Video content on the web increases customer engagement and satisfaction. Pages that load quickly have the same effect. The addition of video to your website will slow down the page rendering time, necessitating a balance between overall page load and video content. In this aticle, Doug Sillars will examine the important metrics to balance performance and video playback on the web, look at how video is being used today, and provide best practices on delivering video on the web.
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For the entire history of CSS Layout, being able to properly align things on both axes seemed like it might truly be the hardest problem in web design. The alignment properties that you might think of as the flexbox alignment properties are now fully defined in the Box Alignment Specification. If you have ever been confused about when to align and when to justify, this article will make things clearer! Today, Rachel Andrew will take a look at the alignment properties in Flexbox while discovering some basic rules to help remember how alignment on both the main and cross axis works.
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Tired of hearing about cryptocurrency? It’s high time we took a closer look at hyperlinks and how they are one of the biggest currencies in the SEO world. With this quick field guide, Myriam Jessier & Stéphanie Walter aim to help you protect your website, improve your marketing or simply discover why so many people troll the comments section with strange links! You are about to go through a linkbuilding crash course.
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CSS Grid Level 2 is already in the process of being specified, and the main feature of this level of the spec is to bring us subgrid. In this article, Rachel Andrew is going to explain what is currently part of the Working and Editor’s Draft of that spec. Note that everything here is subject to change, and none of it currently works in browsers. Take this as a peek into the process!
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With modern email service providers, it’s easier than ever to create a first-class transactional email experience for your users, but, for most of us, the challenge lies in the fact that you don’t know what you don’t know. If you’re sending transactional email for your application, you’ve probably got the basics down, but you may be missing out on some of the more advanced best practices without even knowing it. With this guide, Garrett Dimon will help you make sure that you haven’t overlooked anything and aren’t unwittingly doing something wrong that could be hurting your delivery or user experience for your recipients.
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If you’ve been looking for a list of email newsletters dedicated to web designers and developers, Ricky Onsman has got one that is bound to help you keep up with the industry — the most useful news and resources sent directly to your email inbox. The newsletters that were most namechecked are included here in their own section: “The Favorites.” For this article, Ricky focused on great newsletter content. It could be presented as sophisticated HTML with videos and infographics, or it could be no nonsense plain text with minimal descriptions, as long as the content — including how reliable any links are — is good.
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Today we have a real choice in terms of the layout methods we use in CSS to develop our sites, which means we often need to make a choice as to which approach to take. Whether you’re fairly new to CSS or an experienced developer from elsewhere in the stack who wants to make sure your understanding of layout today is up to date, this guide covers everything you need to know about CSS Layout today. In this article, Rachel Andrew will run through the various layout methods that you have available to you by explaining the basics of how they are used and what they are used for.
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In this article, Ricky Onsman brings you a list of current podcast for web designers and developers that our Smashing community listens to. We had what can only be called a very strong response both in number and in passion, and we’re pretty sure that any web designer or developer will find a few podcasts in this lot that will suit their particular listening tastes.
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The movement towards a more ethical future has begun. As designers and developers, we have an obligation to build experiences that are better than the norm. In this article, Trine Falbe explains how unethical design happens, and how to do ethical design through a set of best practices. She will also also help you understand how you can plant the seed to change the meaning within the company you work for and in the design community, even if you are not part of the management layer. Change starts with a movement!
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So you think you’ve designed something that’s perfect, but your test tells you otherwise. In this article, Christopher Murphy will be focusing on usability testing, where he evaluates the design decisions made against a representative set of users to test if his assumptions are correct. User testing should be happening at every point in the process as an integral part of an iterative design process. With that thought in mind, it’s important to establish a structured framework for user testing throughout the design process. let’s explore the importance of user testing.
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