User interface and User experience are very close to each other, both needed a very detail attention in between.

Recently I just finished code a new layout for simplyWP, an Internet web design firm co-found with my wife. There are a few points I learnt from the process.

Javascript is not so necessary

It is not always about the technology. Javascript can be very helpful if implement nicely and functionally. However, over using of Javascript on a web design, not only will it burden the loading time (Did you know recently Google put loading time into the PR ranking too?). I dumped a few fancy Javascript after a few round of testing the site.

Little graphic is necessary

Icon is a good attention grabbing tool. There is a reason why a lot of web designers are coming out with new icons design almost everyday. I personally don’t use much graphic, not the mention icons. But on this project, I like how the icons works on grabbing the attention of the user as well as call-to-action button.

Time to resume my job while learning from this priceless experience.

I find these points I learnt are great for the recent auto insurance quotes project. Call-to-action is what web design needed to do most. There is this project ending soon, but I might take some times adjusting it a little bit more

There are a lot of webmaster like to use “click here” as their anchor link to some other pages. Does it work well or does it optimized for the SEO? Well, not at all.

The keywords “click here” is too competitive. Not only hard to climb to the top, we have not much point about using the anchor link too, because it doesn’t optimize the linked page.

What webmaster want is a keyword or a phrase like “JQuery tutorial” or maybe the title of the page?

I started to debate myself over Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Now here is how I use both of them…

Google Chrome

Because it is fast, it is my primary browser. I check Google Reader read blog and etc. I cannot start developing web using Chrome as the Developer Tools is not as function-able as I thought it would be.

Google Chrome is like a weight loss version of Firefox, with all the extensions available online, I can of course operate it like how I operate Firefox before.

The only down point of Google Chrome, is those extensions are not 100% working well. Most are online apps, which make it a business tool but not end-user friendly.

Mozilla Firefox

Because it is slow, I place it my secondary browser. When I develop a website, only I will check it, and it’s a final check only I will come to Firefox.

I can’t stress enough that some addon like FireBug and Developer Tools are hell of the addon you must have if your business/career is related to web.

Well, of all… I am updating Mozilla Firefox to 3.6.2

As I mentioned earlier, Microsoft is giving an IE9 test drive of their latest development of IE9.

Well, I got an email from a client telling me something is wrong in IE9 Preview. I was shocked that some how, some users are so keen about IE9 development progress.

In all unwillingness, I downloaded and installed the piece of software, hoping that it will work much better. Well, it did

Put away the crash that happen so often (it is a beta preview after all), the developer tools is definitely an improvement on IE. Especially it works much better than Google Chrome, seriously!

Few months back, I got a call from a client (who is also a friend). He is looking for an online printing business. Things like printing business cards, vouchers, promotional umbrellas and etc. Well, I did not charge as much as I should or usually do, looking at the angle that he is, after all, a friend.

Now, since I’m a web designer in this one, I outsourced the back-end and come back to front-end this few weeks. We are heading to the finishing though, the biggest problem now is… VPS – Virtual Private Server.

I proposed a Dedicated Server before, however, due to the budget, they choose to go with VPS. However, the question is this: How to control a VPS?

As far as I am clear with is that, there is option to install Ubuntu server, which I am familiar working with. What I am troubling to see is, how do I taking the full control over the server itself…