5 tips and tools to optimize your php application – Part 1 simple

With php becoming a more mature language and frameworks becoming a standard practice, it’s increasingly important to analyze your code and test the performance where possible.

Frameworks and libraries can speed up the development time and make code maintenance simpler, but it’s important you understand how they work.  It’s not just the framework itself but the entire footprint your application leaves when a user visits a specific page.  Ask yourself what’s involved from the database, to the code/framework, and then to the client through http requests.

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How to Select an Open Source Publishing Platform – Step 3: Determine Your Capacity for Internal Design

A couple weeks ago we took a look at some of the first steps to take when selecting an open source publishing platform. From starting off with doing some guerilla market research and viewing source code to figure out what tools others are using, moving on to trying to gauge your internal capacity for carrying out the web development work required to set up and extend your installation, the next step we’re going to cover is how to assess your internal capacity to carry out the design work needed to create the web user experience you’re looking for out of your open source site.

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Using Web Statistics to Make Informed Design Decisions

One of your worst nightmares as a web designer is getting caught up in a conversation where you’re trying to defend a design decision, and what you’re battling isn’t a rationed and informed perspective based on sound design principles of ratios, colour theory or typography, but rather the personal opinion of the loudest voice at the table.

“I think the page is too narrow. I hate it when I have to scroll through pages and pages of content,” says one person.

“Hmm. Yeah, but, I don’t know…I don’t like it when the page is too wide….makes it too hard for me to scan the text,” says the other.

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Creating custom tooltips by extending Dojo’s Dijits – in 8 Steps

Introduction

Tooltips are nice small additions that can improve the user experience. They are so common that Dojo and other javascript frameworks provide precanned ways of creating them. In dojo, they provide dijits (their widgets) that can do some amazing things on the user interaction side. That being said, when you want to customize them in any way, you can run into many walls.

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