This is a cool utility that uses YSlow! and PhantomJS to measure your site's speed across many pages. Should be good for identifying slow individual pages as well as practices that impact multiple pages.

This past weekend, my colleague and friend Sandy Smith participated in Election Hackathon 2012 (read his take of the hackathon). We built our first public Musketeers.me product, Candidata.me. This was my first hackathon, and it was exciting and exhausting to bring something to life in little more than 24 hours.

Its amazing to still come across web design failures like this one. The image above is a screen cap from the Northlanders, a site about a series of graphic novels about Vikings. The main purpose of this site is to sell the books, either physical or digital copies.

I've updated my theme here to make the layout more responsive depending on the device you view it in.  For both smart phones and iPads/tables, the layout linearizes. That is a fancy way of saying the right sidebar should scoot below the main content area, and everything will become 100% wide to fill the screen. 

I did this using CSS3 media queries, this technique only works in newer browsers, including Chrome, Firefox. and Mobile Safari.

One of my newest and persistent obsessions is constantly looking for ways to make dcunited.com load faster.  It's a challenge because we want to have a content-rich site, with lots of photos, videos, and interactive elements.  There are a lot of techniques you can try, from optimizing images, using subdomains to trick browsers into downloading in parallel, combining images into sprites, and so on.  Of course, none of these techniques can help you if you choose or are forced to use something that has a big payload.

Wondering what's new in CSS3 and HTML5 that is bound to make your life easier, and maybe make you really ditch support for IE6 and maybe IE7?  Read this article from Smashing Magazine for an excellent overview.  It's hard to keep up with the changes that are becoming available in modern browsers and this article summarizes them all and provides links to learn more about each one.

There's a lot of good insight in this blog post from the creator of the Views module for Drupal. I'm a big fan of the module, and when I've had to dive into the code behind it, I've come away pretty impressed. That's pretty rare for a Drupal module, IMNSHO. Also, if you don't understand or like the CSS classes and id's that the Views module uses in its markup, I'm afraid you don't have a good grasp on the "Cascading" part of CSS or how to use selectors effectively, if at all.

Going from a consultant on the outside to a developer on the inside, I can't agree more that there's a lot more work to do once you launch a site.  Since we relaunched our website at work in March, there have been a number of things we've had to change based because of how users actually use the site despite the assumptions we made during development. 

The single easiest improvements you can make to the usability of HTML Forms is to correctly use LABELs. And it helps all users, not just a subset. Its also a nice application of Fitt's Law

s Use the label element to make your HTML forms accessible | 456 Berea Street

We're guilty of using guesses/gut feelings when putting a site together. Nielsen reminds us that even a few data points can help make better design decisions.