The Raven Archive

Archive for the ‘ Web Design ’ Category

Cross Browser Testing

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

I recently started using a new service called CrossBrowserTesting, and it’s so incredibly awesome I felt compelled to write a review.  First some background… Browser compatibility is a difficult challenge for all web designers and developers.  The process of debugging HTML, CSS, or Javascript problems that only occur on specific ...

Bounce rates affecting rankings? Or SEO for SEO’s sake?

Tuesday, November 25th, 2008

Over at SEO Black Hat, QuadsZilla demonstrates correlation between traffic, specifically Google traffic, and bounce rate, claiming that bounce rate is being used to determine quality and factoring into rankings. Except his or her graphs show direct, rather than inverse, relationships between traffic and bounce rate. In other words, in ...

Conversion Tracking Made Easy

Saturday, November 22nd, 2008

One of my favorite new features of Raven is Conversion Tracking, located in the Analytics section. Similar to how Google AdWords conversion tracking works, Raven is able to easily track conversions, like signups and purchases. We recently used this for TweetStalk and were able to track where all of our ...

Google introduces SearchWiki; SEO heads explode

Friday, November 21st, 2008

If you’re signed in to Google this morning and have performed a search, you’ve no doubt noticed that they’ve introduced interaction elements that allow you to move results up or down or suppress them from your display. Google is calling this feature SearchWiki. According to the Google Help Center article ...

Firefox and Safari Are Aggressively Driving New Ways to Publish and Experience the Internet

Monday, August 25th, 2008

Apple just released Safari 4.0 Developer Preview to its developers. The new browser comes with several new features, including: CSS support for masks, gradients, reflections, and specifying a named canvas. Rudimentary support for the WAI-ARIA (Rich Internet Application) and cross-site XMLHttpRequest specifications. The ability to send messages between documents Storage ...

How to Grab a Screenshot of an Entire Web Page

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Web designers and marketers often need full-size screenshots for before-and-after shots and also for portfolio pieces. Fortunately, there’s many ways to create website screenshots. However, among all of the options, my favorite way to make full-length screenshots is by using Screengrab! — a Firefox Add-on. Using Screengrab! is about as ...

Microsoft Gives Away Early (or Late) Christmas Present to Web Designers

Tuesday, January 22nd, 2008

It is no secret that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 6 (and anything before it) is the bane of all Web Designers’ existence. If you’re a Web Designer and you don’t agree with that statement, then you are most certainly delusional and you probably hate Web Standards (assuming you’ve heard of ...

Create 404 Pages That Market Your Website, Not Turn Them Away

Tuesday, January 15th, 2008

From a user experience point of view, 404 pages are not something you want to see. If you reach one, it means the content is gone or has been moved. Also, the average Internet user has no idea what the “404″ actually means, even though that’s usually the message they ...

A Third (Smaller) Option for Embedding Flash Using JavaScript

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

In January (2007), I wrote a howto for embedding Flash using JavaScript. The examples I gave were for SWFObject and Unobtrusive Flash Objects (UFO) — the howto was for UFO. Now there’s a third viable option for embedding Flash using JavaScript. It’s called FlashReplace and was written by Robert Nyman. ...

How to View the Generated HTML Output from JavaScript Web Widgets

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

One of the best things to come from social networking and the so called Web 2.0 is the Web widget. Web widgets allow users to easily drop JavaScript code into their own website and instantly add content and features. Most Web widgets contain CSS ids and classes that allow the ...