Matcha Design Blog

As web professionals, we always try to find creative ways to present web content in order to provide a more comfortable viewing experience. One of the more popular web features nowadays is to use custom web fonts on web site vs the good ole Arial, Verdana... However, one of the trade-off is the increase of the loading time due to the cost of loading the fonts. One of the solutions is to hide unstyled text while webfonts loaded asynchronously. To get a good idea of what I'm talking about, you can read an article called A Smoother Page Load by Joni Korpi. (Note that if you're using an old version of IE, or any browser that doesn't support opacity, you won't get the full effect.) Read More...

Google has recently added Google+ as a source for Google Search results. So recently in fact, that the change has not been implemented for everyone yet. There's already a lot of information (and mis-information) flying around the internet regarding this new feature. Firstly, I'm going to address some of the more common concerns I've seen raised in articles and comment threads. Read More...

At Matcha Design we've used Concrete CMS for several client sites. We find it's easy for clients to edit, even if they're not very tech savvy, and it's a powerful CMS solution that takes very little time to build for. Concrete recently officially launched version 5.5, which includes a major overhaul of the entire interface. Read More...

Object Oriented CSS is a method of development as it pertains to the HTML and CSS relationships designed to reduce redundancy in CSS, primarily to make more manageable code. The idea is (basically) to take reused styles and assign them to individual classes, then the elements that use those styles take on that class, plus additional classes for the remaining styles. Read More...

Looking for tools to assist with smart phone web development, I came across jGestures at jgestures.codeplex.com. It's a handy little tool that allows you to register all kinds of touch events for supported devices. It uses jQuery's awesome event-handling functions. Unfortunately it seems that Android doesn't register multi-touch events correctly, so it can really only do single-touch swipe gestures and dragging. (I haven't tried an ICS device, so if you have one, please let me know the results in the comments) Read More...

We web developers and designers use a lot of tools to help us create compatible, well-built websites more easily and quickly. Today I'm sharing with you a few of the tools that I like, specifically those made to assist with CSS. Read More...

Google recently launched a bunch of online tutorials (they call them classes) on Android Development. These training courses, collectively called simply "Android Training," can be found at https://developer.android.com/training/index.html. Read More...

Eventually we'll see the day when we can purely use HTML5 and CSS3 and have no fear that anyone who actively browses the web will have such an ancient client that they can't see what we've intended. Unfortunately that day isn't today, so we still need to have options for HTML4 and CSS2 clients, as well as those with partial support. Read More...

I've been using PHP for years. In some ways it's a messy language, but it gets the job done and is widely adapted in the web community. How about another programming language called, "Ruby on Rails"? Let's have a comparison between the two. Read More...

Do you engage in social media, add SEO-minded keywords to your website, advertise with AdWords, and post or comment on industry blogs or forums, and now you want to know which of your myriad online marketing efforts is producing the most effective results? Enter Google Analytics Advanced Segments. Read More...