I love looking at the analytics for my site. I love seeing what articles are most popular, what people land on the most, where they come from and where they leave.
A few months ago I learned about Woopra – a free tracking/analytics program that has a beautiful gui and some pretty freakin’ cool features.
A few weeks ago a new javascript, Unit PNG Fix, was released by Unit Interactive for an IE6 and below PNG support fix. Up until now I have been using SuperSleight with no issues. So I decided to do a little research this morning to find out what made Unit’s Interactive PNG fix better than good old SuperSleight.
Another important aspect in web design (combined with the right color combinations and Photoshop essentials and brushes) is getting just the right typography for your design. There are many, many free fonts available as well as tools to build your own. Not only that but you can use free online resources to determine the name of that elusive font you’ve seen used elsewhere and want to grab it for yourself.
Once you find the font perfect for your project then you have to know how to use it. While some of the best resources about learning more about typography are books (Thinking with Type and The Elements of Typographic Style are two of my favorites) there are tons of online articles and tutorials written by people in the design industry that will help you better your typography.
So recently I was working on a project that required image based navigation AND drop down menus. From the get-go I decided to use CSS Sprites for the tabbed menu for the normal, active and hover styles. I also decided the best way to implement the drop down was to use the “Son of Suckerfish” drop down menus heavily modified from the original code to fit in with the original programming I had done for the menu.
I’ve explained before how to use CSS Sprites for changing images, so I won’t go into too many more details on how to accomplish this, but to recreate this for your own site you will need to create one sprite for your normal tab, hovered and current/active tab. That’s three sets of tabs in one file.
I’m a huge, huge fan of the latest Firefox release. But I was really, really disapointed that a LOT of my very favorite (and most used!) plugins were incompatible. The plugin I felt most lost without was Aardvark, which I use every single day, practically all day long to aid me in development, editing and design.
Aardvark is a simple little Firefox plugin that when activated (right click and choose “Start Aardvark”) lets you highlight each elements on the page with a red border – not only that, a tab appears on the border with the element and id/class that is associated with it.
This plugin is critical for me (along with Firebug) when diagnosing layout problems.