I always like to think I learnt web design by “the book”.

And back in 1997 it wasn’t a very big book, but in those early days there were a couple of basic tenets that “designers” adhered to. Or were meant to adhere to.

1. Manually code your HTML. Never use WYSIWYG webpage editors. They “inserted” all sorts of extraneous markup which was worse than useless. In “those” days the choice was pretty limited though. Frontpage by Microsoft, and Dreamweaver by Macromedia. The 1997 versions of both, IMO, sucked. Guess which one sucked harder though?!

2. Work to web standards and ensure your code validates.

3. However you design, or layout a page, ensure that it will largely load within eight seconds. Yep, that’s right, eight seconds. People were mostly on dial up connections in “those” days, and if a page didn’t load quickly, they’d be away to a “competitor’s” website that did.

4. I forget the rest…

Anyway point three henceforth gave rise a personal aversion to anything that would delay, or slow down, the load time of a web page I had anything to do with producing. That’s stuck to this day, despite the age of permanent warp speed internet connections.

That’s one reason disassociated.com has remained widget free since the day it was launched.

Last week though, at the behest of Kurt from Web Urbanist I decided to try out the new ROMlet widget, that he and some colleagues have been developing over the last few months.

You can see it in action in the lower part of the right hand column.

Basically the ROMlet displays, in real time, a website’s most recent referrers. Both the look of the ROMlet and the data it displays can be customised, and you can even show off the number of referrers from a particular source if you’re up for it!

I love the way it blends in with my design, and, equally importantly, its fast load time! Something not all widgets are capable of.

I’m trialling a special pre-beta release version of the ROMlet, but if you are interested in featuring the release version on your website or blog, sign up for email updates at the ROMlet website.