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

iPlotz: wireframing, mockups and prototyping for websites and applications

"iPlotz allows you to rapidly create clickable, navigable mockups and wireframes for prototyping websites and software applications. Create a project, add wireframe pages with design components and discuss your creations with others."

Hurl makes HTTP requests.

Hurl is a handy web tool that allows you to make specialized HTTP requests. You can ask it to set special headers as well as use different HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE). Great for testing out RESTful API calls. Responses are cleanly formatted with full headers.

How Simple Game Mechanics Can Impassion People To Do More Business With You – with Amy Jo Kim

Amy Jo Kim is a long renowned expert in online community. In this Mixergy interview, she explains how you can grow your business and increase customer engagement by layering game mechanics on top of your existing web site.

So you want a dynamic form

James Bennett describes ways to generate Django forms at runtime.

Dynamic form generation in Django

JKM describes how you can create a form at runtime using Django's awesome form framework.