Web Engineering

In which I hurdled a gotcha inherent in tracking Google Analytics events within a Flash banner.

Two of Loud Dog’s guiding principles are a focus on developing long-term relationships and a focus on design and technology as business solutions. How is this reflected in our engineering practice?

As industry use of JavaScript matures, employing powerful and universal programming best practices, such as namespacing, becomes essential. Come find out what exactly namespacing is, and then how to use it properly in JavaScript.

In part one of this article, I focused on sharing resources for getting started in design for the web. Here, I’ll review how I learned the basics about code in order to enrich my designs and share the resources I recommend to learn about coding on your own.

When building websites, things like background gradients, tabs, and buttons often must be extracted from the design file and engineered in their own right in order to work correctly. In this article, Marty explains how to prepare your graphics file to make this easier.

It’s often more efficient to use CSS and a customized graphic rather than javascript for common effects like button rollovers. Here, we break down how to design and build them.

Popular wisdom claims that if you’re building a web app, you should “release early and release often.” This is good advice, and what I’ve told clients before, but it’s not risk free, as some have discovered. Read on to see what I’m talking about.

Once again, yesterday evening the strains of the sublime, transcendent keyboard riff of the “The Final Countdown” could be heard in the Loud Dog office as we officially launched the ummm… re-launch of the the Loud Dog website. Now with new, improved portfolio!

What are favicons? Why should you use them? How do you make them? Where do they go? What is the meaning of life? Read on, as I gamely tackle these vexing questions. Well, the last one I can answer now. It is of course, forty two.

Learn how Loud Dog uses Print Style Sheets to make sure our websites look as good on paper as they do on the screen.

We recently had a conversation at the office, which amounted to posing and attempting to answer the question, “what’s the best way to show our clients the value we offer with our client side coding expertise”? Using the web, we decided, is an experience that’s become exponentially familiar as we all rely upon it more and more, yet everything that happens behind the scenes, is for most people effectively still quite a mystery.

As part of almost every web-related project, we write code. Here’s a brief description of the different types of standard deliverables we frequently use in our process.

Haphazardly written code is difficult to read and maintain, while using a consistent style contributes to readability, reducing long-term maintenance costs.

Last month, I wrote a post effectively skewering Microsoft over their decision to make their forthcoming Internet Explorer 8 browser render websites by default as if it were the non-compliant IE7 and forcing developers to add extra markup to their sites to tell IE8 to render in standards mode.

A website redesign can leave you with nightmares of broken links. Learn how to sleep easy and keep your visitors happy.

The following post was originally written early in February 2008, but was never “posted” on our website because we were in the middle of a re-redesign. I’m posting it now as a kind of back story to my other post today and as evidence of the speed at which things can move in this crazy, mixed up world wide internets!

Entrepreneurs occasionally ask me about e-mail best practices, both informally and during the course of our website projects. Since I started Loud Dog in 2001, I’ve had the opportunity to get a broad overview what works and what doesn’t, both observationally and through experience dealing with our own internal e-mail, and I’ll try to share what I’ve learned here.

If your website is important to your business (and we hope it is), it’s critical to have a disaster plan in place. Josh takes us through what happens in a disaster, and what plans we should have in place.

Loud Dog shines at building web sites that expertly accommodate both the technical and visual requirements of the web, including those that aren’t immediately obvious without years of web development experience. Here’s how we do it.

I don’t like spam. I don’t know anyone that does. Luckily, there are a variety of tools and techniques that help me win the spam wars. The most obvious - or at least the most well known - are the variety of programs that filter, sort and block spam headed for your inbox. Less obvious are the ways you can prevent spammers from getting your e-mail address in the first place. Since the first is really the domain of IT folks and System Administrators, this article focuses on how to prevent spammers from getting your e-mail, or at least lessening the possibility.