This is excellent, very practical advice.<p>The one caveat I would add which the author glosses over is <i>Test in IE</i> as a high priority unless you have a very tech-savvy audience. Compass/Blueprint abstract away most of the uglier CSS box-model hacks and I agree that IE users <i>can</i> live without gradients and rounded corners. But if the site looks awkward without the CSS3 tricks that don't work on the browser that >60% of your audience uses, you're going to need to tweak that aspect as well .
Relating to Haml/Sass, you may have heard of the ruby gem StaticMatic. It's a great tool that lets you use Haml/Sass to building quick, static prototypes.<p>In fact, I loved the concept so much that I began improving upon it myself[1], adding support for CoffeeScript and Amazon S3. For anyone who might find it useful, any testing or feedback would be greatly appreciated.<p>[1] <a href="https://github.com/mindeavor/staticmatic2" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mindeavor/staticmatic2</a>
I liked it. Lot of folks may already know some or most of this. But it is distilled all in once place, and as the post mentions, it will surely help in quickly moving forward with a polished looking app.
There's a difference between moving fast and doing sloppy work. IMO, this post is a recipe for mediocre design (at best). Don't confuse movement for work - when you approach a design with the a rushed attitude it slows you down in the long run, because you have to clean up your mistakes and possibly start over again when you realize that your first attempt just didn't work at all.<p>I'm not so much arguing with the specific suggestions in the post as I am the general approach and worldview. There are some useful ideas in there, but they're weakened by being presented in "recepie" format. Sometimes they make sense, sometimes they don't. It depends on the context. Better to learn principles than methods. It's quicker in the long run.
Does green convert better than red? Performable seems to like red over green.
<a href="http://blog.performable.com/631526233/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.performable.com/631526233/</a>
This is a good article, if for nothing else besides that button gem which I somehow haven't heard of before.<p>The downside is, there will be a bunch of sites that look the same, so folks will want to do some real work and find their own components.
I was super surprised at how well SASS let me move quickly with coding 3pics.me! The lighten, darken and mix functions make getting appropriate hex codes pain free.<p>Wonderful!