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Archive for the ‘HTML’ Category



Get Your Tabbed Design Right

August 24th, 2008 by Blogging Rock Star

Since the time Amazon made a tabbed interface popular, web designers have been talking about the design pattern. Are tabs good? Are they bad? How do you make them?

Tab Design

Amazon has since removed tabs from their site, but it’s still a useful metaphor when done right. So what’s right and wrong? The Usability Post shares 5 tips for tabbed navigation:

  1. Connect the active tab to the content
  2. Make other tabs a different color
  3. Change the font color on the active tab
  4. Have the link area span the whole size of the tab
  5. Make sure the landing page has its own active tab

Each step is illustrated with the right and wrong way, and explained. That’s helpful. Now you can include tabs on your website without the wrath of the entire design community (you’ll never avoid all the wrath, no matter what you do). Just don’t look like Amazon in 2000:

Amazon.com Tabs

If you’d like to implement tabs and don’t know how to do them, you can’t miss with this classic A List Apart tutorial.

Originally posted on PlanetSean.com

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Validate all your HTML from a Google Sitemap

August 2nd, 2007 by Blogging Rock Star

Thanks to a few Google searches, I came across a cool web application to help automate and simplify the process which uses a sites Google sitemap to help validate pages.

That’s right, validate your entire website in one shot! No need to manually check pages anymore. Just set it and forget it.

The application written by Chris Riley is called Website Validator. Pretty catchy name don’t you think?

How it works is you enter your sitemap URL in the box and hit Validate. Bam. You’re done.

Magically it will validate each page in your sitemap and report back on any that don’t validate.

Keep in mind that if you have a large site full of content and dynamically generated pages, it could take a while to check everything.

Don’t worry because remember, it’s automatic. You can set it and walk away, then come back and check your results.

I ran my own site against it earlier and actually found a few posts that needed some fixing.

I still have a couple more to clean up but with this nifty web application, it won’t take long to track the issues down.

tag Posted in Google + HTML + Web Design | comment No Comments »