News

Do you know why Speedy Gonzales was always the best? The answer is simple – that tiny mouse was damn fast! And that’s exactly what Google thinks…

…ok, maybe not literally. However, Google said that their search algorithm needs changing and updating. They decided page loading time will have an influence in page position on search results. It doesn’t sound scary, does it? Seems like this change isn’t huge… but try to test your page with a web development tool (Try Web Page Analyzer – from Website Optimization) for checking your pages’ loading time. Believe me – you will be surprised! This can be one of the biggest changes in Google’s algorithm since long long time.

So if you want your page to rank better in Google – make it faster. But don’t worry! Google is only testing this solution in some part of the USA and the influence of page loading time will only be a couple percentages of the whole SEO process. So, no need to be scared just yet

“The Australian Government have announced their plan to adhere with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. All Government websites will require Level A compliance by 2012, and Double A by 2015. The new standard replaces replaces WCAG 1.0, which was introduced as a mandated requirement for agencies in 2000.”

Read more here.

Smashing Magazine interviewed XHTMLized along with other awesome web agencies to find what makes a great cover letter for a job application. Get some tips on applying to work with the pros here!

The Olympic fever has overcome us at XHTMLized. We decided to have our own little game and we want you to compete with us! How fast are you in image slicing? Are you able to beat the fastest slicer on the XHTMLized team? Check your skills in this image slicing speed trial (use Online Stopwatch to track your time):

1. Download trial PSD (2.5 MB)
2. Slice 40 photographs from the PSD
3. Store them to a separate folder with file names from 01.jpg, 02.jpg, 03.jpg … to 40.jpg. Start with the first row from the left to the right, then continue with the second row, third row and so on.
4. Store JPGs with the quality you think is best in this case so the images still looks good. Count time for experimenting with the quality into the total time.
5. Post the time it took you to complete the trial, along with the technique you used in the comment section below

The fastest time on our team was 3:30. Can you beat it?

Have fun!

Newsletters are becoming more and more popular for companies and even individuals, and for good reason. Newsletters allow you to keep your clients or customers informed of promotions, sales, contests, and of course, news. The great thing about newsletters is being able to communicate with a highly specific audience – your niche audience. Since signing up for a newsletter is generally done by the user, it means your subscribers are interested in your company and/or what you have to offer.

Sending out newsletters can establish yourself or your company as a market leader and being one that is reputable. You encourage buyers and you remind users of your company’s presence. However, it’s not good enough to just have a newsletter these days. A successful newsletter is one that gets read. In order to get your newsletter read, you must have a well planned, well written and well designed newsletter. The good news is, it’s not hard to get started and we can help you at any or all stages.

It’s as simple as one, two, three… (OK, four):

1. Find a company that can send your newsletter

   We recommend the leader of the pack, Campaign Monitor. Campaign Monitor is email marketing software for web designers and their clients. You can send beautiful email campaigns, track the results and manage your subscribers. It’s cheap too, at only $5 per campaign + 1 cent per recipient. That means you can send your newsletter to 500 people for just $10!

   We’ve been using Campaign Monitor and we have to say, the most encouraging information is the powerful analytics. You can see which subscribers opened your newsletter, which unsubscribed, what email clients they are using, what links they clicked and more. It’s powerful information that can help you redefine the way you send future newsletters.

2. Find or create a template

   Campaign Monitor offers a variety of free templates, all tested and proven to work in all the major email clients. It’s as simple as adding your own content. If you want to distinguish yourself from others, you may want to design your own newsletter, or have us design one for you. When coding a newsletter, you have to be very careful. If you thought web browser support was bad (hello, IE), once you see the world of email clients, you’ll be surprised by the poor support. Microsoft, again, shames us with Outlook 2007 and it’s upcoming 2010 (tweet about it). However, have no fear! We have a great team of newsletter coders who just love to get down and dirty with tables.

3. Fill in your interesting content

   There’s two ways you can do this. You can (or have us) create an email template for Campaign Monitor. This will allow you to change your content each month, with great ease. No messing around with the code, you use Campaign Monitors WYSIWYG editor and see your changes in real-time. Change your titles, content and images easily with use of a template. Or, if your a code monkey, you can make the changes to the code yourself, but with a powerful editor like in Campaign Monitor, there’s no reason to.

4. Send your Campaign

   Follow the steps in Campaign Monitor and send your campaign. It’s simple, intuitive and fast. That’s all there is to it!

At XHTMLized we offer newsletter designs, newsletter copy and of course, newsletter coding & templates. Contact us today for an estimate!

You know, while we’re on the topic of newsletters… how about you join ours? Put your email address in the form at the bottom of this page and you’ll be able to hear our exciting news each month! Oh, and in case you were wondering, Campaign Monitor supplies you with the form code, so you too can add a newsletter registration form on your website with a quick copy and paste. See? Campaign Monitor really is great! (and no, we’re not getting paid to say that, we truly are blown away)

At XHTMLized we recently held the first of our (soon-to-be regular) Open Forums. The Open Forum is a chance for everyone on the team to be vocal about how things are going in the company. The goal of an Open Forum is not only to set aside the time to talk about a specific idea but also to generate ideas in order to take action on it.

The Open Forum takes place on our real time team collaboration chat application – FIVES. As the team is geographically dispersed, it’s an awesome tool for bringing everyone together.

With a large team, it’s important that everyone gets heard, so we play a game of ‘Spaceball’ where we pass the ball to each other. Much like the conch (from Lord of the Flies), when you have the ball it’s your time to talk. Spaceball is a technique adapted from agile scrum meetings and something we do every twelve hours at XHTMLized to keep everyone on the track.

After the Spaceball session, someone takes the role of the host and guides everyone to talk through what was mentioned in Spaceball.

Before the Open Forum, an invitation to the team was sent out, inviting them to think of the biggest internal issue we have. What was initially planned as an hour discussion turned into well over four hours, and we learned some valuable lessons for the next Open Forum.

Focus the focus

The topic of ‘What’s your biggest internal issue?’ is something very important for a company to pay attention too. However, for an Open Forum it’s way too general. In our Spaceball there was myriad of internal issues, however even with 4 hours we only really touched on one central topic. This central topic had been identified before the Open Forum, so it would have been more valuable for the team to come into the Open Forum with a much more focused topic. As this didn’t happen not everyone’s gripe got discussed and we didn’t get to talk about the central focus as deeply as we could have otherwise.

Be explicit in what you mean

A challenge with any communication is assuming people know what you’re referring too. This is only heightened with online communication. During our Open Forum, what some people understood by the term ‘internal projects’ is different to what others thought. While some people were talking about a specific person when they said the ‘visionary’, other people understood it as more a generic term. It’s much better to call a spade a spade so discussion is not wasted with people talking about different things.

Things are solved via solutions – not problems

We invited the team to bring to the Open Forum the problems they are facing. Problems are important and need to be heard. However, it’s more constructive to ask people to focus on the solutions we’ve already had and how to replicate them.

In closing, our Open Forum did result in some specific outcomes that we’ve taken action on to make XHTMLized the best psd2html service ever!

One item was the need for better QA on blog posts. There have been typos and grammar issues in previous post due to the lack of anyone editing them before publish! So starting from this post, we should have smoother reading blog posts. Will this be appreciated or people don’t really care? Feedback on this is most welcome!

Ars Technica have published a good analysis on browers wars for January 2010.

Chrome is on a roll. It’s the fastest-growing browser in terms of market share we’ve seen in a long time. And its rapid growth corresponds with Internet Explorer’s steady decline. Keeping that in mind though, data from last month shows that IE8 has managed to grab 25 percent of the browser market, beating all versions of Firefox to the punch. In January 2010, only Chrome and Safari showed positive growth.

That means IE8 is used by one in four users on the Web.

Analysis shows that roughly a third of web surfers use browsers that support basic HTML 5 implementation (Safari, Chrome and Firefox). It’s a good sign that we’re close to being able to use HTML5 and expect a sizable number of users to be compatible.

It also means that roughly half of all the web surfers now have reasonably standards compliant (CSS2) browsers (Safari, Chrome and Firefox).

So it’s a great start to the year. If large corporations stop enforcing IE on workers, it’ll be a big win.

Lets forecast how the iPad will change how websites are designed. Here’s the top four things which change the game for website designers:

1. Adoption rates that makes you wish you bought Apple stocks

The iPhone is the icing and mobile is the cherry – the iPad will be the cake.

Despite hype, analysts concur that the iPad will follow the same hockey-stick adoption as the iPhone. From day one, it was common for websites to have an iPhone-friendly alternative. Now it’s also almost expected. Often websites don’t even care about mobile support. At a bonus, once a web page is iPhone-compatible it’s also 90% ready for other mobile platforms. The iPhone is the icing and mobile is the cherry – the iPad will be the cake.

2. A display you can poke a finger (or ten) at

Get ready for stiff necks – we’re now designing for 768-by-1,024.

Resolution wise, the iPad has a display of 1,024-by-768 pixels – interesting right? Apple didn’t choose a 16:9 ratio (optimal for video) but went for the traditional computer spec. So in terms of websites, nothing changed right? We’ve been designing for 1,024-by-n since 2006. Wrong! Remember the keynote? (I do. I watched it 50 times.) Ideal viewing for websites, is holding the iPad vertically. Get ready for stiff necks – we’re now designing for 768-by-1,024. Those folk that brought out the computer with the vertical display were from the future! Plus, with rotation, fluid layouts will be essential. The 960 grid is going to replaced by something new.

3. A new way to interact

When using a keyboard and mouse your eyes follow the cursor. With the iPad, there is no cursor as such, guiding your eyes. With this new perception, UI and UX rules change.

Interaction with the iPad is via direct multi-touch. Imagine reading this website now and just pointing to links to go there. There is going to be a whole new field of interaction design for web designers to explore. When using a keyboard and mouse your eyes follow the cursor. With the iPad, there is no cursor as such, guiding your eyes. With this new perception, UI and UX rules change.

Usability labs everywhere, have taught us that running navigation across the top or side of a website is most user-friendly. It may apply when clicking a link is as easy as tapping it. Context navigation is likely going to get a lot of love. Methods like the page-peel on our homepage will become one of the next design trends. Hover-states are not needed. And who knows – Apple will potentially enable the iPad websites to take advantage of multi-touch!

4. Safari setting the standards

For the iPhone, we expect web-surfing to be inferior to a computer. For the iPad, we expect it to be superior.

Finally, it’ll be interesting to see what version of Safari the iPad has. For those cool-kids (who have played around with it, and designed a website for the iPhone), you know when it comes to Safari, apples ain’t apples. Now, although the iPhone has Safari, it’s not the same Safari you run from a desktop on your Mac – it’s Mobile Safari. When it comes to front-end development there are differences. For example Mobile Safari doesn’t handle “Fixed Positioning” natively, not to mention the lack of support for the Flash Player. For the iPhone, we expect web-surfing to be inferior to a computer. For the iPad, we expect it to be superior. The iPad’s built for web-browsing after all!

Summary

My predictions are the world will eat the Apple iPad and swallow the core. It’s going to trigger a whole new wave of web standards. The iPad could actually become the defacto standard to design towards. The fact that websites will also look good on a computer will be the cherry. Now.. someone just give me OmniGraffle and TextMate for the iPad and I can let my laptop get dusty!

At XHTMLized, we’re all (ok, most of us) huge Apple enthusiasts, so yesterday was a day marked on all our iCals. Yesterday being the day Apple would tell us all about their new tablet. It was all too exciting! Our geographically dispersed team gathered, as we do every day, in our futuristic work chat and immediately went scouring for a feed of the live event that took place at 10AM PST. And there we had it, some shifty video, but most importantly audio and pictures! We oohhed and ahhhed all at the same time.

There it was, the iPad. Wait, the… iPad? All jokes aside (I’m sure you’ve heard them already), the iPad has more features than we anticipated and at a lower price than we imagined! While some say the iPad is a big letdown, and others rave about it, we’re plain ol’ happy with it.

So, what is the iPad experience like? It’s your iTouch or iPhone, just bigger. It has a large Multi-Touch screen (same screen size as an Amazon Kindle DX, 9.7-inches diagonal), a 10-hour battery life, newly designed built-in apps, plus all the downloadable apps developed for iTouch & iPhone are compatible. How compatible? Time will tell. With such a vast difference in screen-size, there will likely be problems with a lot of apps that use the Multi-Touch screen to its full advantages (though this wasn’t mentioned at all). But rest assured that iPhone developers are already starting to build apps with the iPad SDK since developers can build and run iPad applications on their Macs using the iPad Simulator. In addition, iPad apps can run in iTouch/iPhone scaled or pixel doubled mode to fit the screen.

The iPad is not a laptop and it’s not meant to replace one (at least not yet). It’s convenience, it’s social networking, it’s as Jobs said, “more intimate than a laptop.” It doesn’t have a camera or a web-cam, but I suspect they are holding out for future versions. As one of our project managers said, it’s like “Minority Report”, just without the glove.

There is a keyboard dock (sold separately) that charges and props up your iPad at the same time. There was no mention of a mouse and there’s likely no plans for a mouse. That would defeat the purpose of the touch-screen and bring it closer to competing with a laptop or netbook.

I may be biased because I’m an avid reader, but one of the main pros of the iPad is definitely the ability to read eBooks (this was a given) but even more the new iBook store (Though, shame on Apple for a near exact copy of the Delicious Library user interface). The Kindle & Kindle DX are going to have one heck of a time competing with the iTab. Why would I buy the Kindle DX for $489.99 when I can buy the iTab (which can do so much more) for $499.00? However, if the prices of the books shown during the demo of the new iBook store are accurate, prices are quite a bit higher than Amazon prices. That doesn’t help Amazon much though, especially since iPad users with be able to download public domain books from Google and has support for the ePub format, unlike Amazon.

The iPad starts at $499 for the 16GB version, $599 for the 32GB and $699 for the 64GB. Add an extra $130 on top of each price for 3G models (there are six models in total) The WIFI models will be available worldwide in 60 days and the 3G models 30 days after that.

There will be two pricing plans in the US with AT&T. The first, 250 MB of data a month for $14.99 or an unlimited plan for just $29.99 a month. Oh, and no contracts! I would think the typical iPad user would need the unlimited plan, 250 MB just isn’t enough. However, WIFI is readily available and free in a lot of places now so is it worth the extra money if the 3G network is something you plan to use once in a blue moon? Unless I’m out in a cornfield, I doubt I’ll be needing it.

There’s so much more to the iPad that wasn’t discussed here. Check out more features and details at the official Apple iPad website.

What are your thoughts on the iPad? Are you going to buy one? Is the iPad paving the way for all future electronics?

Early nineties: before the Web 1.0 bubble; when Internet Explorer was cool – and ‘geek’ was not; this is when I started building my first websites. For those who remember these glory days, you may also remember Derek Powazek. Youngsters may also know him from recent times – Derek to this day creates web experiences which redefine the way we look at things. I’d still rank his baby Fray as one of the top sites ever. I long to see Kvetch reborn. It was Powazek that I’d turn to for inspiration back in the day. Derek is a true web superhero.

For those that don’t know Derek, he’s just captured the excitement, hopes and possibilities that many of us are feeling right now, in a must-read blog post. It’s a great way to pass the next 6 hours, as we hold our breath… refresh our browsers… waiting for the era of Apple’s iTablet.

So here’s a toast to you Derek! Don’t stop punching. And here’s to you Apple! May you change the way we interact with technology yet again! Let’s hope we start to forgot, how the world used to be, before the iTablet (and it’s not just a big iPhone).