02.24.2012 By Lara Swanson
Responsive CSS Table Design In Practice & Execution
We recently launched a new DNS Product feature comparison table to help users more easily compare our DNS products and what they offer. I’m eager to make all of this content accessible for people on smaller screens (particularly people on mobile devices), but it’s very hard to make tables look as good as they do on wider screens.
Here’s what we did and how we did it.
Read More02.08.2012 By Lara Swanson
The Ada Initiative: Supporting Women In Open Technology & Culture
Dyn’s charitable arm DynCares recently contributed to an organization close to my heart: the Ada Initiative. They describe themselves as a “non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media”.
It’s named after Ada Lovelace, widely regarded as the world’s first computer programmer and someone who has her own day in October that I love celebrating every year. Eager to spread awareness of the organization and the good work they do, I asked Valerie Aurora, Executive Director of the Ada Initiative, a few questions about the organization and how individuals and companies can get involved.
Read More02.03.2012 By Lara Swanson
Retail Page Speed & Web Performance Report: How Did Dyn Stack Up?
Strangeloop recently published their State of the Union for Page Speed and Website Performance, focusing on retail industry websites. Their extraordinarily disappointing key finding was that retail sites are 60% slower than they expected with an average page speed of 11.21 seconds. It’s really too bad that websites, especially ecommerce sites, haven’t met site speed expectations.
Retail sites should be at the forefront of optimized page load time. There’s been plenty of research about the correlation between fast page load and revenue and I would guess every retail site wants to increase their revenue using established best practices like compressing text and images, combining JavaScript and CSS, using a CDN, and other tools mentioned in Strangeloop’s report.
Strangely, according to the report, most sites failed to implement these.
Read More01.16.2012 By Lara Swanson
Looking At Smashing Magazine’s Web Redesign & Resulting Performance Loss
I’m always eager to see a major website’s approach to a site redesign. Any site that focuses on best practices for front end coding and design will take interesting approaches to incorporating emerging technologies and styles and it’s something that the front end development community always learns from.
We also are fairly quick to jump on things about redesigns that are buggy or faulty, which is why I’m surprised that Smashing Magazine‘s recent redesign overlooked one pretty big issue that could have easily been prevented.
Read More12.15.2011 By Lara Swanson
How To Create A Countdown Clock With CSS3
I had my first opportunity to code some CSS3 animations for November’s CSSOff, which is “a competition for front-end developers to show off their skills in a no holds barred display of CSS and markup skills.”
Part of the competition centered around creating a countdown clock. In an attempt to break out from the pack, I decided to keep it CSS-only, which I found out later was fairly unique. Post-competition, I saw others’ completed challenges and similar clocks used Javascript to create it.
My goal was to stay as semantic as possible and to learn more about animations and transitions using CSS. Below is the HTML markup for the clock and the explanation for my methods.
Read More11.15.2011 By Lara Swanson
Web Development Tips For Navigation In Responsive Design
We coded Dyn.com’s HTML and CSS to respond well to different screen sizes because it was important to us that the site remain intuitive and easy to use on any device and in any orientation. We made sure it loads fast and that users can quickly find what they’re looking for, using media queries to shift and redesign our WordPress templates to make sure they flowed nicely at different sizes.
One of the most important parts of a responsive design is navigation and it can be really tricky to figure out what navigation should be removed, where it should live and how it should look among the rest of the content. We did a lot more in our media queries than just restyle and reorganize the navigation on our pages, but I want to dig in to our process for deciding how the navigation would change at different screen sizes.
From the planning to the execution, here’s how we attacked the navigation on Dyn.com from all experiences.
Read More10.19.2011 By Lara Swanson
Web Development Best Practices: What’s An Ideal Page Weight?
I recently came across an interesting poll on CSS-Tricks about the ideal page weight/size for today’s modern web design. We worked really hard at optimizing the front end of this very site for page load time, using asynchronous assets, CSS sprites and tons of other things to create a happy user experience, but I’d never thought about the total page size ’til now!
So I opened Firebug to check out Dyn.com, which clocked in at 195.9K and could change a few kilobytes per day depending on the featured images we have on our homepage. Chris Coyier suggests that very few sites today come in at under 200K which “used to be a common goal”.
Used to be? Why can’t it still be?
Read More10.03.2011 By Lara Swanson
Uncovering Our Employee Strengths Infographic Style
When new employees join Dyn, they take the Strengthsfinder test and they later get a nameplate with their name, title and their top five strengths. It’s a really interesting way to get to know the people who work around you and who you work with directly.
I’ve loved changing teams and seeing how different people interact and play to each other’s strengths. Then again, one of my top strengths is “Individualization”, which means I’m “intrigued by the unique qualities of each person” so this makes sense!
We recently aggregated the data from all employees to see what the makeup of Dyn’s strengths were like. I absolutely love the results.
Read More08.22.2011 By Lara Swanson
How We Improved Page Speed By Cleaning CSS, HTML and Images
Page load time is a big part of the user experience.
Site speed can make or break conversion rates and impact your site’s revenue, so keep your page load time low by writing code semantically, use best practices and routinely cleaning up your CSS, HTML and images.
The root issue of heavy page load is typically poor planning at the beginning of a project or poor planning for routine site updates. For example: if a developer didn’t realize a block of content would be reused on another page, additional classes and ID’s may be added to “make it work” in the additional design. If a designer hasn’t created a master style guide for a site, tons of different hexadecimal color codes or RGB values may be used for the same purpose throughout the main CSS stylesheet. If pages involving unique designs are removed, their originally well-coded CSS may be left behind for all visitors to continue to download.
Page load time will increase as a site ages or as more hands are involved. Page size creep is a natural part of site growth, so we need to make this routine cleaning a natural part of the workflow to ensure a positive user experience.
Let’s get started!
Read More08.03.2011 By Lara Swanson
Welcome To The New Dyn.com!
It’s a big day for celebration here at Dyn as we officially unify DynDNS.com and Dyn.com!
You’ll notice some major changes in the design and content of the site as we’ve worked hard to make it even easier to learn about what we offer and how our products will be the solution that you’re looking for.
We’ve also been careful about retaining the DynDNS user experience: Sign In and Cart are still in the top right, while the Checkout process and account management still live on DynDNS.com. However, you’ll find that some old DynDNS pages are now being redirected to their new siblings on Dyn.com.
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