links from one site to another. There are links in e-mails to websites. There are links in PDFs and documents to Web pages. Chances are, you used a link to get to this article. Yet, when it comes to setting up a website, styling and consideration of links is often overlooked. Or worse, specific choices for links are made that end up hurting the usability and interaction of your website. … Continue reading You Are Not a Web Developer
Yes, I'm talking to you, Dreamweaver user. You. Are. Not. A. Web. Developer. You're just the person that is screwing up the nice, pretty, semantic, standards-based Internet for the rest of us. The one that devalues our hard work with your naive undercutting. The one who makes our life hell when our project managers quote maintenance or design-tweaking projects not realizing that we can't just reuse your code and keep our dignity intact. You. I really hate you, you MM_preloader using, nested-tables employing you. … Continue reading
Online Retailers: Help Your Customers Find Your Products
One of my favorite (only because it has the best, low-price selection) sources of quality fabrics has horrible UX on their store site. Horrible to the point that I’m only able to do rudimentary filtering because I understand the GET variables they use to display their catalog. In fact, I wrote a post to help non-developer users figure out how to filter the catalog by changing the URL. The fact that I had to do either of those things really bothers me as a front-end developer; your users should never have to resort to manipulating the URL in order to filter or find products. … Continue reading
Advanced HTML Tables: Columns
Last week, we discussed table basics for the year 2010 (as opposed to 1995). We set up a simple semantic table with a caption, header and footer. Today, we’re going to go over two lesser-known elements: the colgroup and col elements. I had grand plans of going into some little-known attributes for other table elements, … Continue reading … Continue reading
How to Use the Table Element Correctly
First, how not to use the table element: as a layout tool. Repeat after me: “Tables are for tabular data. Tables are for tabular data. I will not use tables for laying out a Web page. Tables are for tabular data.” So, now that we’ve gotten that bit out the way, let’s talk about what comprises a semantic, valid table. This is basic table creation 101. Next week, we’ll talk about advanced table features. … Continue reading
Semantic, Accessible (Good) Forms: the Label Element
One of the most common issues I see with forms is the improper (or lack of) use of label elements. Admittedly, I too am guilty of misuse, but even after becoming aware of them, I was very confused about how to do radio and checkbox elements. Why? I learned incorrectly that the
for attribute of the label referred to the name attribute of the input. Wipe that from your memory this instant. The label’s for attribute is a reference to the input’s id. … Continue reading 
