A record number of shoppers are turning to their smartphones to research potential purchases. Meanwhile, the bigger question — are those same users willing to complete the purchases on their mobile device? — is quickly being answered.
The US, for example, saw an 81% spike in mobile e-commerce (m-commerce) sales in 2012, comprising a $25 billion market. And it’s not just apps. By a landslide, users prefer mobile websites to apps for shopping.
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At the recent WordCamp Edinburgh, I took part in a panel discussion about WordPress theme development and the options available to developers when building themes. The overriding conclusion from the session was that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer and that the best method depends on the needs of the website and the capabilities of the developer.
But if you're starting out building WordPress themes, or want to develop a system for building them more efficiently or robustly, how do you decide which approach to take? In this article I'll briefly describe how WordPress themes work, and then look at some of the different approaches to developing them, with tips on which approach might be most suitable depending on your site and your circumstances.
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Designing with users in mind is a tricky thing. Not only does it require of us a sound understanding of who our users are, but the actual act of translating what we know about them into a well-designed product is not always an obvious or easy path.
Currently, our user experience tools tend to focus on “who” users are. I believe this is a hangover from how we traditionally approached marketing and market research. A couple of years ago, I stumbled across a somewhat different method, which has proven useful in a few of my own projects.
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Responsive Web design has been evolving rapidly ever since Ethan Marcotte coined the term two years ago. Since then, techniques have emerged, become best practices and formed part of our ever-changing methodology.
A few obvious examples are the multitude of responsive image techniques, conditional loading, and responsive design and server-side components (RESS), among many other existing and emerging strands stemming from the core concept of responsive Web design.
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Another weekend, and yet another freebie. Today, we are happy to feature a useful icon set, the Simple Icons by Dan Leech. Dan's set contains 100 PNG icons for popular websites, apps and organisations, all in eleven sizes (16, 24, 32, 48, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 pixels squared).
Larger view.
The white icons have transparent backgrounds, which makes them ridiculously simple to style with CSS. As a bonus, simpleicons.org maintains a list of official background colour values that can be used in conjunction with the icons, thoroughly researched and derived from official branding guidelines of each brand.
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Print continues to be treated somewhat cursorily by most Web designers, who tend to be obsessed with pixels rather than printers. In the real world, a significant portion of people rely on pages printed from websites for reference: there’s still something about having a physical sheet of paper in one’s hands, even in this age of digital saturation.
Web developers can take several steps to bridge the gap between the worlds of printers and LCD screens. First, let’s cover the basics. Modern print style sheets are typically placed within a media query.
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Hundreds of tools may be available for interaction designers, but there is still no industry standard for interaction design the way Photoshop and Illustrator are to graphic design. Popular programs are out there, but many of them have considerable drawbacks, which has led me to explore alternative apps.
I eventually chose Adobe InDesign for much of my preliminary interaction design work. Yes, you read that correctly: InDesign, a desktop publishing app originally created for designing books and magazines, is currently my tool of choice for designing low- to medium-fidelity wireframes and interactive prototypes.
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Today we are happy to release three more exclusive interviews as well as two Smashing Conference videos featuring Brad Frost, Andy Clarke and Nicole Sullivan. You can check out even more conference interviews and talks by Jeremy Keith, Rachel Andrew and Stephen Hay.
In case you are wondering whether Smashing Conference 2013 will take place or not, the answer is a definitive "yes!", so please make sure to stay tuned to not miss it this year!
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Earlier this year, I was in the beginning stages of a redesign for our company’s website. We had already been planning to use a straightforward responsive approach to Web design, which is our preferred solution for multi-device support.
After hearing some frank discussions at An Event Apart conference in Boston about the limitations and challenges of responsive Web design, I realized that our solution needed a bit of adjustment.
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