10 Design Tips from Tech Soapbox
Written by J. Angelo Racoma in
3 Comments
AhmedF of Tech Soapbox gives us 10 HTML tips that will help improve speed and efficiency. I say building in the sense that you could either be a theme designer creating a blog template, or you could be tweaking your existing blog for speed.
For instance, Ahmed recommends you put in your content first, then other elements later. Good for SEO. Same with using proper headers and nesting these accordingly (H1, H2, H3). How about loading your javascript at the end of the page rather than the beginning? Great for making sites appear faster.
Then for usability, there’s the use of tabindex, which is great with people who are fond of using the keyboard to navigate rather than the mouse.
And then there’s conforming to web standards and conventions. I know designers these days do their best to conform. However, there are still some who use HTML elements for purposes other than their original intent. Yes, that’s thinking out of the box. But that “box” was created for a purpose. And sometimes structuring things differently makes it difficult to make changes down the road, especially when you change the use of commonly-used tags like LI, SPAN and P.
For non-designers or non-developers, these things might sound a little too technical. But if you look under the hood of your blog (i..e, the underlying code of the theme), or at least even your blog’s source, it pays to clean it up or tweak it to improve on the end-user experience. Even if you shave just a few seconds off loading time, or even if the improvements seem trivial, multiply that a thousand times over, and both your readers and your server will appreciate it.
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thanks
I know designers these days do their best to conform. However, there are still some who use HTML elements for purposes other than their original intent.