First of all, apologies for not posting on here for a while. We've been working hard on some really exciting projects recently and we're really proud to announce that we've undertaken projects for both Hotel Chocolat and Honda Europe in recent weeks.
We've always considered ourselves to be a "premium" design and development agency so it's important for us to back up our work with a premium service, which means supporting our growing client base in a timely and professional manner. Which is why we've decided to trial a new helpdesk system from Zendesk. We'd like to introduce you to "myTVI"
We've been testing my.tvi internally and we're fairly confident it should allow us to offer us a better level of support and we're ready to start trialling in with a few of our clients. If you guys like it as much as we do then we'll roll it out to everybody.
myTVI makes it easy for you to alert us if there is a problem with your site and keep track of the responses. It'll also help ensure that we never miss a ticket and are alerted to serious problems immediately via text message.
If you'd like to be included in the trial then please email
ben.nylk@tvidesign.co.uk
Fact: IE6 is a pain in the ass.Speak to any web developer and they'll tell you the same. IE6 has more problems than I've got time to mention, but here are just a few examples.
- It's got loads of rendering bugs, including the peekaboo and guillotine bugs.
- PNG transparency isn't supported.
- position:fixed isn't supported.
- The box model calculates widths and heights of elements incorrectly.
- min/max-width/height aren't supported.
IE6 has also been getting a lot of bad press recently...
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John Resig has posted on the jQuery blog about
the beta release of jQuery 1.3.
His post also contains a few details about what's new, most of which were included in the roadmap already published but there are a couple of surprises in there.
Sizzle Selector Engine
The new selector engine that John announced in August is here and apparently it can make certain tasks up to 400% faster in Firefox.
Native event delegation
I only posted last week about how event delegation can help you to optimize your code and it looks like jQuery will do it for you now, which means that any event handlers you add to a group of elements will automatically be added to matching elements when you create them.
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jQuery is awesome. I've been using it for about a year now and although I was impressed to begin with I'm liking it more and more the longer I use it and the more I find out about it's inner workings.
I'm no jQuery expert. I don't claim to be, so if there are mistakes in this article then feel free to correct me or make suggestions for improvements.
I'd call myself an "intermediate" jQuery user and I thougt some others out there could benefit from all the little tips, tricks and techniques I've learned over the past year.
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As web designers we're constantly having to make decisions on how to optimise websites while catering for as many users as possible. We often want to introduce new features and functionality using new technologies but we know that doing so may mean that a percentage of potential users may not be able to use the site or make full use of it's new functionality.
It's useful in these situations to have access to some decent
stats so that we know how many people we may potentially alienate ,but they're not always easy to come by and are obviously constantly changing. So, we've collected together as many as we can from around the web and present our handy guide to
stats for web designers.
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I have recently been debugging a few websites that have javascript functions that run on every page load (including ajax postbacks).
Traditionally, you would use sys.application.add_load to achieve this. However, Firefox 3 appears to only run functions assigned to this after postbacks and not on the additional load.
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Before launching our new site I spent a day trying to make the site faster. The new site is pretty graphics heavy and makes extensive use of javascript and CSS, so to begin with it was pretty slow. I found that the net traffic monitor built into Firebug was really helpful in showing me where the stumbling blocks were and by the end of the day I had got the page load speed down by 75%
If you haven't used it before, you'll need to install Firebug from
getfirebug.com. Then visit your site, pick a page to test (make sure you always test the same page to compare results), open up Firebug and make sure you tick the box to switch the net monitor on.
Next, ensure you've cleared your cache so that the browser is loading a fresh copy of all your files. Do this before each test to make sure its fair. Then just press f5 and watch as your files load. When it's finished you'll get a total at the bottom of the page sizes and the load time. My results were as follows.
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Browser sniffing is messy. There are a million ways to do it but none of them are particularly clean and most involve conditional statements such as "<!--[if condition]> HTML <![endif]-->" for IE and various other CSS selector hacks for other browsers.
I've done a fair amount of browser sniffing with jQuery recently and it's really easy, useful for when you need to detect the browser and version number in your javascript. It occurred to me that it would be easy to detect the browser and then put something in the DOM that your CSS could use for conditional formatting. So I wrote a quick script in JavaScript/jQuery.
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After many weeks of hard work we've finally launched our new website. What do you think?
You'll probably have noticed by now that you're reading our new blog, which we'll be using to keep everybody up-to-date with our movements, product launches and promotional offers, along with some thoughts and advice on web design and development that we hope you'll find useful.
We'd love to hear your feedback, so if you've spotted a spelling mistook, have a useful suggestion, or just fancy a chat then don't hesitate to call us, or drop me a line on
jon@tvidesign.co.uk