March 26, 2020 — Recent research has found that e-commerce category pages have higher click-through rates in search than individual category pages. So, if your e-commerce site is struggling to attract shoppers and convert them, your category pages (specifically, those on mobile) might be in need of a redesign. Based on the following data, Suzanne Scacca will show you how category pages have a role to play — as the intermediary between search engines and e-commerce websites. Read more…

March 25, 2020 — In Part 1, Paul explained the basics of the terminal, shared a few productivity hacks to get you started, and how to choose a code editor. In this part, he’ll continue with the topics of version control (Git), HTML and CSS, semantic code, and a brief introduction to some key engineering principles. Read more…

March 24, 2020 — In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about the user experience around converting site visitors into customers. Can our selling techniques leave customers feeling cheated? And how can that be avoided? Drew McLellan talks to conversion optimization specialist Paul Boag to find out. Read more…

March 23, 2020 — With so many people — including our workshop leaders — working from home, we thought we would bring our Smashing workshops from our home offices to yours. We hope we can help you continue to learn and interact with the speakers and each other, and also help out our workshop leaders who are losing income by being unable to run their workshops in person right now. Read more…

March 23, 2020 — In this seventh instalment of Inspired Design Decisions, Andy Clarke will explore how American art director and graphic designer Otto Storch inspires his designs for the web. How do we use CSS Shapes to go beyond basic shapes to add energy to our designs? How do we use rotations on text for extra impact? How can we use mirroring and reflections to add interest to a design? In this article, we’ll explore just that. Read more…

March 20, 2020 — Making your tables sortable in React might sound like a daunting task, but it doesn’t have to be too difficult. In this article, Kristofer Giltvedt Selbbekk is going to show you how to implement all you need to sort out all of your table sorting needs. By the end of this tutorial, you will have found a way to model your state, wrote a generic sorting function, and wrote a way to update what our sorting preferences are. After making sure everything is performant and refactored you will provide a way to indicate the sort order to the user. Read more…

March 19, 2020 — Houdini, an umbrella term for the collection of browser APIs, aims to bring significant improvements to the web development process and the development of CSS standards in general. Frontend developers will be able to extend the CSS with new features using JavaScript, hook into CSS rendering engine and tell the browser how to apply CSS during a render process. Houdini’s browser support is improving and some APIs are available for use today, so it’s a good time to become familiar with them and experiment. We are going to take a look at each part of Houdini, its current browser support and see how they can be used today using progressive enhancement. Read more…

March 18, 2020 — For the purpose of this two-part series of articles, we’re going to assume the answer for “Should designers code?” is “It depends.” If you’ve started and never finished courses in some online coding school — or if you’ve finished the courses but found it difficult to apply this style of learning in your day-to-day work, these two articles will provide a few different learning methods and will highlight different opportunities for their everyday application. In this first part of the series, we’ll take a look at getting comfortable with the command line and text editors. Read more…

March 17, 2020 — There isn’t a ton of mystery when it comes to what makes for an attractive and modern-looking design these days. What’s not always clear, however, is the usability aspect of it. In other words, have the pathways you’ve designed for users intuitive enough? The truth is, it’s all really just a guessing game unless you start getting user feedback early on. Thankfully, Indigo.Design has a usability testing solution to help us out. Read more…

March 16, 2020 — HTML is getting better at providing nice APIs for implementing cool features. In this tutorial, Chidi Orji is going to show you how to use the HTML Intersection Observer API to implement infinite scrolling and image lazy loading in a React functional component. In the process, we’ll learn how to use some of React’s hooks and how to create Custom Hooks. Let’s get started! Read more…