During December 2008 at TAKKLE I began to explore Google’s Website Optimizer tool. It seemed like a great tool to do testing for a lot of projects I was involved in. A lot of business decisions can come through knee jerk reactions and a lot of those decisions get passed down from “HiPPO”s, Highest Paid Person’s Opinion’. [Here is a fun article on how to train influence your HiPPO] Testing on a site is vital to prove why some of the decisions are right and some are wrong.

I began by reading “Always Be Testing: The Complete Guide to Google Website Optimizer” which was given to me by our marketing department who knows the author. While the book is a bit heavy on marketing concepts, it gives many valid reasons for testing, testing stratigies and served as a great guide to what GWO can do for you for free and what it’s limitations are.

I gave a presentation to the company (I will soon share this through Google Docs) where I used an example of a few ways we  could change the homepage to see if we could achieve more conversions to our register page.

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While making sure all my code was validation via w3 (http://validator.w3.org/) I kept receiving an error on my single post page. After tracking this down to the comment form that exists on all single post page, I read up on the attribute.

There is a good explanation here…

http://dev.aol.com/accessibility/bestpractices/ARIA_Required

Accessibility has always been in the back of my head but has always come 2nd to the fast paced production environment I work in most of my employment career. I am going to blog about some of these issues in the coming months, issues with screen readers, mobile content, etc…

I’m trying to experiment with some new CSS3 properties on the site, one example is the rounded and transparent block items within the content (sorry IE6 users, you’ll have to take my word on it). Here are a couple of great articles on the future of CSS, some new properties and their browser limitations.

The selector block article has some innovative ideas on grouping selectors into blocks and making them Macros.

~ H

New Properties | Selector Blocks

Or “So you want to be a Front End Developer”

I received an introductory email via Linkedin from a Google recruiter asking if I had interest in working for the Big “G”. I wasn’t looking for work at the time but thought that if anything it would be a great learning experience and see how they handle their hiring practices. I graduated with my BS in Computer Science from Georgia Southern, far from the ivy league expectations that I had heard about Google’s hiring practices but the recruiter was legit and I started the process. After narrowing down the field to Google Front End Engineer, she quickly quizzed me with 3 questions over the phone to move on to the next phase of the interviewing/testing process. I did not sign any confidentially agreement, so I can reprint them here for any would be tech recruits looking to work for the Google.

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I will be implementing this on this blog for logging in for commenting and sending articles to your friends

My usual process for screen grabs is the normal Mac screen shot (apple – shift – 3), then browse to find the file on my desktop and then edit in Photoshop. This process can be a little lengthy and to be honest a pain in the ass. I have used SnagIt in the past and it works great but I really don’t feel like pay $30 for that privilege. Then along comes Jing (http://www.jingproject.com/), from the makers of SnagIt

Free screen caps, short video caps and free to share online (for now). The widget stays with you as a yellow sun in the upper right corner ready for all my screen capture glory. Give it a shot it works nicely.

I even made a short video of me writing this blog, cool right!?
Jing Cap