July 14, 2020 — We’re moving all of the 2020 conferences online. We hope this means that more of you can join us for these great line-ups! All of our online conference events will take place on the Hopin platform. We roadtested this platform for our Smashing Meets, and we love the way it allows for social chat and side events alongside the main conference. It’s as close as we can get to an in-person experience. Read more…

July 14, 2020 — The Scrabble GO, Instacart and YouTube mobile apps have recently undergone disruptive redesigns. Were they worth it in the end? Judging by their users’ reactions, the answer to that is “No”. But that doesn’t mean that redesigns or design tweaks are a bad idea after launch. In this article, Suzanne Scacca will take a look at the mistakes made and the lessons we can extract from them. Read more…

July 14, 2020 — We’re talking about Gatsby. What is it and how does it fit into your web development stack? Drew McLellan talks to expert Marcy Sutton to find out. Read more…

July 13, 2020 — In this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at a new effort to crowdfund the costs of implementing browser features. She encourage developers to use, talk about, and raise implementation bugs with browsers to try to get features implemented, however, what if there was a more direct way to do so? What if web developers could get together and fund the development of these features? This article is based on an interview with Brian Kardell, Developer Advocate at Igalia. Read more…

July 13, 2020 — There is a high possibility that a lot of components in your React application will have to make calls to an API to retrieve data that will be displayed to your users. It’s already possible to do that using the componentDidMount() lifecycle method, but with the introduction of Hooks, you can build a custom hook which will fetch and cache the data for you. That’s what Ademola Adegbuyi will cover with this tutorial. Read more…

July 10, 2020 — We shipped the first copies of Click! How to Encourage Clicks Without Shady Tricks in June, with a little extra something for preorder customers. The book is one of our most creative — beautifully designed and filled with great strategies for increasing conversion without falling into the dead-end routine of dark patterns. It’s a well-timed jolt of inspiration when so many of us are struggling with productivity and creative projects. Read more…

July 10, 2020 — Transitions are a nice way to remove, change, or update data in an application because their occurrence adds a nice effect and is good for the user experience. In this tutorial, Timi Omoyeni will look at the different ways to apply transitions in both Vue.js and Nuxt.js applications. Using these transitions in your applications and websites create a better visual experience and sometimes draws and holds the user’s attention while a piece of information is being introduced to or leaving the screen. Read more…

July 9, 2020 — There was a time when marketers used things like urgency, scarcity and FOMO to drive online shoppers to a sale. But scare tactics can actually hurt a brand’s relationships with customers. By their very nature, we run into similar problems with shipping and inventory alerts. That said, there are ways that web designers can keep panic and frustration from seeping into the shopper’s experience. If you want to better control your shoppers’ responses and keep them on the path to conversion, Suzanne Scacca will tell you how, in this article. Read more…

July 8, 2020 — Tauri is a toolchain for creating small, fast, and secure desktop apps from your existing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. In this article, Kelvin explains how Tauri plays well with the progressive framework Vue.js by integrating both technologies in bundling an example web app called nota as a native application. Read more…

July 7, 2020 — If you are the sort of person who doesn’t like reading about things if you can’t use them now, then this article probably isn’t for you — we have many others for you to enjoy instead! However, if you like to know what is on the way and read more about the things you can play with in a beta version of a browser, read on! Today, Rachel Andrew takes a look at some of the interesting CSS features that are making their way into browsers right now. Read more…