Web Dev

Data: The End of Web Design as an Art

I tested the color of a button on my company’s website to see if changing its color would change the amount of signups that this particular website received. It did. This leaves me feeling a bit uncomfortable as a designer. The issue is that I liked the color of the under-performing button better. I could […]

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My Backend is Better than Yours

For some reason I found myself in a subreddit where someone started the familiar post on why their backend programming language was better than PHP. I see this come up quite a bit with regards to PHP, I even remember responding to someone’s blog post several years ago where they were complaining about PHP — […]

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Random Video Backgrounds

I don’t know how early Paypal adopted the video-as-banner-background trend in comparision with other websites. It was one of the earliest places that I personally saw this design pattern appear. I have mixed feelings on using videos in that fashion. Perhaps Paypal does as well. Today when logging into Paypal I noticed that their video […]

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Do Bounce and Conversion Rates Matter?

I attended an interesting usability lecture/meetup today, with a talk by Jared Spool. I enjoyed the talk — it definitely got me thinking, but I disagreed with more than a few points. Overall, I gathered that the takeaway from the discussion was to emphasize that you need to focus on the things that matter, and […]

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Can We Please Stop This Infinite Scroll Madness

Several years ago, a trend started to rise.  I believe it was perpetrated by Pinterest, but perhaps it doesn’t matter who started it…

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SASS – Something Went Wrong Reaching

Tearing my hair out, trying to figure out what’s wrong with my SASS files.  I keep get a “something went wrong reaching…”, with a long filename of sass files, none of which is helpful.  My guess is you’re probably using Visual Studio, and using Web Essentials to compile your SASS.  To solve this (at least […]

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Using Handlebars Templates

 It generally takes me a few minutes to tease out the right code on the handlebars page to get everything to work, here is the essential code for setting up a handlebars template via javascript: Template Code (Html): Javascript Code: var data = {title: “Test Title”, body: “Test Body”}, source = $(“#test-template”).html(), template = Handlebars.compile(source), […]

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A Simple Slideout Menu

I just wanted an easy slideout menu.  Click on a link, and the menu slides out from the left side of the screen.  Click on the link again, or somewhere else on the page, and the menu slides back in.  Here it is: HTML Code data-openwidth is the width in pixels of however wide you […]

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Git Ignore a Directory

There is a folder within a project that you don’t want to be tracked with git, to do this on a windows computer: 1. In the project folder managed by git, make a new file named ‘.gitignore.’ (no quotes, but with periods at both ends — it will automatically be changed to ‘.gitignore’ 2. Add […]

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Why Isn’t My SVG Image the Right Size in Internet Explorer

My svg images looked fine in the good browsers, but in Internet Explorer, they were appearing huge!  I attempted to just set the size using css in the image tag, but that didn’t work.  What actually did work, was I opened up the svg file, and added a “viewBox” value to the svg declaration, so […]

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