Web Safe Fonts

Whenever building a site especially your first site its very tempting to head over to your favorite font library and just go nuts. This is a exercise in futility though as almost 99% of those font cant display on the world wide web. Fear not intrepid young developer here is a list of the current fonts (many of them actually aesthetically pleasing) that are completely web safe.

Catch common usability problems before user testing.

There is a saying I always liked: "Don't try to say again what has already been said better," With that on my mind, I present to you the following link. http://userium.com/ This a excellent checklist/tool in your web development arsenal that allows you to catch common usability problems before user testing. Enjoy, and happy coding.

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Do's and Dont's of HTML Email Blasts.

Hey everyone, after a week off we are back with more helpful hints.

With the proliferation of email-blast software and websites all over the internet, its becoming increasingly popular for people to turn to these avenues in order to drive sign ups, direct to seasonal events, and really reach out and impress where a regular email would fall short.

One of the best aspects of these sites is their ability to let you craft a beautiful email-blast whether you have skills in HTML or not. Many people though can sometimes be a little to ambitious when diving into the HTML editors as they tend to carry their skill sets in designing websites into crafting their email blasts and they can be frustrated when the results do not match their efforts

Email clients such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook, Gmail, etc., can render your emails in different ways. What looks one way in Yahoo or Outlook 2003 may appear very different in Gmail or Entourage.
The root of this problem is the variance among email clients in the level of support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).

There is no real standard for what an email client should support and how it should go about supporting it. Every email client takes its own approach to rendering HTML and CSS – which is why an email that looks fine in one email client can look different in another.

So how can you or your designer ensure an email design remains consistent and looks great across all these different email clients? Here's a helpful list of "Do's and Dont's" on email blasts and HTML.

Hop on the “Mobile Friendly” Bandwagon

Many people are short on time these days and tend to do their websurfing on their phones or tablets. You want to make sure that your site looks good and is easily accessible on a mobile phone or tablet, especially with the thousands of young parents in AYSO.

You can easily make a separate style sheet that is mobile friendly for your Region website. This style sheet would reduce the use of images and adjust the width to that of whatever device the user is using to surf your site. If this is the route you’d like to take with your website, you can view a full list of tips here.

Embrace Browser Testing

Browser testing is important to ensure that your viewer audience can view your website accurately. It’s difficult to test in all browsers on one computer, since you can’t have them all installed on one single computer. There are tools out there to help with testing, and here are a few that I’ve used:

Adobe BrowserLab

Adobe BrowserLab is an amazing tool. I have used this tool so much when it comes to testing a website. It has every major browser AND lets you set up a custom list of browsers you want to test in. It even gives you the option to onion skin the displays between browser so you can easily compare what’s different in each browser. This tool is free to use as long as you have an Adobe account, which is free to create. It’s all web based, so you can use it anywhere without downloading anything. The only downside of BrowserLab is that it renders the website to an image, so you cannot test functionality. You can learn more about this great tool here.