January 21, 2016 — WordPress does make it really easily to completely customize a website. Unfortunately, any modifications made to a theme will be lost once the theme is updated by the developer — which is also bad for security. A much better idea is to use a child theme. This allows you to make any number of changes to a website without touching any of the original theme files. In this article, Nick Schäferhoff will take a detailed look at what WordPress child themes are, how to create them and how to use them to customize your website — the right way. Read more…

January 20, 2016 — In this article, Becky White will try to point out how you could avoid common pitfalls through UX considerations such as the variety of ways you can usability test with children, when and how to use non–digital prototyping, why you shouldn’t forget about adults, or when to incorporate audio/visual feedback. It’s not just taking grown–up content and dumbing it down. In fact, there are many reasons why designing for kids is actually more difficult than designing for adults. Read more…

January 19, 2016 — JavaScript developers faced a great revolution with Node.js, by allowing them to write code that runs directly on their machines. They started to easily write tools for the command line that automate a lot of things in their development cycles. npm, which is bundled with Node.js, made this even easier by giving them quick and easy access to tools that others have created, which they install on their machines to access from wherever they are in their system. Make the most out of it Installing packages from npm globally. Read more…

January 18, 2016 — Developers have no reason not to explore Client Hints. The key benefits are more maintainable responsive image tags, fewer image bytes transferred and, ultimately, happier end users. In this article, Jon Arne Sæterås will focus on how to address responsive images issues, with a little help from the web server and Client Hints, the new way for the browser to request images with specific properties. Read more…

January 15, 2016 — What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at. Read more…

January 14, 2016 — Too complex and feature-driven products may not provide the users what they need or want. When designers reduce to the minimum the footprint of their product in the user’s life, they provide better actual usage for digital products. They should be focusing on processes, not screens, to get more results with less interactions. In this article, Goran Peuc will dive into a review of remarkable products and services that actually bring easy solutions through simpler processes. It’s up to you to remove complexity for the user and to minimize the footprint of your product in the user’s life. Yes, this requires a lot of work, but that is how you will differentiate your product from the competition’s. Read more…

January 13, 2016 — Over the time, OSS has turned into crowd-sourced marketplaces and this big range open source functionality is great, but it also carries big risks. Whenever you are running a stranger’s code inside your applications, you might question yourself “Do you know if these authors understand or care about security?” or “Do you know if they have vulnerabilities?”. In this article, Guy Podjarny will show you a good way to start acknowledging and handling this risk which is to address the known vulnerabilities in your dependencies and Snyk makes it easy for you to find, fix and monitor these vulnerabilities in Node.js. Read more…

January 13, 2016 — Using a preprocessor does not automatically upgrade one’s code: A thorough foundation in CSS is a prerequisite. In Karen Menezes’ experience, badly architected and overly abstracted preprocessor code is much harder to debug and maintain than a large CSS file created with basic structure and common sense. Variables can be seen as the backbone of a well-constructed project. Well-commented and well-defined variables set a great foundation for a project of any size. By maintaining a variable-centric approach, we can structure our style sheets with a meaning and modularity that persist beyond the trends that come and go. Read more…

January 11, 2016 — Usually, Numeric keypad Design is an inversion of the Calculator Layout, but why? Nowadays the users experience most of digital products using gestures, not only buttons. In this article, C Y Gopinath explores the roots of this disparity and proposes a better solution. He will discuss how to simplify and adapt a traditional numeric interface to a minimalist design norm by taking advantage of modern touch–driven modes of human–mobile interaction. He’ll also tackle the design logic behind developing a new interface for the basic calculator. Read more…

January 8, 2016 — What’s going on in the industry? What new techniques have emerged recently? What insights, tools, tips and tricks is the web design community talking about? Anselm Hannemann is collecting everything that popped up over the last week in his web development reading list so that you don’t miss out on anything. The result is a carefully curated list of articles and resources that are worth taking a closer look at. Read more…