Many times the aesthetics of a website often overshadows the programming base of which it was built upon. While web development best practices can be underprivileged and overlooked, it is something that the Squeaky team strives to be on top of.
Always looking to build upon coding best practices, members of our development team recently put together a “Squeaky” script, jSPRITE, that enables images to be coded into a web design through the use of replacing HTML text. When a webpage is requested, the large image is initially loaded and can be used throughout the rest of the website for everything from rollovers to navigation elements. While this technique is nothing new, what Squeaky’s team has done is offer a different, more streamlined approach, that uses a home grown extension of jQuery that can be packaged for other web developers to use. This bypasses the need to write several lines of CSS in order to take advantage of the benefits of CSS Sprites, thus cutting down on the number of HTTP requests made to the server, thereby saving on bandwidth and network lag time. While this sounds very technical (and it is), in short the script builds a much friendlier SEO site while requiring less CSS, something all programmers and brands online will appreciate, and no doubt will want to emulate.
Click the link for a demonstration to see how the script works.
