What makes a web site effective?

Our Web Strategy section is about making sure your web site is doing the right things. Web sites don't exist for their own sake, but as part of a communication strategy to deliver a message and more importantly to engage your audience in a conversation. In some circles this is called "marketing", but it is much broader and more important than just selling a product or raising awareness. It's about spreading knowledge and inspiring action. Effective web sites empower and inspire people to take action.

How do you build web sites effectively?

Our Web Development section is about doing things right. Highly effective, low-cost, high-performance web sites are the result of good architecture and the proper application of web standards, not tricks and hacks. When you understand the core principles of effective web development, you can create valuable, effective web sites with great speed and reasonable cost.

Recent articles

I Replaced Movable Type with HTML::Mason

Although Movable Type is a fine blogging tool, I decided to build my own. Here's why.

10 Things I Love/Hate About Movable Type

In which our hero counts off the list of inspirations and irritations encountered while blogging with Movable Type.

The Moose is on fire!

In which I am inspired by my fellow Perl hackers to write blog posts and code using the Moose object system for Perl.


Web development tips from around the Web

Namecheap.com - Cheap domain name registration

Free SSL Certificates - Web Hosting - Free URL Forwarding, e-mail forwarding and DNS services are included with our cheap domain names registration service. Recommended by Gina Trapani.

django-grappelli

A jazzy skin for the Django Admin-Interface

Intro to Ming — Ming v0.1 documentation

Ming is a Python API for accessing data stored in MongoDB. It adds a layer of data structure on top of Mongo, which is schema-less.

Introducing Gordon: the Flash Player Written in JavaScript

Want to run Flash on your iPhone? This JavaScript implementation translates Flash animations into SVG so it will work in mobile Safari. Don't think video & audio are supported, but I could be wrong.

Google’s Proposal For Crawling AJAX May Be Live

Google has a proposal for making AJAX-enhanced pages available to search robots. You have to do some heavy lifting on your side. The program is not widely available, but this article suggests that it may be in silent pilot mode. How much work is it worth?

Haystack - Search for Django

Haystack provides modular search for Django. It features a unified, familiar API that allows you to plug in different search backends (such as Solr, Whoosh, Xapian, etc.) without having to modify your code.