May 4, 2018 — UX professionals are constantly pressured to reduce the time they need to conduct UX research. Find out which techniques and ideas can make the user research process more transparent and collaborative. In this article, Zoe Dimov will take a closer look at some challenges and propose a new approach known as ‘FAST UX’ in order to solve them. This is a powerful tool that you can use to speed up UX research and turn stakeholders into active champions of the process. Read more…

May 3, 2018 — Macular degeneration is the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. Bud Kraus shares his story of lessons learned from his disability as a tool to help him communicate and teach WordPress to others. Everyone works with WordPress differently, and Bud has discovered that for most people technology makes things easier. And for him, it makes things possible. Read more…

May 3, 2018 — SmashingConf Toronto is coming! Join us for a conference without slides, and see how experienced designers and developers work live. With lots of time for deep dive-ins. June 26–27. All talks will be live coding and design sessions on stage, showing how speakers, including pattern libraries setup, design workflows and shortcuts, debugging, naming conventions, and everything in between. Read more…

May 2, 2018 — With the help of this article, you will finally be able to learn the basics of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda and Simple Email Service (SES) APIs to help you build your own static site mailer on the Serverless Framework. Today, Brian Holt will show you the basics of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda and Simple Email Service (SES) APIs to build your own static site mailer on the Serverless Framework. The full service will take form data submitted from an AJAX request, hit the Lambda endpoint and return a response for our users. Brian will guide you through getting Serverless set up for the first time through deployment. It should take under an hour to complete, so let’s get started! Read more…

May 1, 2018 — Printing pages directly from the browser is an experience that can lead to frustration with enormous images being printed out. We have covered print stylesheets in the past here on Smashing Magazine, but in this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the state of printing from the browser today. She will show you how you should include print styles in your web pages, and look at the specifications that really come into their own once printing. Read more…

April 30, 2018 — Let’s celebrate the beginning of May with some fresh and inspiring desktop wallpapers. Since more than nine years, artists and designers from across the globe challenge their creative skills and design monthly wallpapers for you to indulge in. In this post Cosima Mielke brings you their artworks for May 2018. Designed with love by artists and designers from across the globe, this wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar, so that you can continue using your favorites even after the month has ended. Read more…

April 27, 2018 — Is there a better way to make direct changes to your WordPress website? Yes, there is! In this article, Nick Schäferhoff will show you local WordPress development. You will learn about the benefits of building a local WordPress development environment, how to set one up and how to move your local site to the web when it’s ready. Learning how to install WordPress locally is super useful. It enables you to make site changes, run updates, test themes and plugins and more in a risk-free environment (and it’s free thanks to open source software). Read more…

April 26, 2018 — Not sure how to remove the code debt that bloats and weighs down your site? In this article, Jon Raasch will show you the quantitative benefits of optimizing page speed. This guide will give you the tools you need to convince others. Here are specific ways mobile performance impacts your site and page speed results. It’s time to change our mindset. Read more…

April 25, 2018 — Ever find yourself writing the same code over and over again? Sharing code between projects is vital to building software faster, while making your code base simpler to maintain and develop over time. However, the overhead of splitting repositories, refactoring projects, and modifying components from different projects can make it hard to effectively collaborate and share your code. In this article, Jonathan Saring shares his and his team’s lessons learned from their own journey towards simple and effective code sharing. Read more…

April 24, 2018 — Creating a team who can work well together across different disciplines can be hard. Given the wide range of skills held by the line-up at the upcoming SmashingConf Toronto, Rachel Andrew solicits some suggestions from the speakers. She’s wrapped those up with her own experience of 20 years working alongside designers and other developers. Read more…