Pro CSS for High Traffic Websites
eBook Details:
- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: WOW! eBook; 1st edition (April 27, 2011)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1430232889
- ISBN-13: 978-1430232889
eBook Description:
Pro CSS for High Traffic Websites
Although web standards-based websites can scale effectively-and basic CSS will give you basic results-there are considerations and obstacles that high traffic websites must face to keep your development and hosting costs to a minimum. There are many tips and tricks, as well as down-to-earth best practice information, to make sure that everything runs quickly and efficiently with the minimum amount of fuss or developer intervention. Targeted at “high traffic” websites-those receiving over 10,000 unique visitors a day-Pro CSS for High Traffic Websites gives you inside information from the professionals on how to get the most out of your web development team.
The book covers the development processes required to smoothly set up an easy-to-maintain CSS framework across a large-volume website and to keep the code reusable and modular. It also looks at the business challenges of keeping branding consistent across a major website and sustaining performance at a premium level through traffic spikes and across all browsers. Defensive coding is considered for sites with third-party code or advertising requirements. It also covers keeping CSS accessible for all viewers, and examines some advanced dynamic CSS techniques.
Who this book is for
This book is for Web developers building and maintaining premium, successful, high-traffic websites using web standards. This book will also help team leaders responsible for code that will be shared over multiple projects, as well as project managers with a high churn of contract staff.
Although web standards-based websites can scale effectively-and basic CSS will give you basic results-there are considerations and obstacles that high traffic websites must face to keep your development and hosting costs to a minimum. There are many tips and tricks, as well as down-to-earth best practice information, to make sure that everything runs quickly and efficiently with the minimum amount of fuss or developer intervention. Targeted at “high traffic” websites-those receiving over 10,000 unique visitors a day-Pro CSS for High Traffic Websites gives you inside information from the professionals on how to get the most out of your web development team.
The book covers the development processes required to smoothly set up an easy-to-maintain CSS framework across a large-volume website and to keep the code reusable and modular. It also looks at the business challenges of keeping branding consistent across a major website and sustaining performance at a premium level through traffic spikes and across all browsers. Defensive coding is considered for sites with third-party code or advertising requirements. It also covers keeping CSS accessible for all viewers, and examines some advanced dynamic CSS techniques.
What you’ll learn
- The value of process
- Making reusable, robust, and modular CSS
- How to maximize the performance of your site
- Integrating with third parties
- How to keep branding consistent
- Best practices for cross-browser and accessible CSS
- Dynamic CSS techniques
About the Author
Antony Kennedy is currently describing himself as a lead front-end engineer. That means he makes websites work under the hood with JavaScript and keeps them friendly and functional, with animated AJAX interfaces. He has worked on many high traffic sites for companies such as Apple, the BBC, BSkyB and Channel4. He is an advocate of good processes and agile development and blogs about these and web development on his blog Zeroed and Noughted (http://zeroedandnoughted.com/).
He has been working in web and development technologies for over 13 years and remembers Internet Explorer 3 and Xara 3D fondly. He started his career doing IT support in Hastings (in South East England), and has since been involved in the entire software development lifecycle, from design and conception to support and warranty. He particularly enjoys fixing broken processes and demonstrating that you can be agile in a waterfall business environment. He learns by doing things that he doesn’t know how to do.
He is the managing director of a small business called Silver Squid (http://www.silversquid.com). He lives in a half-finished house in North East London and complains about it a lot while being taught how to use a Nintendo DS by his daughter Talia and his son Felix. He can’t cook (except for sushi and pot noodles) and is very difficult to buy presents for.
Inayaili de León is a London-based web designer from Portugal. She loves and lives the Web and her job; she loves that there is no time to learn everything and that she can learn something new every day.
Self-taught when it comes to web design, she has a degree in Communications Design. Working on content-heavy web applications is a challenge and a pleasure that she will happily take on, transforming what could easily look like a mess into user-friendly designs. Clean, semantic and efficient HTML and CSS are a must when converting those designs into the Web, and a subject that she is passionate about.
Sundays are dedicated to reading and writing about design, web standards, CSS and HTML. She speaks at conferences when she can and writes for 24 Ways, Smashing Magazine and .net (where she is also the editor of the CSS gallery) as well as on her own blog, Web Designer Notebook (http://webdesignernotebook.com).
Chocolate, cats, shopping, tea, pizza, and pancakes make her days happier.
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