Google Chrome extensions has been available for quite some time now and it seems to be growing more and more each day. Google Chrome just got a whole lot more useful with the expansion of new extensions based around web development, making designers and developers like myself giddy with joy. That right! Finally, extensions for web development.

Firefox is without doubt the most popular browser used by many within the developer community and still considered my top favorite browser to work with personally. I could argue with you why that is the case but to put it bluntly, its mainly due to the awesome add-ons available. Chrome is definitely catching up though. To view a list of extensions available for web development, check out this page.

Below are just a few of the extensions I recommend you install for Chrome:

Chrome Editor – Edit HTML easily, right inside your browser. In a way, this is the alternative to Firebug for Firefox.

SpeedTracer – Get insight into the performance of your web applications. Alternative to the YSlow plugin extension in Firebug for Firefox.

Web Developer – The Web Developer extension adds a toolbar button to the browser with various web developer tools. This is the official port of the popular Web Developer extension for Firefox written by the same person.

Just got the opera mini app for the iphone a few days ago and its not bad. Its considerably faster than the safari on iphone. There are a few things I didn’t like such as how I could barely read anything unless I zoom all the way in. Strangely, the text width looks squished when viewing my website. Safari on the iphone definitely does a better job at rendering the zoomed-out pages as there’s a major difference in the ability to read the text zoomed out compared to the opera.

After doing some research on google, it has something to do with 2-step zoom that the Opera Mini uses to render text columns so that they are fit in the zoomed-in-display. I find it weird that it would do this and that its not even considered a bug on their end especially when its set like this by default. There is a fix available by going into app, browse to :config and turn setting:

“Fit Text to Screen” to “No”.

Source: Opera.com

The author makes a good point in stating that fact and giving examples to back them up. Websites don’t have to look fancy as you can see from websites considered to be “ugly” such as Google, YouTube, or Craigslist. While I do agree with McGovern’s point about building websites that don’t necessarily have to look gorgeous (they just have to be user friendly and accessible), I also believe there are certainly some sites out there that can be both well-designed and functional at the same time. I will admit that at a time, I was one of those folks who would design a website with small text and a lighter font color to suite the layout design of my website. It may appear cute but I have since grown out of it. It is always a plus if you can make a site look the way you want and also have it function well, though, a site’s look should always come second after usability.

In Marissa Mayer’s article, “More Evidence that Speed is Key to User Experience,” I believe she was right on the dime when she stated, based upon her research, that slow loading time on a website will have adverse affects on the amount of traffic it will generate. I am one of many Internet users out there who absolutely feel discouraged from visiting any website that takes a long time to load. If I was visiting one of those fancy editorial websites just to read their review on a movie and it took more than several minutes to load the page, I’m more inclined to not stick around and decide to look elsewhere. I find it to be very annoying to have to wait so long in order to gain access to any type of content, especially when I want it immediately. You have to make the user stick around as they are not obligated to your site — their interest in viewing your site will trifle away. When designing a successful website, the designer should pay attention to accessibility and usability. The speed it takes for a website to load is very much apart of the two and designers should take this into consideration. Not everyone has a fast internet connection and having many graphics on a website will decrease the speed it takes to load a page. If the website is design heavy, the key to having good load times is to use the right amount of images and content on a page. I think progress indicators can help relieve the frustration of having to wait for a website to load because it lets you know that progress is being made.

The article that I found most helpful was “Principles of Effective Web Design.” The author here provides ten guidelines to follow when designing a website that would be considered practical for the user. I especially liked how he covers user habits along with how the user shouldn’t have to stop and think how something on the site works. Everything should be self explanatory and shouldn’t in anyway confuse the user. This was stated in many other articles that I had read about effective web design and while it isn’t really new to me — I find that it serves as reminder to me and to those who need recalling. I pretty much got the drift on how the users want instant gratification, how they don’t read but scan through pages in a “F” shaped pattern, managing the user’s attention with minimal to moderate visual elements and having a good sense of where certain objects are placed. etc. It’s practically stuck in my head now. I absolutely love how the author states that “users appreciate quality and credibility”. Its a proven fact that sites like YouTube can get away with having an ugly design and obtain huge traffic due to the great content the site brings to users. I love how the author offers bullets that further helps the reader grasp the concepts he tries to conduct. A few more interesting tidbits in this article include the author encouraging effective writing with examples of using words like “sign up” rather than “start now” as promotional style of writing won’t be read. I thought that was quite intriguing.

Another article that caught my attention was from Derek Powazek’s “Calling All Designers: Learn to Write!” He definitely offered some good advice to designers about the importance of knowing how to write. The author made some very good points about how writing along with the design are both in relation to one another. Just because your a web designer doesn’t mean you shouldn’t deal with the writing aspect and focus entirely on the “pixel” work. Writing plays an important part in conveying communication between the user and the website just like design. You would think that having a good design increases your credibility as a business is enough. It shows that your site means business and it is logical to think this way but it is not sufficient. Having great copy and offering great service is what sells you website. We as designers rely on “Lorem Upsum” far to often during the design process but we really should think about what interesting words should appear on a site and why it’ll will help keep the user’s interest alive to revisit the website in the future. While it isn’t necessary our job as designers to think about the writing, we are responsible for the user experience design and we need to make sure all things flow well along with the design. As the article above stated, the content of the site is more significant than the design (which acts only as the support that bridges the content and the design). I suggest any designers out there to read that article as they would greatly benefit from it.

In the article,  “Web Standards, Browsers And Designing For The Future” by James Opiko, checking for compatibility on other browsers is also one of the processes used in making sure your website is standards-complaint. This is crucial in helping to keep your site uniform throughout various browers. You shouldn’t design around just one browser and hope it will look the same on others. Problems will most likely occur if you’ve been designing a site that hasn’t been reviewed on other browsers. My brother, who is also a web designer himself, has experience in what this article talks about as I’m sure many others as well. He could never get his website to look exactly the same on I.E. after testing it on FireFox and Safari. We both absolutely despise I.E but you just can’t ignore the fact that the majority of online users out there are still using that particular browser, especially since it is the standard default browser installed on all PCs.

Most websites nowadays are designed using cascading style sheets (css) and that shouldn’t be ignored, it should be embraced as it is the future of web design. I’ve been designing and managing websites for over 7 years and I see how much the web has evolved since the early days. It is so much more flexible and manageable to design using css.