CategoryGuides

April 18, 2019 — With so many applications and services and people and machines and chatbots fighting for our attention, staying focused is a luxury that needs to be savored and protected, and so no wonder notifications don’t enjoy a decent reputation these days. More than that, often they feel off the point and manipulative, too. In this series of articles, Vitaly Friedman will talk about privacy-related design patterns. He’ll be exploring some of the respectful ways to approach privacy and data collection, and how to deal with those notorious cookie consent prompts, intrusive push notifications, glorious permission requests, malicious third-party tracking and offboarding experience. Read more…

April 10, 2019 — Now cookie prompts aren’t particularly useful, but they certainly helped raise awareness about privacy and data collection on the web. In fact, users now know that websites track their data, which they weren’t aware of a few years ago. But they often see it as a necessary evil in exchange for accessing the content “for free.” This series of articles is about privacy-related design patterns. Vitaly Friedman will be exploring some of the respectful ways to approach privacy and data collection, and how to deal with those notorious cookie consent prompts, intrusive push notifications, glorious permission requests, malicious third-party tracking and offboarding experience. Read more…

March 28, 2019 — There are a few ways to align elements in CSS. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains what they are with some tips to help you remember which to use and why. She will take a look at the different alignment methods. Instead of providing a comprehensive guide to each, Rachel explain a few of the sticking points people have and point to more complete references for the properties and values. You can go a long way by understanding the fundamental things about how the methods behave, and then need a place to go look up the finer details in terms of how you achieve the precise layout that you want. Read more…

February 20, 2019 — What is Node in the first place? What is the meaning “event-driven” and “non-blocking” anyway, and how does Node fit into the bigger picture of applications, Internet networks, and servers? In this article, Jamie Corkhill will attempt to answer all of these questions and more throughout this series as he takes an in-depth look at the inner workings of Node, learn about the HyperText Transfer Protocol, APIs, and JSON, and more. An introduction to the backend web application development process. Read more…

February 7, 2019 — It’s important to understand that all decisions involve emotions. In this article, Susan Weinschenk explains how you can make your users feel confident of their decisions and why it’s a bad idea to provide more than four options to choose from. For example, if someone is making a habit-based decision, do not give them a lot of information, and always limit the number of choices people have to make to one, two or three. If you provide too many choices then people likely won’t choose at all. Read more…

January 14, 2019 — Web Standards, and the documentation to support them, provide huge insight into ‘the why’ and ‘the what’ of the world wide web. They are a fantastic resource for any web developer and help people build stuff for the web that is functional, accessible and cross-compatible. In this article, we take a look at the history of Web Standards, how to use them in your work and ways you can get involved in making them. In this article, Amy Dickens will give you an introduction to web standards, as well as ways you can get involved in contributing to new and existing standards. Let’s begin! Read more…

January 2, 2019 — You don’t need to commit to memorizing every CSS Property and Value, as there are good places to look them up. There are some fundamental things, however, which will make CSS much easier for you to use. In this article, Rachel Andrew aims to guide you along your path of learning CSS and outline resources for further reading on key areas of modern CSS development. Many of those are things right here on Smashing Magazine. Her aim is to cover the breadth of modern CSS with a focus on a few key areas, that will help to unlock the rest of the language for you. Read more…

December 31, 2018 — We’re not just the publishers of an online magazine or conference organizers, we are people who work in the web industry. As Editor in Chief of Smashing Magazine, Rachel Andrew looks after the content that goes out on the online magazine, and also our upcoming print magazine for members. This year, we have published almost every weekday — that represents over 290 articles! Today, the Smashing Team looks back at 2018. Conferences, articles, books and the Smashing Membership — there has been a lot going on. Read more…

November 21, 2018 — Today is a very important day for us. We celebrate the first year of Smashing Membership. Those who have been with us from the start will receive an email with details of a present from us to say thank you, and we’ll give you a taste of what’s to come in year two. Now that the team is larger, we’ll be bringing you more content — going up to three webinars a month. The price stays the same. And, of course, we’d love your input on subjects or speakers! Read more…

October 25, 2018 — Since video files are large, optimizing the video to be as small as possible will lead to faster video delivery, speeding up video start, lowering the number of stalls, and minimizing the effect of the quality of the video delivered. Of course, we need to balance startup speed and stalling with the third metric of quality. In this series of posts on video performance on the web, Doug Sillars takes a closer look at how video is being used today, what we can learn from it, and how to move forward in a way that promotes fast delivery and playback of video content on the web. Read more…