As you may already know, we’re a little obsessed with page load speed. We wanted our home page to load in under 1 second, and we were close. But close isn’t good enough. So, with some guidance from Ian, I started out on my quest for sub 1 second page load times. The journey took [...]

***** If you’ve ever used Photoshop on a Mac, you’re probably familiar with this guy. Would you like to send him packing and never see him again? If you answered yes, strap on your Photoshop helmet and get ready for the blog post of your life. For this blog post I am using Adobe Photoshop [...]

Last night I gave a presentation at the Seattle IA/UX meetup. Good pizza, plus I got to say ‘toilet bowl of death,’ which is one of my favorite phrases. IA, UX and SEO from Ian Lurie I know IA/UX and SEO are supposed to hate each other. What I don’t know is why. We’re all [...]

If you want to call yourself a web designer these days, you’d better be ready to keep up. Daily study is required or you’ll be left in the dust. I follow countless blogs, listen to podcasts during my commute, and work on random projects at home just to try out new things. When I start [...]

My daughter just turned 3. And aside from wondering where the devil the last few years of my life went, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make Christmas special for a girl whose birthday is in December. Charlie loves technology. My iPad 2 was instantly hers the moment I brought it home a [...]

OK everyone. Take a deep, freaking breath. I can’t sneeze right now without spraying germs on someone’s attempt at a data-driven work of art. Here’s why the poster you paid someone $400 to make isn’t an infographic: Lack of clarity. Infographics should ease and speed the consumption of information. If you take something you can [...]

Please note: I am not a server expert. This is stuff I figured out by bumbling around, crashing our server and generally wreaking havoc. Be careful, unless you want to see steam coming out of your IT team’s ears. I don’t want to shock anyone, but I’m a little obsessive. And competitive. No, really, it’s [...]

Good Design Roundup Good design doesn’t just mean pretty, it means functional too. Sometimes a website is born that combines those two things seamlessly. It’s like a miracle. Or more likely, people worked hard and communicated with one another, allowing design, functionality, and content to come together and deliver a clear and helpful message. A [...]

Custom tabs on Facebook Pages allow us to display our own HTML content inside Facebook Pages by embedding code in iframes. This is done by creating a Facebook app and providing a few parameters (like the URL where our custom HTML page is located). Here’s an example of a custom tab: Add a Custom Tab [...]

Every time I receive a logo in JPG format, a little part of me dies inside. Actually, it’s a big part of me, because choosing the right file type for images is an essential part of good web design. Did you know that JPG images lose quality every time you re-save them? PNG and GIF [...]