Code articles

At the end of 2016, I put out the 2016 Front-End Tooling Survey. The response has been phenomenal. Thank you to all of you who have taken the time to do so. The aim was pretty straight-forward; to find out more details about the tools front-end developers are currently using in their own workflows. In our industry, it’s all too easy to take for granted what people are using based on your own knowledge. This survey aims to give more of an insight into...

Whether you love them or hate them, conversational interfaces have started making a significant impact in the business/brand communication landscape. Though many businesses have realized that conversational interfaces are likely to cause a major shift in brand communication there are many who are skeptical about CIs.  CIs have limitations, but they are here to stay and they will get better and more advanced, and that the current issues...

January is the time most of us cease reflecting on the year gone by, and start looking to the months ahead. It seems everyone has different ideas on what to expect in 2017 (you’ll read ours next week) and one of the most anticipated changes this year, is the introduction of CSS Grid Layout. Grid Layout allows us to define areas of a page, and determine how they stretch, scale, and respond to the viewport. Developed as a mature layout solution for...

With hundreds of free JS libraries out there it’s tough to know where to put your energy. Some end up discarded or forked into new projects, while others grow rapidly and achieve widespread adoption. Most developers already know the big names like jQuery and React. But in this post I’d like to introduce twelve alternative JS libraries that are less well-known but rising rapidly. 1) D3.js Big data is a growing industry and data visualization...

If you have a modern website or mobile app, there’s no doubt you deal with a lot of media resources, particularly images. But delivering these images can be a challenge. You may not know if there are broken images on your website, or if URLs point users to non-existing images, resulting in HTTP status errors. Worse yet, search engines like Google, may have indexed the URLs of images that have since been deleted or modified, leading to even more...

I’ve made no secret of my love for LESS. It was my first CSS pre-processor, and still my favorite, even as pragmatism pushes me towards SASS. The addition of variables, mixins, selector nesting, and advanced calculations to CSS just blew my mind. And while the enhanced versatility and ease of writing CSS was much appreciated, I was especially excited about the potential for the increased separation of content from presentation. That was...

This one’s for the absolute beginners. Once you’ve learned how the box model works, and how to float those boxes, it’s time to get serious about your CSS. To that end, we’ve compiled a massive list of tips, tricks, techniques, and the occasional dirty hack to help you build the design you want. CSS can get tricky, and you should too. And now, in no particular order, (almost) everything you’ll need to know: 1. Absolute positioning If...

HTTP/2 is a new way of making your website load much faster by eliminating many inefficiencies associated with the current version of HTTP. The greatest thing about it? You don’t have to go to much effort to get it up and running. Or do you? What is HTTP/2? When HTTP1 and HTTP1.1 were originally developed, the web was very different to what it is today. Websites had fewer resources (JavaScript files, CSS files, images) than today. Connections...

We take web fonts for granted these days. We didn’t always have the option of setting our text in almost any typeface. I mean, we could, but then we’d have to sigh and say, “Well, that’ll look good on about five people’s computers. Hope everyone else likes Verdana!” Web fonts brought some much needed variety to the seen, a few abuses of typography, some extra page weight as the fonts themselves were loaded, and flashes of unstyled...

The internet is constantly making headway with speed being the major metric of progress and a key question for most web developers. A previous WebdesignerDepot article How slow is too slow in 2016? highlighted the need to focus on speed, so we decided to present a few features that will help your site make the grade in 2016. HTTP/2 Published in May 2015 and supported since the second half of 2015, HTTP/2 is a new version of the world wide web...

If you use any kind of social media like Facebook or Twitter, you won’t have been able to avoid the merciless onslaught of ads promoting WYSIWYG website development. I’m not talking about those fancy software applications like DreamWeaver, but actually hosted site building applications that offer drag-n-drop website building systems complete with predefined templates. You could easily think that this is a great idea because on the...

Zurb, makers of Foundation, have a reputation for building robust tools that web developers love. They craft effective solutions because they start out to solve problems they encounter themselves. Now they’re back with a brand new, open-source, ES6 JavaScript @mention engine called Tribute.js. @mention is a user interface technique for addressing someone directly. When you @mention someone, they are tagged into a conversation....

As citizens of the digital world, we are constantly flooded with data. From website analytics to our fitness tracker, data is all around us. As a result, for the front-end designers it is becoming increasingly difficult to present data in a way that stands out from other data sources that are competing for a viewer’s attention. One of the best ways to get your message across is to use great charts and graphs. They allow you to quickly draw attention...

This tutorial will help you with the most important thing you probably aren’t doing for your MailChimp newsletter: ensuring its delivery. If your newsletter isn’t being delivered, then no training, or tips, or marketing tactics will matter. Ensuring delivery basically means that you’ve got to prove that you are who you say you are, where your email address is concerned; because spammers and spoofers like to use other people’s email...