JQuery is a JavaScript Framework intends to decrease the time it takes to code the user enhancements; a website should always be able to work without JavaScript. JavaScript is just to improve the user experience.
Key Advantages of jQuery
Very easy to learn and code. If you are familiar with basic JavaScript and CSS you should be able to pick it up quickly.
A wide range of plugins available thanks to its large development community.
Its cross browser compatibility is great. The same code will be able to work in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari or even IE6.
JQuery has fantastic documentation, which has a Firefox search engine plugin.
Unfortunately there is one disadvantage with jQuery. If a developer incorrectly utilizes it, the page loading times will drastically increase. This is mostly down to a developer adding lots of plugins without considering the total bandwidth required to send the data.
Building a website is not difficulty, but making it look perfect in very browser is almost impossible. Here are a few essential tools to make cross browser testing a little easier.
IETester – Internet Explorer is a pain to build a website on, mainly because standalone versions are difficult to run on Windows Vista and Mac. This little tool makes testing your website on multiple versions of Internet Explorer a breeze.
IETester allows you to compare you website in Internet Explorer Versions 5 to 8. Its interface is easy to understand and while there is still work needed to be done on it, I would be surprised not to see it on every web developer/designer’s desktop.
iPhoney – Lots of users are now browsing the internet on their iPhone. It makes sense for webmasters to make sure their website works correctly on the small screen.
BrowserShots – BrowserShots is quite famous for allowing designers to see their websites is lots of browser (in the region of 93) on major OS’s. The main disadvantage though is that you have to wait over an hour to see the screen shots.
IE NetRender – Similar to BrowerShots, in terms of a web based screen grab service. But this website does not require a wait of up to an hour to see a screen shot. However, it does only support Internet Explorer.
Here are a few quick and easy tips to remember about starting a website, which should make your website more successful.
1. Quality is better than Quantity
This tip can be put in several contexts. Content wise, if you have thousands of pages essentially saying “I’m great” in thousands of ways you have wasted your time creating them. Instead make a single easy to find page, which engages the user quickly and gets to the point.
Traffic wise, it’s better to have a small audience which engages with your content (or will pay for it) then a large audience who do not engage with your content and end up just increasing server costs. A notable example of a Company which has decided to focus on serving the 10% of their audience who will pay for content is News Corp.
2. Start Small
When you start you may want to do everything under the sun. Unfortunately in most cases this leads to websites stalling in development. For example many websites spend years “Under Construction” and when they are finally released their product or service is outdated or uncompetitive.
Some of you may have noticed several twitter users complaining about their “clients” accounts getting suspended. In some cases the user was doing nothing wrong ( See Mashable: Influx of Twitter Account Suspensions Creating Confusion). But in others the user was clearly not helping the twitter community.
Here is a neat little screen shot of people complaining their account has been suspended:
I think the screen shot speaks for itself (Click the picture to see a larger version).
HTML 5 – Essentially this means more people will be able to support markup such as the video tag and footer tag, which makes the internet a more indefinable place. We can also stop using those annoying < object> tags to play flash videos (Which normally causes invalid code).
