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TopUp

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42 pointsmshafrir14 comments

Lightboxes are to javascript developers what pastebins and url shorteners are to frontend developers.

Don't forget wikis and blogs.

I heart all javascript developers who write OSS lightboxes for the rest of us, because a) they're really surprisingly difficult to do right in exactly the way you need it done (an edge case I've seen: does the content stay fixed while the grey overlay moves with the window when scrolled with the mousewheel on Google Chrome?) and b) proper integration of them with your site practically prints money.

You can look at the obvious one on my site for an example -- I've been through a dozen or so iterations of that, from starting with a simple HTML link to an image file (don't do this -- just don't) to a simple Lightbox for the image to the iBox for the image and call-to-action buttons that I'm using right now. Those improvements move the needle for my business.

Have you a/b tested the image quality of your screenshots?

I'm just curious about whether a higher quality image would be easier to read and thus more helpful (on the flip side, it might take longer to load, which is bad).

100% agree. I use lightboxes on nearly every site we build. They are an elegant solution to a common problem.

> b) proper integration of them with your site practically prints money.

Explain please =)

It is about 2 AM here, so I can't find the blog post on it for you, but they have tended to greatly increase my conversion rates versus linking directly to screenshots.

Did you mean backend developers? I struggle to see what fun a frontend guy might see in building a URL shortener.

The way I think of it, a frontend developer specifies REST APIs and writes controllers and routes, while the backend developer is the one required to know their algorithms and data structures cold, and writes/architects the model and business logic. A site like the Google homepage obviously requires both kinds of these developers. CRUD only requires the frontend developers, though, so we call the code-monkeys munging Photoshop mock-ups into CSS "frontend developers" and call the actual frontend developers backend developers.

>> "TopUp is compressed with Yahoo! YUI Compressor to 44.6 KB"

That seems quite a lot for a lightbox effect.

Agree, and it also requires jQuery and jQuery UI. That adds another ~150 KB, depending on the jqUI package you select.

Nice looking lightbox, but that's way too heavy for my tastes.

wowsers. You could probably have GMail in that size.

Why don't all of these libs close the popup when you click the image?

i also think this is quite annoying. at least pressing escape should work.

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