XRAY, in very simple terms, is a bookmarklet with some eye popping features. It is aptly named as XRAY. It completely skins a website and like an actual XRAY, sees within the elements of the web page and gives information just about any element. This is the most interesting utility I have seen in a browser after the web developer toolbar for Firefox. If you have Firefox then you can simply stick to web developer toolbar but what would you do if you had the ill famed Internet Explorer or any browser which does not have the features like Firefox. XRAY rescues you from such situations.

The installation of XRAY is to just drag and drop the bookmarklet on the browsers bookmark tool bar and it becomes Read the rest of this entry »

How many times have people said that your website is too slow and you found out that there is nothing you can do to improve its performance? The final option most of the times might have been either trying to change your hosting server (may be even blaming him for purposely slowing your website) or finding several ways to optimize your code.

Over last few months I have been facing this same problem. I browsed the web for answers, even went ahead and bought many books on Website Optimization. All of them more or less targeted the same issue of Read the rest of this entry »

I had been using fluid designs over a couple of months until the big screens came into picture. The fluid designs became so drastically different on those big screens that I found all my imagined design going down the drain. The web site rendered itself in such an ugly manner that it came down to negative remarks of the big flat screen owner. So the ultimate question to me was, why did I choose a fluid layout in the first place?

Image Credit - mountaingoat

If you are bewildered about the fluid and fixed terminology then their concepts are somewhat self-explanatory: Read the rest of this entry »

Designing a theme or a website can be a nightmare if done in a haste. I am currently trying to develop a good theme for Techtracer and found out that designing is typing in some HTML and CSS to bring out what you are visualizing. Web Design should follow some rules and it requires proper planning to do so. I have taken down some rules that I realized they should have been followed while I began designing the new theme. I would like to share those with you.

Image Credit - louisedesign

Rule #1 : Lay out the Blueprint First

This is a must. Do not start your web design just on the assumption of a that you have a design in mind and you would want to see it in reality. Believe me, it never happens this way and if it doesn’t then you would just get frustrated at the failure and give up on the design in the mid way. What you must do is Read the rest of this entry »