Google has come up with a nice new image format called webp. Currently support for this format is fairly limited, so if you need to use webp images else where it might be nice to convert them to a more widely supported format. To do the conversion, Google has made a small tool available called dwebp. The tool however does only seem to support conversion of a single image, not a batch of images.
A while back I complained you couldn’t change title on documents in Google Docs. Well, you can. It just wasn’t obvious to me how you do it. Just click on the title while the document is open, and you can change it.
On most websites - including this one - the footer is the boring place where you (usually) place all the pocket lint, which didn’t make it into the page anywhere else. It usually have a copyright notice, links to a site map and other stuff which may be important, but not interesting (speaking in very broad terms).
Today I came across an article on footers with great usability. Footer Usability? Yes, and from a blunt disregard and ignorance, I’ve discovered that the site footer is an excellent place to place a lot more effort.
Sometimes web developers forget, that they are not typical net users and develop websites and applications for themselves rather than the intended mainstream users. Too often we let ourselves slip into a “geek to geek world”, and forget, that many of the sites we create are not for geeks, but for common users. Here are the top three mistakes made across a large number of mainstream websites, as I’ve seen them.
I was browsing across some pages at Telia Mobile – one of the largest mobile providers in Denmark (and Scandinavia) and frankly, their webshop leaves something to be desired in terms o user-friendly behaviour. I can to some extend accept to be rejected if there are reasonable reasons behind it, but this rejection – that’s just too much and too amaturish in 2005:
First the Internet Explorer doesn’t ship with OSX any more – Safari does and shouold be supported, if you intend to support Mac-users.
An odd discovery today – if you don’t specify a protocol in your links, the browser apparently suppose it’s the same (be that http or https) as the current page. You can se it in action on Slashdot by viewing their source – none of the regular links has protocol specification – they just start with two slashes and the hostname (ie. //netfactory.dk/).
In the case of Slashdot I suppose they don’t use it to save bandwidth, but in most cases it’s probably useless.
There are quite a large number of tools available for testing and checking a website, but the most valuable is (without doubt) the Web Page Analyzer – as it does tell (and help) you optimize your site in ways you may not have thought of. I am assuming that the site in question is either valid HTML (as any good site should be) or at least tested and found working in the browsers it should work in. The tool is for the “post design” process.