CategoryCase Studies

June 25, 2021 — This article is a case study of how a UX audit affects a UI. It explains how a famous educational platform can be analyzed edX against Jakob Nielsen’s usability guidelines. To get started, Mark Lankmiller shares all of the criteria and metrics he used for his UX audit. Read more…

May 17, 2021 — Google’s “Page Experience Update” will start rolling out in June. At first, sites that meet Core Web Vitals thresholds will have a minor ranking advantage in mobile search for all browsers. Search is important to any business, and this is the story of how Beau Hartshorne and his team at Instant Domain Search improved their Core Web Vitals scores. Read more…

May 6, 2021 — When dealing with themes for large platforms and CMS, legacy issues often become a bottleneck. In this article, Carson Shold discusses how his team improved the performance and organization of their Shopify themes, and improved maintainability along the way. Read more…

May 5, 2021 — This article showcases a case study of Bookaway’s landing page performance. We’ll see how taking care of the props we send to Next.js pages can make loading times and Web Vitals better. Read more…

April 15, 2021 — Selling is key to growing your web design business, but it doesn’t have to be complicated! With clear goals, customer research, and proven closing techniques, anyone can find new clients. Read more…

March 30, 2021 — In this article, Michael Rispoli explains how he evaluated the decision of whether or not to adopt a serverless database for client projects. This decision will focus on three lenses: the functional aspects of the technology, the developer experience, and the business ramifications of adoption. Read more…

March 19, 2021 — Wondering what’s happenin’ at Smashing? Well, we’ve been busy. Here’s a little story of how we removed floating labels, improved performance on mobile, and launched a new series of articles. Oh, and how you can contribute to Smashing, too. Read more…

March 18, 2021 — The secret to growing a successful web design business is thinking of design as a service, not a product. When you focus on recurring revenue and sell to one targeted niche, you can grow a business faster than ever. Read more…

January 21, 2021 — In this article, we’ll take a close look at some of the changes we made on this very site — running on JAMStack with React — to optimize the web performance and improve the Core Web Vitals metrics. With some of the mistakes we’ve made, and some of the unexpected changes that helped boost all the metrics across the board. Read more…

September 18, 2019 — We’ve just released Smashing Magazine Print, with the very first pilot issue dedicated to ethics and privacy. In this post, Veerle, the illustrator of the issue, sheds some light into her design process and decisions made along the way. Read more…