February 1, 2018 — Content marketing is the practice of creating a piece of content. This piece of content is generally free, though it may be hidden behind a simple email/lead-capture form, and it usually is meant to be found through search or through free/low-budget distribution methods It is tough, but with the right WP plugins, you can turn your website into a content marketing machine, one that actually performs for your business. Here are some stellar plugins that will ensure your efforts aren’t falling short. Read more…

February 1, 2018 — JavaScript is essential to any advanced web app, so a strong debugger is a key part of the toolset. In this article, Dustin Driver and Jason Laster find out how the new Firefox JavaScript debugger can help you write fast, bug-free code. They will crack open a very simple to-do app with Debugger divided into three panes: the source list pane, the source pane, and the tool pane.. Here’s how it works! Read more…

January 31, 2018 — As every month since more than nine years already, artists and designers from across the globe once again fired up their favorite illustration tools and got out their paint brushes and cameras to create charming desktop wallpapers that are sure to breathe some fresh life into your desktop. Today, Cosima Mielke brings you unique and inspiring desktop wallpapers that celebrate the month of love, Chinese New Year, and the small things that make us happy. Created by artists from across the globe and available with and without a calendar for February 2018. Read more…

January 31, 2018 — The most important thing to remember when designing products is that design is for people. To design great products, you must deliver the right features, with the right user experience for the right people. Thus, define your target audience, then research their problems, and, finally, focus on building a product that solves those problems! In this article, Nick Babich takes a closer look at how to define an optimal product vision, strategy, and design process. Read more…

January 31, 2018 — GraphQL’s features are not a revolution, but what makes GraphQL powerful is that the level of polish, integration, and ease-of-use make it more than the sum of its parts. Many of the things GraphQL accomplishes can, with effort and discipline, be achieved using REST or RPC, but GraphQL brings state of the art APIs to the enormous number of projects that may not have the time, resources or tools to do this themselves. In this article, Eric Baer focuses almost entirely on why GraphQL exists and the problems it solves. Read more…

January 30, 2018 — The past years have been remarkable for web technologies. Our design process is systematic and efficient. And after so many years, accessibility and performance have finally become established, well-recognized pillars of user experience. It’s a truly wonderful time to be designing and building for the web, and Vitaly Friedman couldn’t be more excited and honored to be a part of these developments. However, as designers and developers, we focus on beautiful interfaces and fast experiences, but there is one side often missing: respect towards privacy, security, inclusivity, authenticity, personality, and ethics. It’s about time we change that. Read more…

January 30, 2018 — Manually clicking through different browsers as they run your development code, either locally or remotely, is a quick way to validate that code. However, it’s not a solution for testing the full breadth of your site’s code base on the assortment of browsers and device types available to your customers. That’s where automated testing really comes into its own. In this article, Jason McConnell provides an overview of the concepts, technologies and coding techniques involved with running test scripts against browsers automatically using WebDriverJS on Windows 10 and Microsoft Edge. Read more…

January 30, 2018 — One of the toughest challenges Harris Schneiderman came across is the reorderable drag-and-drop list. While a reorderable list is a somewhat commonly used widget with intuitive conventions for mouse users, it’s not clear how keyboard-only assistive technology users can perform this simple task. Dragon Drop seeks to fill this gap by providing means for all users to perform this somewhat common task. Due to the absence of supported ARIA attributes, Dragon Drop utilizes live regions to convey the information needed for all users to reorder a list. Read more…

January 29, 2018 — Offboarding is something users come into contact with every time they complete an online transaction. It is usually described as the interaction between a company and their customer at the end of the customer journey. Whether a user is permanently ending their relationship with a company, or they are just finishing a single transaction, offboarding should be acknowledged as the last impression a user has of your business. In this article, Christine Logan will show you everything about the benefits offboarding can bring to your company and how to apply it in such a way that it is a good experience for all users. Read more…

January 25, 2018 — The most important step anyone can take to make sure that a site is secure is to keep in mind that no single process or method is sufficient to ensure nothing bad happens. WordPress itself provides a sizable library of functions, some of which can be dangerous. Beyond that, there are lots of PHP functions that a WordPress (PHP) developer will use with some frequency that can be dangerous when used. Before deploying a new plugin in WordPress, it’s a good idea to keep a list of easy-to-misuse functions by your side. In this article, David Hayes will take a closer look at some functions which you can and should use as part of a broader security strategy. Read more…