With mobile traffic increasing on local business websites, web developers and designers are now tasked with a new responsibility. It’s no longer enough for websites to rank well — they need to rank well in local search results, too. As mobile users demand more information about local businesses, your websites need to be creative in how that data is served to them in search and through design. You can use these seven mobile design strategies to do so. In this article, Suzanne Scacca is going to show you how to use mobile web design to improve local search ranking.
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Not sure how to remove the code debt that bloats and weighs down your site? In this article, Jon Raasch will show you the quantitative benefits of optimizing page speed. This guide will give you the tools you need to convince others. Here are specific ways mobile performance impacts your site and page speed results. It’s time to change our mindset.
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Linking JavaScript functionality to the DOM can be a repetitive and tedious task. In this article, Rik Schennink explains how ConditionerJS can help make websites more flexible and user-oriented. Step-by-step he’ll improve this logic, and finally, he’ll make a 1 Kilobyte jump to replacing it with Conditioner. By combining all of the following tiny changes, you can speed up page load time and more closely match your functionality to each different context. This will result in improved user experience and as a bonus improve our developer experience as well.
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We all want to load images fast on the web. Choosing the right image format, optimizing the quality and using responsive images are important tasks, but what can we do beyond that? As developers, we need to measure performance. We should care more about the loading experience of the websites we build. It’s great that we now have tools such as WebPageTest and Lighthouse that can help us easily measure the effect of using progressive image loading techniques. No more excuses!
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In this article, Aidan Sliney is not going to make you the next Instagram, but he will hopefully help you get a nice base level of users that you can grow from. The example app in this article received 100,000 downloads in eight weeks. This is with a marketing budget of zero and very little work since launch. Aidan will cover the basic app store optimizations that will help bring people to your Google Play page. Getting them to download and stay is up to you and up to the value your app provides. Of course, to get traction, you need to pick a topic in which enough people are interested, and then the quality of your build is what is going to help keep these users.
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The first and most important thing you can do to improve the performance of your website’s images is figure out how to measure them. In this article, Eric Portis will show you Website Speed Test, a free and drop-dead-simple tool that leverages Cloudinary’s image smarts to let you measure, diagnose and communicate about the image performance of any website. Better yet, it’s built on top of, and integrated in, Pat Meenan’s WebPagetest. Interested? Read on!
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Moving from one image for all kinds of devices to the common one-size-per-form-factor approach is definitely a step in the right direction. The downside is that, from a performance perspective, the approach is too general. There is more juice to be squeezed. However, from a development and maintenance perspective, it might make sense because three image sizes, or breakpoints, are manageable. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås will look closely at how well the one-size-per-form-factor approach really works and how you can use smart content delivery networks to improve image performance.
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Two years ago, The Russian ruble’s exchange rate slumped, and Andrew Sumin and his team had to take a look at what email consists of. At the time, they didn’t have file deduplication in place, but they estimated that it could shrink the total storage size by 36%, because many users receive the same messages, such as price lists from online stores and newsletters from social networks that contain images and so on. In this article, he will describe how he implemented a deduplication system under the guidance of PSIAlt.
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Is your website on mobile devices friends with your users? As web designers, you could often treat your users the same way the “bad guys” treat The Little Mole, especially on mobile websites. In this article, Martin Michálek goes through them and suggests best practices to optimize the user experience on mobile devices. Be kind to mobile users. Do not be the wicked old man who tries to get rid of The Little Mole in his yard. Do you want to know how the fairy tale ends? The Little Mole survives, laughs at the old man and moves to another garden.
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With a few additions, WordPress websites can accommodate a responsive image use case known as art direction. Art direction gives us the ability to design with images whose crop or composition changes at certain breakpoints. In this article, Laurie Laforest will show you how to set up a WordPress theme to support art direction in a simple manner. This method relies on WordPress’ standard administration interface as much as possible, and it requires only a single image to be uploaded.
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