Webpage forms are quite commonplace for a number of different purposes. Some examples include user registration, e-commerce checkouts, profile settings, or even contact forms. Input fields are much easier to style with modern CSS3 techniques – but what about improving the overall user experience?

In this post I want to showcase a number of free open source jQuery plugins to help developers create easier web forms. Visitors want to fill out forms quickly and without much hesitation. You don’t want too many flashy page elements distracting from the task at hand. Think of these additional features more like guidelines to help users fill out forms concerning unique or unfamiliar content.

When you have decided that you want to usability test, one of the first things you have to consider is what you are going to usability test. Although this may sound like a very straightforward question, there are a number of facets you need to consider to make your test successful and to ensure you are testing the right things.

Of course, what you are trying to test can vary a lot depending on the product or service you are working on, but there are some simple rules that you can follow to ensure you get the best, most effective results you can from your testing process.

Whether you are an experienced Web programmer or just starting out, you know that there are many browsers currently in use and have probably had experience with the cross-compatibility issues. The frustration of building a beautifully functioning website using Firefox, then discovering it doesn’t render properly in IE6 is a definite learning experience. Testing your creations in as many browsers as possible is crucial to turning out a professional product.

There are a multitude of tools available to allow cross-browser testing with only one computer and your favorite browser. Many of them will let you do online testing of multiple versions of the most commonly used browsers and some will include applications you may never have heard about. A few require downloading and installation on your machine.

It's often interesting to think about where on a given element, whether it be the page, an image, or a static DIV, your users are clicking. With that curiosity in mind, I've created HeatMap: a MooTools class that allows you to detect, load, save, and display spots on a given area where a user has clicked.

With the ever-increasing sales of smartphones and the burgeoning tablet market starting to skyrocket, coupled with far greater access to more robust mobile data networks, the internet is now being accessed by our users in a multitude of new ways.

The huge range of mobile devices used to browse the web now means you really have to consider making your site mobile-compatible.

But how do you go about it? Testing your site on mobile devices can be time-consuming and expensive due to the vast number of different mobile devices.

Fear not, because there are some handy tools available at your disposal for making sure that your website renders appropriately on the Mobile Web. This article shares and discusses 10 such tools.