north – design and development standards to align and guide your project

north – design and development standards to align and guide your project

Often referred to as waterfall, the old method of a static page being created by a designer, approved by a product owner, and then handed off to developers without further communication does not produce results in the best interests of anyone involved. The product owner doesn’t see the final product until it is all finished and ready for launch, much too late to make any significant corrections or alter the path of the project.

Instead, a more agile process, where product owners, designers, and developers all work in conjunction with one another to build value in a product throughout its development cycle, is needed. One where a small amount of work and constant feedback between all parties can build a large project out of small parts. One where the final project may not have every bell and whistle hoped for, but rather has an array of features that fulfill the maximum potential of the cost of development based on business and user needs. This is a large change in the way most individuals and organizations have done this type of work in the past, but by sticking to this process, a better product will be built in the long run, and those involved in the building will not be exhausted or burnt out by the process.

Font sizing with REM

Font sizing with REM

The em unit is relative to the font-size of the parent, which causes the compounding issue. The rem unit is relative to the root—or the html—element. That means that we can define a single font size on the htmlelement and define all rem units to be a percentage of that.

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You might be surprised to find that browser support is surprisingly decent: Safari 5, Chrome, Firefox 3.6+, and even Internet Explorer 9 have support for this. The nice part is that IE9 supports resizing text when defined using rems. (Alas, poor Opera (up to 11.10, at least) hasn’t implemented rem units yet.)

What do we do for browsers that don’t support rem units? We can specify the fall-back using px, if you don’t mind users of older versions of Internet Explorer still being unable to resize the text (well, there’s still page zoom in IE7 and IE8). To do so, we specify the font-size using px units first and then define it again using rem units.

Visual Website Optimizer

Visual Website Optimizer

  • Well established, with many clients
  • Not too expensive
  • Integrates well with third-party tools, specifically WordPress and Google Analytics
  • Has both a user friendly WYSIWYG editor and jQuery-based API
  • Supports multipage tests via both unique URLs and URL patterns.