There’s a lot of buzz with Frameworks and Libraries these days, and rightly so, without them some projects I’ve worked on would still be under construction!!! Developing with frameworks and libraries will save you time in both development and testing.

The abundance of functionality some provide often mean you’ll end up with a better end product. Not all clients can afford the time and money required to have developers work from the ground up. With the benefits of useful frameworks/libraries your clients will get more than they wanted for less than you quoted (or you could keep the float).

I could go on for hours listing examples I’ve played with over the years, but some of my personal favourites are:

Zend Framework
http://framework.zend.com

The leading open-source PHP framework has a flexible architecture that lets you easily build modern web applications and web services.

Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI)
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/

a set of utilities and controls, written in JavaScript, for building richly interactive web applications using techniques such as DOM scripting, DHTML and AJAX. The YUI Library also includes several core CSS resources.

jQuery
http://jquery.com/

jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

I realise there is a great deal more I could and should be listing here… and probably some much better?! Please leave a comment I’ve love to here your favorites… and I’ll try include them in future posts!

Its very poor practice to use the text like “Click here” as links. Some browsers, particularly some for disabled users, provide a summary of links throughout a page. If this practice were to be adopted throughout a page, a list of links like this would be presented to the user:

• Click here
• Open this
• Here
• Download

Out of context none of these links make sense nor provide any indication of where they go!

When creating a link, first check that the words sufficiently describe where the user should expect to be taken. So avoid using phrases like “click here”, and in a lot of cases, linking just one word probably wouldn’t be descriptive enough either.

Other common indescriptive links used are “Document” “Publiction”, “Form”. When taken out of context you have no idea where this link goes, and you’re left with so many questions e.g. Which form? Which publication?

Usability studies have shown people quickly scan pages rather than reading them in full. Because links stand out, by linking the appropriate text rather then indescriptive phrases people are likely to find the information they are looking for a lot quicker. Otherwise they’ll give up a visit a website which is easier to navigate…