August 8, 2018 — Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you the following pairing of talks from 2018 SmashingConfs, which will help you to assess the third party scripts you might be considering adding to a site. Taking into account business goals, user experience and performance you can make good decisions about what to include and how to do it. Read more…

August 5, 2018 — Do you know what a froto is? Do you know how you can get users to evaluate your product? Due to their technical skills, creativity and deep understanding of user needs, UXers are in a perfect position to apply marketing, SEO and growth-hacking tools and processes to their work.For focused UX efforts, it’s all about knowing user outcomes at each stage of their journey. In this first part of an upcoming series, Joe Leech will help you in understanding and mapping the problems users have and which solutions they need. Read more…

August 3, 2018 — Today is a very important day for us. We’re incredibly honored to have crossed our first milestone of 1,000 Smashing members today. In fact, with Membership, sometimes it feels like walking around a small town in which everyone knows each other and their friends, and so we know many members by name, and we’ve also met some of them at Smashing Conferences. In this post Vitaly Friedman highlights some of the members, how much money we’ve earned and how we spent it, and a bit of a feel about what Membership is like. Read more…

August 2, 2018 — In this article, the beginning of a series on Flexbox, Rachel Andrew will take a detailed look at what actually happens when you add display: flex to your stylesheet. She will take the initial values of Flexbox, in order to explain what actually happens when you say display: flex. It’s a surprising amount once you begin to unpack it, and contained within these few properties are many of the key features of flex layouts. Read more…

August 1, 2018 — How can we design in a way to help visitors rather than frustrate them? How do we know that a great user experience is really working well? In this pairing of videos from 2018 SmashingConfs, we think about UX — from two very different angles. Read more…

July 31, 2018 — August is here, so why not celebrate with a fresh wallpaper? In this post, Cosima Mielke features desktop wallpapers designed by artists and designers from across the globe. We give all artists the full freedom to explore their creativity and express emotions and experience throughout their works. With and without a calendar for August 2018 and available for free download. All images can be clicked on and lead to the preview of the wallpaper. Read more…

July 30, 2018 — The tips presented in this article aim to help HTML5 game developers in avoiding common mistakes when converting their Flash games to JS and making the process run as smooth as possible. Today, Tomasz Grajewski will focus mainly on Phaser v2. However, a newer version of Phaser is now available, and we encourage you to check it out, as it introduced a plethora of fresh, cool features, such as multiple cameras, scenes, tilemaps, or Matter.js physics engine. Read more…

July 27, 2018 — The Beacon API is a lightweight and efficient way to log information from a web page back to a server. It is used for sending small amounts of data to a server without waiting for a response. Think of it like a postcard sent home when on vacation. You put a small amount of data on it, put it in the mailbox, and you don’t expect a response. In this article, Drew McLellan will help you find out how that can be used and what makes it so different from traditional Ajax techniques. Read more…

July 26, 2018 — Have you been looking for a way to create a notification system when using WordPress? Meet the ‘Notification’ plugin, an all-in-one solution for any custom WordPress notification system. In this article, Jakub Mikita will show you how to create your own notification system within minutes with the free Notification plugin. By notification, he means any kind of notification. Most of the time, it will be email, but with the plugin you’ll be using, you can also send webhooks and other kinds of notifications. Read more…

July 25, 2018 — Frameworks such as Espresso and Mockito provide easy-to-use APIs that make writing tests for various scenarios easier. The important thing to consider while writing tests is the units of responsibility that emerge as you design the new feature. The unit test should cover all possible interactions with the unit, including standard interactions and exceptional scenarios. In this article, Vivek Maskara will cover the fundamentals of testing and frameworks which developers can use to write unit tests. Read more…