When the time has come to make some changes to your website-building toolkit there’s no shortage of tools or services you could use to smooth out your workflow, save money, add to website capabilities, or put bigger smiles on your clients’ faces. There are literally hundreds of tools and services you could choose from, if you had the time to make the necessary comparisons, and if you could be confident your choices were good ones. Or, at our...

When the web was young, a 56k connection was fast, CSS was new, and Flash was but a glint in Macromedia’s eye, there was a phrase that graced half of all splash screens: Best viewed in IE6. You see, back in the early 00s, the web was a lot less competitive. It was perfectly possible to ignore 40% of your users and still turn a profit. In fact, given the expense of maintaining a different codebase for every browser, it was often financially inviable...

We are always looking for ways to improve our skills and services and what we create. Sometimes that desire to improve is a conscious one. Most of the time it’s in the back of our minds, yet active. Short term results can be OK, but good long term results are what you want if you are to grow in your profession. In terms of web design, that means subscribing to, and adhering to, design trends that have staying power. You might have to stray from your...

Even web designers who prefer to design websites from scratch eventually look for frameworks, past work, or shortcuts. That way they speed up their workflow. And there are also those times when it’s hard to find the right template. You need help to create a special page and you feel compelled to build it from scratch. It only makes sense to take full advantage of drag and drop, front-end editing, design modules, customizable demos, and other...

One of the best things about the Internet is that it (mostly) doesn’t care where you are. The person you’re interacting with might be in Rio or Rhode Island, Bahrain or Birmingham. The Internet opens up the world. But opening up the world doesn’t mean removing it. The geographic independence loved by users can be a real headache for businesses, because nearly all businesses are constrained by geography. For business, having an accurate...

In our increasingly global world, people travel by airplane…a lot. With rapid turnaround times, unpredictable weather, and unexpected delays, airlines both domestic and international frequently adjust their flight schedules to keep us moving. If you’re building a website, a progressive web app, or even a native app that involves any kind of travel, the last thing you want to do is give users out-of-date information, and when it comes...

It’s that time of the year again. If you skipped Black Friday there’s still Cyber Monday. And there are tools and resources out there that you’ll find only once a year at this great price. We’ve gathered the best of them in this article. Bookmarking this page isn’t a solution. Don’t let a slow decision ruin your chance of getting these products or resources at a discounted rate. Act fast and don’t let them slip by. 1. Brizy Cloud Website...

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,...

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...

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...

Created by Design Bombs, these two fantastic sets of financial investment, and responsive design icons are perfect for apps and websites, especially in the fintech industry. There are 60 different icons included, ranging from concepts like Designing an Investment Plan, to Customer Emails, from a Browser, to CSS. Each icon is supplied as color, and outline versions, and in AI, EPS, PNG, and SVG formats, so no matter what your preferred workflow,...

weatherstack provides real-time, historical, and even forecast data up to 14 days in advance. Licensed from some of the world’s biggest weather stations and weather data providers, the information provided by weatherstack’s simple to use API gives you an accurate picture of the conditions on the ground, wherever your users access your site from. Trusted by over 75,000 companies, including many household names, weatherstack delivers...

The global market keeps getting bigger and bigger, which should be good news for web designers – but there’s a catch. The clients you can expect to serve are more sophisticated and want creative websites, not just the regular HTML and CSS. You can’t deliver just anything and expect them to be happy. You’ll also have some serious competition to contend with. As a consequence, your website must adequately address an ever-growing need...

The foundation of all typography is your choice of font. The font creates the voice of your text, its character and personality. For designers who aim to produce vital and engaging designs, a well-stocked font menu is a must. Of all the varieties of typeface, the most expressive, the most characterful, are script faces. The hand-drawn, hand-written, and hand-painted qualities make them ideal for designs that eschew the corporate grey of...