XHTMLized

Back from SparkUp!

wojtek — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 16:48:24 +0000

Last week polish part of our international team attended SparkUp, a one-day User Experience conference hosted in fabulous town of Poznan, Poland. The program (spread over two paths) aimed strictly for those interested in Usability, Design and Front-End Development. As the first conference hosting that number of UX specialists from around the world, no wonder it got attention of the whole polish blogosphere.

Stop Being So Clever — Sparkup Conference

The opening words went for Bruce Lawson of Opera and Andy Budd of Clearleft. Bruce talked about HTML 5, showing us how it can help us build better websites and why we should start using it today. Bonus points showing the video of him dancing in turkish dancer’s outfit — he promised to do that late at the afterparty, but we must have missed that. Andy, on the other hand, focused on web design. His “Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!” talk soaked in inspiration that everyday life gives us. After that, we could learn CSS 3 with Yaili. That portuguese girl tried to persuade us IE6 is not that bad. People laughed. We did, too.

Persuasive Design: Encouraging Your Users To Do What You Want Them To!

Next, Remy Sharp explained how to build quality behavior layer and even help making prototypes using jQuery (slides). Remy talked in depth about popular faults done by a lot of programmers. We’ve been happy to see that the topic of front-end performance optimization got proper focus thanks to Piotr Czekała. The audience went through Yahoo! Yslow’s and Google Speed’s guidelines in order to find a good way to simply make websites load faster.

The conference got mostly positive reviews from attendees, and despite a few technical circumstances, it can be considered successful. XHTMLized was proud to help making this happen by sponsoring the event. We certainly hope SparkUp is going to happen again next year – if so, we’re going to be there again. Let’s meet again in Poznan next year!

If you’re from Poland and interested in doing some work, we strongly encourage you to apply to our company via our special mail praca@xhtmlized.com

2cloudnine

dave — Wed, 26 May 2010 02:59:46 +0000

If you’re in Australia, be on the forefront of technology and discover the substantial benefits that cloud computing offers. 2cloudnine is Australia’s go-to place for anything related to the cloud.

Viewpointr

tine — Fri, 14 May 2010 01:47:59 +0000

When Bill Withers wrote the lyrics to “Lean on Me” he could have been thinking about the great new startup Viewpointr!

Viewpointr is a real-time question and answer site where you request and receive help from your extended community via a simple Twitter-like experience. So the next time you need somebody to lean on, it’s just a click away!

XHTMLized is proud to have helped Viewpointr implement the entire front-end of this hot web application.

Viewpointr launches on stage at the Summit Series conference Friday, May 14th. It is followed by Bill Clinton’s keynote speech.

Fast, Faster, Google!

pawel — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 21:54:29 +0000

Do you know why Speedy Gonzales was always the best? The answer is simple – that tiny mouse was damn fast! And that’s exactly what Google thinks…

…ok, maybe not literally. However, Google said that their search algorithm needs changing and updating. They decided page loading time will have an influence in page position on search results. It doesn’t sound scary, does it? Seems like this change isn’t huge… but try to test your page with a web development tool (Try Web Page Analyzer – from Website Optimization) for checking your pages’ loading time. Believe me – you will be surprised! This can be one of the biggest changes in Google’s algorithm since long long time.

So if you want your page to rank better in Google – make it faster. But don’t worry! Google is only testing this solution in some part of the USA and the influence of page loading time will only be a couple percentages of the whole SEO process. So, no need to be scared just yet

SparkUp – webdev, ux & design conference in Poland!

pawel — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 05:22:05 +0000

SparkUp is really rocking conference that’s going to be in Poland, Poznań. Members of our team are going to be there. Yes, that’s right! You should check out the list of speakers, then you can say WOW, and THEN you can book a ticket for that conference.

We have to be honest… the price is really funny – 70 euro. It’s not too much, is it? You can pick one of two paths:

for web developers
for web designers

But we are pretty sure that it will be possible to mix both tracks. It looks like it going to be awesome event. We really can’t wait!

About speakers… We don’t really have to say too much, the names alone should be enough to WOW you:

Andy Budd from Clearleft
Bruce Lawson from Opera Software
Bartłomiej Zess from Microsoft
Matt Bidulph from Nokia
… and many more!

Besides, we are 50% (that’s a lot, huh? ) sure that you haven’t been to Poland. It’s a beautiful country, especially the Poznań city. It’s amazing! Just check out the Google Images for “Poznań, Poland”.

Anyway, we are going to be there and we hope to meet you there as well!

Ohh! By the way, we are ready to have some drinks with everyone after party

Ready for iPad

dave — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 20:53:04 +0000

Apple has released a list of websites which are ready for the iPad. See it here. Is your website ready for the iPad? At XHTMLized we’re offering a special service to make sure you are ready. Get on the list. Get in touch today.

Australia loves Accessibility

dave — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 05:03:45 +0000

“The Australian Government have announced their plan to adhere with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0. All Government websites will require Level A compliance by 2012, and Double A by 2015. The new standard replaces replaces WCAG 1.0, which was introduced as a mandated requirement for agencies in 2000.”

CacheFly

dave — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:36:36 +0000

Simply the best – I can’t imagine what we’d do without them.

Matt Levine, CTO at CacheFly

[Smashing Magazine] Tips for working at XHTMLized

dave — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 21:51:46 +0000

Smashing Magazine interviewed XHTMLized along with other awesome web agencies to find what makes a great cover letter for a job application. Get some tips on applying to work with the pros here!

Internet Explorer 9 – a complete reboot

dave — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 11:43:08 +0000

Internet Explorer levels up as IE9 announcements were made today with Microsoft releasing the Windows Internet Explorer Platform Preview to the wild. The final version won’t hit mainstream until next year, however it’s great to see what been unveiled so far. With HTML5 support, focus on web-standards, javascript and speed improvements, it’s looking like Internet Explorer is finally catching up to the Jones. In the tradition of IE, it still likes to dance to it’s own beat – the lack of Canvas support and no WebKit-pioneered CSS properties (transform, transition, animations, gradients, etc) [boo Microsoft!] the line in sand will still be drawn as far as web designers are concerned. I doubt we’ll ever skip that phase in the web developer cycle of ‘making a site IE friendly’, but hopefully in the future there will be less curses that come with it.