If you’re reading this from an RSS reader, come check out the new design live on the site! I’ve spent the past two days working on ways to improve the overall usability of the blog and bring back focus to where it belongs: the content. You’ll find bigger text, a wider reading area and much less clutter. Stay tuned for a more in-depth blog post on the design changes but for now, check out the new poll for December.
A few days ago on HackerNews, one of the top articles on the front page was entitled Make Your Mockup in Markup. As someone who makes a living by making websites for various clients, I couldn’t help but cringe at the thought of skipping what I consider to be an integral part of web design: the Photoshop mockup.
It’s been a busy month here and I just wanted to take a minute to make a few announcements regarding DevGrow.
The freelancer’s worst fear: underestimating the scale of a project, setting the deadline too soon and having to deal with angry clients. This is a scenario most of us have faced and many still continue to face as a result, but what can you do to change that?
If you haven’t been to the BBC News page lately, check it out! They’ve completely revamped the site, changing the header, typography and element positioning among other things. While I like the changes overall, I would have done a few things slightly differently to make the site more user friendly.
If you’ve been to the site at all in the last day or two, you have probably noticed the fairly drastic design changes. I’ve spent the better part of 2 weeks redesigning the site and adding several new features, including a discussion forum and an inspiration gallery (website showcase).
A scalable website is one that can handle growth with grace and dignity. Adobe refers to scalability as “a Web server’s ability to maintain a site’s availability, reliability, and performance as the amount of simultaneous Web traffic, or load, hitting the Web server increases.” While the bulk of the work is developmental and server-side, web designers can also take steps to ensure your website is capable of handling growth.
In order to simply the process of updating my plugins and to give you guys the ability to fork them into your own works, I’ve moved all of my plugins to Github (thanks to Sam Sherlock for the suggestion).
This effect is actually from Techi.com, a new blog launched by the guys at WebDesignerDepot, where they use it to display their popular tags in the sidebar. I wanted to see how easy (or hard) it was to recreate using JQuery and CSS, and it turns out that it’s pretty simple to do. I’ve packed it into a neat little plugin so you hopefully you can make some use of it!
In the spirit of transparency and openness that many websites have embraced over the last few years, I’ve decided to share my stats and experiences blogging on DevGrow over the last three months. Overall, the results have been pretty interesting and positive, at least for the most part.
DevGrow is a journal on web design, development and usability written by Monji Dolon.
