Articles for November 2019

If you’ve ever moved from one home to another, you know how difficult it can be to get rid of things you’ve owned for years. While digging through your closet, you find an old pair of pants you used to wear all the time despite the growing holes in the knees. But you tell yourself, “Maybe I’ll wear them around the house when it gets warmer” or “I bet the grunge look will come back in style”. It’s easy to make these kinds of justifications...

Keywords are essentially the bridge between a website and a search engine. They are what helps a search engine identify what your site is about, and how relevant it is when a certain term or phrase is searched for by the user. A search engine keeps a database of websites which they have filed away under the appropriate tags/topics to be able to produce fast results.  You can make sure you have a much stronger chance of appearing in the SERPs by optimising...

Unless you’ve been hiding under a tinfoil hat for the last few years, you probably know that UX and UI are not the same thing because “UX is more ergonomic”, or some such nonsense. But what about the unified part? Normally speaking, I’ve got very little patience for hipster acronyms and nit-picking, but actually it turns out there’s more to this than fake specs and chai latte. Imagine you’re standing outside two different coffee...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

The short answer to the title question is “no.” The long answer is more complex, and begins with, “kindof…” There are several JavaScript alternatives for developers, but (for now) they have to be transpiled into JavaScript before they’re deployed. People Love to Hate JavaScript This is not a surprise, if we consider some obvious drawbacks of this programming language, including IEEE 754 Double Precision, the fact that a number...

Data is the lifeblood of the web. We often say “content is king”, but what we mean is “data is king”. All good user experiences are crafted after careful data analysis. It’s why we’re all here, from the articles we read, to the products we buy, to the ideas we post, data is everything. Finding data, particularly for smaller businesses can be a daunting prospect. How can you generate so much data, when your competitors have been pushing,...

This month, the slow decline of minimalism continues, and color is everywhere. There’s some awesome type, and video-based maximalism seems to be gaining a foothold. Enjoy! Another Colour I adore Another Colour’s site. It takes incredible complexity to produce an effect this simple. The landing page is a looping rainbow gradient, and the gradient strip on the left takes you to the related point. Click a case study, and you’ll see tons...

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

When Tim Berners-Lee gave us the WorldWideWeb in 1990, it was the first and only web browser. But it didn’t remain alone for long. Even in those early days of the web, there was plenty of competition for web browser market share: Mosaic, MidasWWW, SlipKnot, Arena, Netscape, and Internet Explorer emerged around that time, too, and duked it out for the top spot for the better part of a decade. So, if there’s always been a battle of the browsers,...

App websites are sometimes neglected by app owners. The owners or developers set up everything in place for the app to go ballistic on the market, except doing the basic marketing step: designing an app website that converts your visitors to users. But is it enough to create a random website for an app? Nope. If you do a rushed job, your website will be just as good as not having one. You’ll end up having visitors come to your site that you’ve been...

You’re sure to find some tools and resources that will help you save time as we enter what is often one of the most hectic seasons of the year. Here’s what’s new for designers this month. Screen Size Map Screen Size Map is a tool to showcase popular screen sizes and will even auto-detect yours. Map sizes by device type, usage, size, and popularity. This can really come in handy when thinking about viewports or breakpoints in design projects....

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.  The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week. Note...

You already have a ton of tools in your web design toolbox which is why I’m reluctant to write this post the way I would for copywriters and SEO pros. Why? Well, because there are literally dozens of SEO tools you could add to your workflow. Unless you’re promising clients that their websites will go to #1 in search results for every keyword they want to win, there’s no reason to add that kind of complexity to your life. That said, you can’t...

One of the most important elements in the success of a website is speed. Tools like Google Lighthouse have been built to emphasize performance precisely because it is so important to user experience, and by association, to search engine ranking. The speed of a website is determined by numerous factors, but the single greatest is the volume of data that needs to be transmitted across the web; large file sizes mean slow load times. One of the biggest...