I'd Like to Make a Shout-out To...

I've been on vacation, so things have been a little slow. In the meantime, I'd like to give a shout-out to:

• Bootstrap
  As mentioned in an earlier post, it's an awesome, easy to use front-end framework that's helped me build a clean and responsive framework.
• Font Awesome
  Font Awesome provides a great suite of font icons that are vectors. They scale great, are styled the same way your fonts are styled using CSS, and can be manipulated a number of ways. I highly recommend checking this out.
• Subtle Patterns
  I've actually never been a huge fan of backgrounds until sometime told me about Subtle Patterns. Now, I try not to overuse them.
• Google
  Google doesn't really need a shout-out. However, I think it's important to remind people of all the free resources Google provides, including:
  • Google Fonts
  • Google Analytics
  • Webmaster Tools

My Site is Online...Now What?

itstiredinhere.com is now online, and I can see all the traffic I created on Google Analytics...pretty cool.  What should I do next?

Getting incoming traffic

There's some low hanging fruit when it comes to getting more traffic.  One of the most important things is getting your site visible either on other sites, or to people that have a large network of people that might be interested in your site.

For starters, I've updated my LinkedIn and Google Plus profiles to link to my site.  Though this doesn't really seem to be targeting a specific audience, most of the people I'm connected with are in my field, and it's easy.

The other thing I did was add a link to my accessibility page on the Wikipedia accessibility page; it's the second item in the results after searching on web accessibility.  I've also submitted my site on a couple tumblr pages dedicated to sites built using Bootstrap.  The are several other places like this I can link to my site from.

Understanding and reacting to incoming traffic
I've now had a couple hundred users from multiple countries view my site, and here's what I've learned:

• Almost all of my users keep their browsers up to date.  As much as it might be cool to say my site not only supports all major browsers, it supports older versions of browsers, as well; my philosophy is, if hardly anyone will benefit from it, why spend time and effort on it.

• Most of my users are using iOS or OS X.  I'm interested in Bootstrap's support for responsiveness.  Since I've got a lot of iOS users, it makes sense to spend some time on this.

• Only one user came in using IE.  At least the user was using IE 9.  They were also from the home of Cable 10 and Stan Mikita's Donuts.

• Traffic was basically split between web accessibility and an app I'm building to determine how awesome you are.  This information makes prioritization easy.  I'll spend about 70% of my time on these 2 pages, and the rest on everything else, including doing things to help me better understand why I'm not getting traffic to other pages.

Getting Started

Things started out pretty simple.  I had a few static HTML pages I put together using Bootstrap.  I chose Bootstrap because it's proven and simple to use when it comes to producing clean web sites.  It also has nice support for responsive design/development, which I haven't completely taken advantage of, but plan to.

I decided to take what I had, and introduced PHP for things like common headers and footers.  PHP isn't necessarily my first choice, but Apache is the cheapest option when it comes to hosting.  It's actually nice for a change to do something other than Java, and after all, building itstiredinhere.com isn't necessarily about the language, its about everything else that's involved in building something, including people using it.  I use GoDaddy for hosting; it's not necessarily the cheapest, but I'm used to it, and so far I've got no complaints.

Now that I've got hosting, some content for my site, a general purpose defined, and a domain name, there are 2 more things I believe are no-brainers before making your site public:

1. Add Google Analytics.  It's free, and it will allow to collect the data you need to determine if people are using your site, and what improvements to focus on if you've got users. 
2. Version control your site with something like GitHub, which is also free.  As little content/code that you might have in the early stages, losing it all, or being unable to reproduce what your site looked like 5 days ago, become difficult to deal with without version control.

Now publish your site.  Don't wait until you've got the exact look, or all the content/features flushed out.  It is important, however, to start to think about how you expect your site to be used, and how you'll use the analytic data to prove your theories.

Here's some additional tools to help you build/maintain your site:

•  If you're using PHP, I recommend downloading an AMP package.  I use MAMP on my Mac; it's free and easy to use.
• Use an IDE that has support for what you're building.  A text editor that highlights HTML isn't worth using, when you can download something like Eclipse for free, which has code assist, and server integration.
• FileZilla is a nice free tool for uploading content.  At least in my case, I find it much easier to use than the tool GoDaddy makes available,

itstiredinhere.com

I've been working on itstiredinhere.com for about 3 weeks now.  It started out as part of a presentation I did on web accessibility.  I started to think it would be a cool idea to create a sandbox to work on things I'm interested in as a developer.  Prior to the last 6 months I've spent a majority of my time developing a business tier and exposing it via web services using Spring.  The past 6 months have been different.  I'm now work on a team that's responsible for basically everything, including the presentation layer, and I love it.  This includes a lot of CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

I'll be using itstiredinhere.com to do the following:

• build a CI environment
• strengthen my knowledge of CSS3 and HTML5
• practice JavaScript TDD techniques
• constantly work on SEO
• gather analytics
• discover new concepts and integrate with new API

I'll use this blog to document my progress.