In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re talking about the user experience around converting site visitors into customers. Can our selling techniques leave customers feeling cheated? And how can that be avoided? Drew McLellan talks to conversion optimization specialist Paul Boag to find out.
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Ever built a website and reached for jQuery, Bootstrap, Vue.js or React to acheive some basic user interaction? Alpine.js is a fraction of the size of these frameworks because it involves no build steps and provides all of the tools you need to build a basic user interface. Today, Phil Smith is going to take a closer look at Alpine.js and how it can replace JQuery or larger JavaScript libraries to build interactive websites. If you regularly build sites that require a sprinkling on Javascript to alter the UI based on some user interaction, then this article is for you.
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Whenever a web client uploads a file to a server, it is generally submitted through a form and encoded as multipart/form-data. Multer is a middleware for Express.js and Node.js that makes it easy to handle this so-called multipart/form-data whenever your users upload files. In this article, Deve Rathore introduces how Multer streamlines the process of handling file uploads. It also introduces how to use Mongoose to interact with our database by building a music manager app using Express.js alongside Multer for the music upload and Nuxt.js (Vue framework) for our frontend.
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In this episode of the Smashing Podcast, we’re taking a look at UI Frameworks. How can the custom needs of a highly usable application be met with a set of off-the-shelf tools? Drew McLellan speaks to UX Designer Stéphanie Walter to find out what we should be considering when building on a UI framework.
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Django is a framework for developing dynamic websites. While a static website is one that solely presents information, there is no interaction that gets registered to a server. In a static website, the server sends HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to a client and that’s it. More capabilities require a dynamic website, where the server stores information and responds to user interaction beyond just serving pages. One major reason to develop a dynamic site is to authenticate users and restrict content. One major reason to develop a dynamic site is to authenticate users and restrict content. Django provides a powerful out-of-the-box user model, and in this article, Philip Kiely will walk you through the best way to provide secure, intuitive user authentication flows.
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Denys Mishunov recently discussed what “Frankenstein Migration” is, compared it to conventional types of migrations, and mentioned two main building blocks: microservices and Web Components. He also showed you a theoretical basis of how this type of migration works. If you didn’t read or forgot that discussion, you might want to get back to Part 1 first because it helps to understand everything we’ll cover in this second part of the article.
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What if you spend the unproportionate amount of time to support an outdated system?
The typical answer to such a problem is the migration of the application. However, all of the front-end frameworks are different. In this article, Denys Mishunov will show you “Frankenstein Migration” which is a new, framework-agnostic approach to the process of migration that allows using the same mechanism to migrate to pretty much any framework of your choice.
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As with many other topics in software development, testing and test driven development are often made needlessly complex in theory and implementation by placing too much emphasis on learning a wide array of testing frameworks. In this article, Ryan Kay will revisit what testing means by a simple analogy, explore concepts in software architecture which will directly result in a reduced need for testing frameworks, and some arguments as to why you might benefit from an attitude of minimalism for your testing process.
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In this article, Ben Frain concludes a three-part series about the trials and tribulations of designing and writing a basic web application with vanilla JavaScript. In part one he covered the why, part two dealt mostly with the how and this part concludes by looking at how the project was drawn to a close and what was learned from the experience. Ben will cover turning a basic web application into a Progressive Web Application (PWA) and ‘shipping’ the application before looking at the most valuable lessons learned by making the simple web application In/Out.
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In the first article of this series, your author, a JavaScript novice, had set themselves the goal of designing and coding a basic web application. The ‘app’ was to be called ‘In/Out’ — an application to organize team-based games. In this article, Ben Frain is going to concentrate on how the application ‘In/Out’ actually got made.
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