Lifeline Blog
We’ve been selected by Kaddy-Lac of Burlington, a manufacturer of products for the golf industry, to redevelop their website. Stay tuned for more info!
Okay, so chances are, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last decade or so, you’ve used zip file compression on your computer at least once or twice. Zip compression will take large files and make them significantly smaller provided they aren’t compressed already, and best results are seen when compressing text files. This is fantastic when moving or storing large files on your computer, as it saves space and time when copying the files.
Now I know you’re thinking, “We know that Dave, but what does this have to do with with my website?” Well, it’s actually possible to compress your website as a zip file too! This digital alchemy will take the text files on your website, compress them, and then send them to visitors zipped. Don’t worry, the process is transparent for the visitor because their browser will automatically uncompress the files as they arrive and display them as if the website wasn’t compressed, only faster!
Why would you want to do this, you ask? Well, there are two very good reasons for using gzip compression (what it’s actually called) on website, so let’s take a look:
1. Makes Your Site Load Faster
If you’re using a large Ajax library or other text intensive files when loading your website, gzip compression will make your website load significantly faster. You have less than 10 seconds to grab a visitor’s attention, so even losing a few seconds while your site loads can be costly. Therefore, the faster the site loads, the better chance you have of grabbing that user.
2. Google Caffeine
Google frequently updates their algorithm to present users with better search results, and Caffeine is the name of their latest update (previous updates include Bourbon, Jagger, and Big Daddy among others). While Google keeps a pretty tight lid on the secret sauce that goes into their search engine results, the web professional community is usually pretty good at figuring out basic info about what Google is currently emphasizing for search engine rankings, and one of the factors that Caffeine seems to place greater emphasis on is page load time. So, now more than ever, it’s important for your page to load quickly as it could have an effect on your search engine rankings.
What Do I Do Now?
Now that you know about this fancy new zip compression, you probably want to make sure your website is using it, right? Well, the bad news is, it’s a little bit more complicated than zipping a file up on your computer… so it will be beyond the average user. The good news is, for someone who knows what they are doing, it is relatively simple to activate, so if you contact your web hosting provider they should be able to do it for you for little to no cost. If you’re a current client, we don’t charge to activate gzip compression — so get in touch with us today!
Lifeline has been contracted to build a web site for Dover Coast, a new adult resort lifestyle community in Port Dover.
We’re pleased to announce the launch of the new website for Ariss Valley! You can find it here.
Their new site features a photo gallery , calendar and automatic news all managed by our easy to use and friendly CMS!
Hello!
This tutorial will illustrate how to create a variable width/height box with a background image and rounded corners via CSS.
The solution is very easy, and the box created can be easily modified and shaped according to different widths and heights required.
First: You need a PSD file or an image with the entire box.
Second: You need to have an HTML file, a CSS file, and the images folder.
We recently launched a brand new website for Roulston’s Pharmacy, and it’s a perfect example of the different ways you can make your customers’ lives easier with a website. You’ve probably heard how important usability is when it comes to web design, but let’s talk about what that exactly means in real world examples.
You’ve got your obvious usability stuff: make sure that the text is legible and your navigation uses standard conventions for websites (i.e. don’t call your home button “Journey”), and all the other “common sense” things you want to put into a new website design… but taking things to the next level requires a bit more thought.
Start by figuring out what most of your customers are going to be coming to your website for. In Roulston’s case, one of the primary reasons is to find out location information (hours, contact details and so on). So, to meet this need, we placed a prominent AJAX powered pop-up on the right side of the header.
With this feature, the visitor can easily and quickly find all the important information about a specific location without reloading the page or having to navigate around the site searching for they store they are looking for. This is definitely a good thing, but we wanted to take things a step further with this particular section of the site. It’s often possible to make very small functionality changes to improve usability that your visitors might not even notice, which may sound counter-intuitive, but in actuality that’s exactly what you are trying to do. You don’t want a site visitor to notice things, everything should just “work”… if your user has to stop and think about what they have to do next, then it’s almost guaranteed that some of them won’t be able to figure out the next step and will become frustrated and leave.
Going back to the Roulston’s site, we took this relatively simple piece of functionality and tied it in throughout the site. For starters, it remembers your location, so if you visit the site at a later date you will have the previously selected location already displaying. This also ties into any part of the site that needs location-driven input from the user. If you click on the refill prescription link, the currently selected location will already be auto-populated into the form. This can be changed if needed, but it saves the visitor from telling us information that we’ve already asked them for (from their location selection earlier).
Remember, usability doesn’t have to extremely noticeable — the best examples of good usability aren’t even noticed, because they just work!
Most people would argue that CSS frameworks are the new “god” when it comes to CSS programming. Although in part this is correct, I highly disapprove of the need to use CSS frameworks for everything, for a couple of reasons.
First off, a CSS framework is a very compact, complex, and relatively useful base on which you can style your own elements independently. It offers basic layout classes, basic width classes, basic height classes and a standardized way to write your CSS. This is all nice and great – on paper – however, in real life and real life development it only works if you have a very specific goal you want to achieve.
CSS frameworks work very well when it comes to building a huge website that is PHP/ASP.NET based and which has a very standardized layout, ie. most elements on the page are placed into modules and each module is presented after a strict grid like this:
<div class="module"> <div class="mod-header"> </div> <div class="mod-content clearfix"> <div class="list-item"> </div> <div class="side-item"> </div> </div> </div>
If you have a website that has a lot of different content on all pages, and many different ways you want the content represented, building the website via a framework is impossible. But let’s say you wish to build an administrative panel for a software — then, since everything is modulated and everything almost looks the same because each module is a function of that CMS system (much like in wordpress admin panel ), actually making the entire CSS based on a framework is actually a smart decision that will cut your development costs significantly.
Also, having a framework is very good when it comes to getting people to work on your code; since I highly doubt that the developers who build the website will remain with the same company for the next 5-10 years, having a standard on which everything is built can help the newcomers get up to speed quickly and without too many hassles.
PRO
- Highly easy to build from the ground up
- Fits like a glove when you try to build an admin-panel or anything modular
- Helps newcomers get up to speed quickly
- Lowers development costs
CON
- Highly unsuited for building a regular dynamic website
- Very complicated to learn from the start if you have zero previous knowledge
- Lots of files to manage
So, CSS frameworks have their usefulness but it’s not the “end of everything” as they are preached by various CSS coders.
Regarding CSS frameworks suggestions, I highly suggest jQueryUI framework which comes bundled with image-icons, CSS code, and jQuery functionality all in one, so you can grab that @ http://jQueryUI.com
That’s all for this week.
Lifeline is excited to announce a revolutionary module available only for the Intelligent Web Interface, our proprietary content management system. This new accessibility module will allow any website running our CMS software to automatically maintain a website that will comply with the upcoming communications standard for the AODA and WCAG 2.0 level AAA accessibility compliance.
Users can simply edit and add content as they normally would and the system will automatically ensure that there is an accessible version of any content created available for impaired users.
The first automated system of its kind, the Lifeline AODA automatic compliance module is sure to make the lives of many of our customers easier in the near future!
We’re pleased to announce that the Norfolk Firefighter’s Association has selected Lifeline to develop a brand new website to help promote fire safety and prevention to the children of Norfolk County. We’re all very excited to work on what’s sure to be a fun project!
A big Lifeline Welcome to Ariss Valley Golf and Country Club, they’ve selected us to redevelop their static flash based website with our state of the art content management system. We can’t wait to see how great their website turns out.