Category: Programming Page 17 of 27

Programming

What’s On Your Programming Bookshelf?

On July 31, 2015

Do you read code? Reading code can help you learn to write better code. Whether that is database queries, JavaScript, CSS or your favorite programming language. You should read as much code as you can. Programming books can be a great source of code to read. Everyone who writes code should have a few favorite books on writing and designing code on their bookshelf.

Here is a sample of books that I have on my bookshelf:

The Pragmatic Programmer
Creative Code
The Strategic Web Designer
Don’t Make Me Think!
Always Be Testing
Bonus: The Magna Guide to Databases

Programming books on shelf

The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas

Want to be a programmer? The Pragmatic Programmer is a practical guide on the best practices of software development. Whether you are new to programming or experience, you can find tips and tricks to help you write better code. The authors, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas, use tips, stories, code and diagrams to help you learn new skills and habits.

Creative Code by John Maeda

Is programming a creative process? Creative Code shows that it is. This book has an wide variety of essays that talk about design issues and how to integration digital design into our daily lives. While not a typical programming book, the focus is on design and how to challenge your approach to problems.

The Strategic Web Designer by Christopher Bulter

How do be more than just a web designer? As you develop web projects, your clients need you to do more than design or code a website. They need you to think about their projects in a strategic and comprehensive manner. The Strategic Web Designer helps you to take charge of your web projects from design to launch and beyond.

Don’t Make Me Think! by Steve Krug

How do you keep people on your website? Many people leave websites for different reasons. They leave if it takes to long to load, too difficult to do anything or they can’t read it on their phone. How usable a web site is depends not only on the design, but on decisions made by the developer. Steve Krug wrote the original guide on Web Usability. In Don’t Make Me Think, his tips range from design to testing. He helps you to make your website better and more usable for your users.

Always Be Testing by Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar

Test. Test. And test some more if you want your website to more sales, leads and profits. In Always Be Testing, Bryan Eisenberg and John Quarto-vonTivadar explain how to use the Google Website Optimizer to test your website and to get your visitors to take action. Whether that action is subscribing to a newsletter, purchasing your product or sharing your latest post. They teach you how to develop a testing framework, optimize your landing pages and design tests.

Bonus Book

The Magna Guide to Databases by Mana Takahaski, Shoko Azuma and Trend-Pro Co., LTD.

The Magna Guide to Databases explains database through the use of a Magna story. When I found the book, I had never read any Magna. It was a fun refresher of how databases worked. I liked the way they introduce the story and how databases would help the main character, Princess Ruran solve her data problem. You learn with the Princess and Cain the concepts of a database and why they are important. In the Manga Guide to Databases, you switch from story to databases and back to the story. They build upon the database concepts presented in the story.

Summary

Technology changes quickly. Information in programming books can get quickly out of date. That shouldn’t stop you from reading programming books. You never know when you may find something that helps you on your next project. Keep reading and writing code.

What are a few of your favorite books?

Do You Need a Website Refresh or Redesign?

By admin

On April 28, 2015

In CSS, Design, Programming, Web Development

What do you do if your website is old or needs to change? Do you start over? Should fix what is not working for you? With a website, you have two options: refresh or redesign. Fix what you think needs an update or start over with a brand new site.
Redesign or Refresh?

Refresh or Redesign

What is a refresh? Fo example if your website was a house, a refresh would be like making over a room. To update your room, you may repaint the walls, replace a rug, curtains or even pillows and add new furniture. When you refresh your website, you leave the way the website functions and change how it looks. This may include changing the colors, fonts or even images.

What is a redesign? A redesign is where you start over. Instead of a makeover, you would tear the house down and build a new. With a website, you start over by building a new site.

When should I refresh my website?

Refresh or redesign? It depends on your needs. Why are you updating your site? Do you need to fix some small issues? Has your business changed and your website no longer reflects your brand? If you need to make small fixes, than a refresh will work for you. If you need to have it reflect how your business has changed, you want to redesign.

How do I do refresh my website?

Decide what your goals for the website are.
Look at your content and determine if you need to add, delete or update pages.
Prioritize what you want to work on.

What are you site goals?

When looking at a redesign or refresh, you should reevaluate your site goals. Is it performing the way you expect? Does it reflect your current brand? Are there any pages that just don’t work?

Do you know what content your site has?

Audit your website by figuring out how many pages you have and what they focus on. Is each page current, out of date or needs a slight tweak? Decide which pages you want to work on, remove and update.

Prioritize

What do you want to work on first? Does your content need updating? Do you need to change the look and feel first? Decide what you want to work on and schedule how you are going to accomplish fixing or updating your site.

Summary

Your website should change to reflect who you are as a business. This means you may need to either refresh or redesign your website. What you choose to do depends on your goals. Sometimes, your may need simple fixes and refreshes your website is the best choice. Other times, you may choose to start over because it is just easier and a better way to achieve your goals.

How to write usable error messages

By djbrensinger

On March 31, 2015

In Programming, Web Development

Have you ever come across a bad error message? If you have used a computer or any piece of technology, you may have seen them. What makes an error message bad? A bad error message is an error or dialog box that only makes sense to the person who wrote it in the first place. It doesn’t tell you what the error is, what caused it or how to approach solving it.
How To Write Usable Error Messages

How do you write good or usable error messages?

A good error message has three parts: what is the error, what caused the problem and how the user can fix it.

What is the error

Be Descriptive. Your error message should answer the five w’s: Who, What, Why, When and Where. An error message like “Invalid Entry” doesn’t answer the 5 w’s. A better message is “Your email address is empty. Please enter your email address.” It tells you what the error is, where the problem is located and how to fix it.

Make sure your error message focuses on the user. It should use simple and jargon-less words to describe the problem Your error message should be short and direct. No extra words. If you think it has too many words, cut out the extra ones.

What Caused the Problem

You want to explain what caused the problem. Was it a data entry error? Did they forget to fill something out? Was it something beyond their control like a lost database connection? Let them know in simple and easy to understand terms.

How can the user can fix it

Your error message should also have a way to fix the problem. If they forgot the fill out a field, tell them which field. Make it easy to figure out the problem.

Additionally, your error message should also be visible. Your error message should be displayed prominently so the user can see it and know that an error has occurred.

Summary

Why do you want to do this? Remember, you are not writing error messages for yourself. You are writing for the person who may be annoyed, doesn’t understand the code and just wants to get a task done. That person may be you.

Need more tips on writing usable error messages? Check out these 7 tips on writing friendly error messages.

What is smart design?

By djbrensinger

On November 28, 2014

In Design, Programming, Web Development

As we use mobile devices, they change how we interact with our devices and content. Developers and designers need to consider many things when developing a website. You have to think about responsive design, speed, UI/UX, patterns, touches and gestures. Sara Cannon explains how mobile design trends affect how we design.

Smart design is

Content-focused
Fast
Informed
Refined

How to you create a smart design?

Be content-focused

Your design should be Mobile First, Readable, Designed for Content and uses digital storytelling. It just works. A visitor can read your site on their computer, laptop, tablet or phone. They can read your website using what ever device they choose. Make the content the most important part of the design. Use web design techniques, like photos, videos, fonts and more to help tell a story.

Be Fast

Your design should be fast. People have a limited attention span when it comes to slow loading websites. Make sure your site loads quickly. Sara talked about balancing speed vs awesome. Some photos may make a design look awesome, but they take time to load. You need to decide if that photo is really necessary. If it is, you can optimize the photo for the web. A tool that smushit optimizes photos for the web. You can speed up how your site loads by using tools like Icon Fonts and SVGs (Scalable Vector Graphics). You can get Icon Fonts from Font Awesome, Fontello or IcoMoon. Nounproject is one place to get svgs. By replacing icons with fonts, you can increase the speed of your site.

Be Informed

Every website performs differently. You have well and bad performing pages. By using Google Analytics or another web analytic tool, you can learn more about how your site is performing and find out what works. Not enough people do user testing. User testing of your website can tell you a lot about what works and what doesn’t. You can also learn why someone uses your site in unexpected ways. Use usertesting.com to invited people to help you test your website.

Be refined

A little bit of motion can add refinement to your website. Add animated navigation icons with CSS Transformations. The motion lets people know that something has happened.

Smart Design – Content-first, Fast, Informed, Refined. WordCamp NYC 2014 from Sara Cannon

When you consider a new website or redesigning an old one, think about how to focus on the content and not just making the site look pretty. A site that is readable, fast and just plain works is going to have more people using it than one that looks awesome. Remember to make a site that is content-focused, fast, informed and refined.

Milwaukee WordCamp 2014

By djbrensinger

On October 31, 2014

In Design, Programming

WordCamp Milwaukee was held at the UWM Continuing Education Center at the Grand Avenue Mall, July 25-27. UWM’s Continuing Education Center was a great location. Thanks to the WordCamp Milwaukee team for organizing this event. Thank you to the sponsors and speakers for making the event possible. It was a great weekend for learning more about WordPress, Web Development and Business.

As with other WordCamps, it can be difficult to choose which sessions to go to. They offered sessions for developers, designers, marketers and business people. Here are my notes from a few of the sessions I went to.

Brain Based Conversions!

Luke Summerfield talked about how to increase website conversions. By using learning about how psychology and neurology affects our decisions. Luke gave us some techniques for optimizing your website and marketing.

Demonstrate Authority by adding Testimonials, Case Studies and Awards and partnering with authorities (experts).
Show Social Proof by adding or letting users post photos and videos. Include a way to add reviews and ratings. Let people see that you are active on social media.
Demonstrate Reciprocity by sharing others content, random acts of kindness and offering free content.

Brain Based Conversion – NeuroMarketing from Luke Summerfield

SVG is for everybody

Chris Coyier explained what SVG is, how to use it in web design and resources to help you incorporate it into your design. SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics. It uses XML to define the image. Which means the image can be scripted, searched, indexed and compressed. You can create them with any text editor or drawing software. SVG’s can be resized without a problem. They can be used as: an image, in a background and inline HTML. Most browsers support SVG. You can use caniuse.com to see if your browser supports it.

Tools Mentioned By Chris

The WordPress JSON REST API

Rachel Baker and Ryan McCue talked about the WP-API. A plugin that provides an easy way to use REST API through HTTP and JSON. Why is this needed? As WordPress moves towards becoming an application framework, new tools are needed. WP API provides a simple and easy interface to WordPress. You can talk to WP Query, users API, posts API and more.

Where can we use it? Plugins, Forms and Validation, Front-end content editing and displaying content on another WP site or multisite. Anything that you can think of for CRUD (create, read, update and delete). Where can you get it? The JSON REST API plugin is available on github.

How to tell a customer they’re wrong and make them love use

Marc Benzak talked about a time when a customer had an issue with their website and believed it was Marc’s tool, ServerPress, that caused the issue. After working carefully with the customer on this issue, Marc’s team determined that the problem was with the additional programming that the customer had hired out prior to using ServerPress. Marc gave us tips on how to handle a stressful situation with a customer who is panicking and angry.

Ask these 4 questions

Is there any truth (Did we really screw up)?
Am I reacting logically or emotionally?
What are they really saying between the lines?
Are they really calling my baby ugly?

Your customer is upset because of trust, pressure, unexpected issues, lack of education and information and panic.

Before addressing the customer, remember:

It’s a team effort
Your ego doesn’t count
There is no place for emotion
Don’t take it personally

When you address the customer, use this equation:

(Apology + Resolution + Education) + Apology = Satisfied Customer

Summary

WordCamp Milwaukee was a great event for learning and connecting with designers, developers and business people. These tips on web design, development and managing customers are just a sample of what can be learned and shared at a WordCamp.

If you have a WordCamp happening near you, plan to attend to learn more about WordPress and the community.