Les Jones

E-commerce > Web Design Links

LYNDA WEINMAN: The web-safe color palette is dead. It's true. Those 216 colors made sense five years ago, but the log files for my work site indicate that the number of visitors using 256 color video cards is down in the single digits. They'll just have to see dithered graphics until they spend the thirty bucks to upgrade to a new video card. I can't even feel guilty about that, since photographic images are going to dither on 256 color displays. Where's the harm in letting the navigation graphics and logos dither, too?

WEB SITE OPTIMIZATION: These guys have a new version of their page loading time checker. Awesome. The book - "Speed Up Your Site" - that accompanies the site is worth it. I used it in the last re-design at work. Best advice (other than keeping CSS, HTML, and image sizes small, and reducing the number of objects on the page) - keep each external object below 1165 bytes so that it can be transferred in a single TCP/IP packet. (An object is a file included in the page, such as an image, linked CSS stylesheet, etc.)

LINK CHECKING: I tried lots of link checkers. I needed one to satisfy these criteria for work: must handle lots of pages (>5,000), must handle dynamic pages, must handle secure (https) pages, must be fast, and must not cost a lot of money. The winner: Xenu Link Sleuth. It satisfies all of my requirements, and it's freeware.

I discovered one trick in finding broken links with a dynamic, database-driven site. Say you have a page called results.cfm. The output of that file is based on the storyid called with the file. So, for instance, you might have a URL like www.domain.com/results.cfm?storyid=1234. If the storyid 1234 doesn't exist in the database, you get an error in your database middleware, but you don't get a 404 file not found error at the web server level, because the file results.cfm is present. So how can you get your link checker to report the error?

The hack I use is to find the file containing the middleware error string and include a non-existent image. I used 404.gif. Xenu tells me that a file 404.gif couldn't be found, and shows me all of the files that referenced it, complete with the bad id numbers in the URL string. Sweet.