Stop using anchors as buttons!

Posted by Ancestry Team on September 2, 2014 in Accessibility, CSS/HTML/JavaScript, UX, Web

Semantic buttons and links are important for usability as well as accessibility. Hyperlinks indicate a URL change, whereas buttons are used to perform an action. I thought this post up in response to a question asked on Stack Overflow over 5 years ago. Which one should you use? <a href=”#” onclick=”doSomething()”>Do Something</a> <a href=”javascript:void(0);” onclick=”doSomething()”>Do Read More

Core Web Accessibility Guidelines

Posted by Ancestry Team on August 13, 2014 in Accessibility, CSS/HTML/JavaScript

How do you ensure accessibility on a website that is worked on by several hundred web developers? That is the question we are continually asking ourselves and have made great steps towards answering. The approach we took was to document our core guidelines and deliver presentations and trainings to all involved. This included our small Read More

Creating a Completely Accessible Navigation Bar in HTML, CSS, and JS

Posted by Ancestry Team on January 27, 2014 in Accessibility, CSS/HTML/JavaScript, UX, Web

Recently, I volunteered to prototype a new global navigation bar for the core Ancestry.com website. This was a huge opportunity for some drastically needed improvements, not only for the code behind the header, but more importantly, the accessibility of the navigational items. Even though we’re early on in this process of creating an accessible navigation Read More

API Performance Monitor

Posted by on January 15, 2014 in Analytics, CSS/HTML/JavaScript

My team has been tasked with providing a dashboard for some of our product teams that enables them to aggregate various monitoring systems, logs, metrics, and other forensic tools into one place. While provisioning this dashboard, we discovered we needed a tool that could hit an endpoint, run code against the response, record the results, and Read More

Open Source Development

Posted by Liam Molloy on November 26, 2013 in ASP.NET, C#, CSS/HTML/JavaScript

At Ancestry.com, we have many developers whom contribute to open source projects. Today I want to talk about an open source project I have been involved in, along with one of my team members Shane Burke. As contributing to open source projects is not directly related to the day to day development work at Ancestry, Read More

CSS Woes

Posted by on August 20, 2013 in CSS/HTML/JavaScript, Testing

I’m not a Front End Developer, but I often find myself writing, tweaking and adjusting style-sheets to make a particular element look just right, fix layout bugs and deal with cross-browser issues. Most often I will find someone else that has already done what I want to do and look at how they’ve styled a given Read More

Hiring: First Test Then Assess

Posted by Ancestry Team on July 25, 2013 in CSS/HTML/JavaScript

Hiring awesome people who are also talented developers is often times easier said than done. Having grown tired of sifting through endless resumes and conducting countless mind numbing interviews with unqualified applicants, our team has uncovered the filtering power of a FED (front-end development) specific assessment test. While some like to schedule time during the Read More