"Success is the sum of details." - Harvey S. Firestone

For some it's the last thing you think of, for some it's the first. No matter how you as a person deals with details you're generally aware of their importance. This applies just as much to web design as it does to print design, interior design and life. While broad strokes will get the information across, the small details can turn a visit into an experience. When the details have been considered and taken care of, it reflects well upon your design and the client you're designing for.

When I talk details I'm talking navigation, buttons, link colors, and the small bits of typography that sometimes get thrown together last minute. These are the bits that are often considered quickly at the end, but including them in the beginning and as part of the process can make it a much more natural integration.

For smaller websites this can make even more of an impact. Without extensive navigation and lengthy content you can make your user's experience a memorable one by rounding it out with little touches and getting playful (without sacrificing accessibility of course).

Why a well-designed/well-built website matters more than ever

Have you heard?
Google now personalizes all its search results based on your last 180 days of search activity linked to an anonymous cookie in your browser. You can read about it on Google's blog if you want to learn more about this important change to how Google operates.

What does it mean?
Say you search a particular topic like "computers" on a regular basis. In the past Google would deliver similar results to you as it would to everyone else searching on the same phrase.

With personalized search Google will consider your past search activity, the phrases you search on and the pages you click through in order to generate a user profile that will deliver more relevant results when searching for "computer hard drives" or some other component. If you click on ZDNET more often in search results then that site will be weighted in your personalized results...

It seems like there's a ton of information coming out this week regarding developments in web development. Here I have assembled some links to blogs, websites and pages that discuss interesting new technologies, work arounds and generally cool stuff that web developers might find interesting. Some of these innovations will apply to Smallbox, but most apply to anyone working in web development.

First off, Smallbox has released an upgrade to our core content management engine. The latest release offers improvements in page load time (on average pages now render twice as fast as the previous version), new functionality such as the ability to manage navigation using Smallbox Config™, and hundreds of other small improvements that contribute to the ongoing evolution of our content management system. 

IE Workaround - Google developers have come up with a clever work around for the ongoing and painful experience of optimizing websites to work for Internet Explorer. The Google Chrome Frame is essentially a plug-in for IE 6/7/8 that renders pages with Google Chrome's webkit engine. How sweet is that?!

Google has also released a new set of tools called Google Web Elements. Web Elements lets developers and content managers insert code snippets that integrate Google Calendar, Maps, News, YouTube Video and more into your website. Users can specify specific sources and render this information on their website as an interactive page plug-in.

Have you heard of Kaltura? If not you should definitely know more about it...