If there’s anything I’ve learned working for a tech company, it’s that in order to build a website—a really amazing, beautiful and high-functioning website—a multitude of different talents and elements have to come together and work in harmony. Sometimes it can feel like working on the Tower of Babel: one person is sifting through a palette of hex codes, the guys across the room are rattling off an alphabet soup of different coding...

Trust occurs when our physical, emotional and logical responses combine into one confident, positive intuitive feeling. When we trust companies or brands, the feeling—or “experience”—is often carefully cultivated and consumers uphold a level of expectation when visiting the business. This remains true online, as there are a number of cues that can reaffirm trust, or completely ruin visitors’ experiences; and their reaction...

For years, the “home” button has provided a compass rose, the north star, a navigator’s ability to regroup to the familiar comfort of the homepage no matter how deep into a website we’ve gone. As users become more fluent in navigating the intricacies of the Web however, having a prominent home button is becoming an unnecessary navigation crutch — a visual obstacle that web designers increasingly eschew. Because primary navigation...

With mobile internet usage eclipsing desktop-based web browsing, it’s more important than ever for websites to be built with an emphasis on speedy page loads and fluid reactions to user input. One important technology we use to achieve this is AJAX, short for “Asynchronous JavaScript & XML.” AJAX allows you to update parts of a single webpage without continually throwing out the DOM (the HTML architecture of the page) —...