Responsive web design is great, but it’s not a silver bullet. In this article, Maximiliano Firtman will cover the relationship between the mobile web and responsive design, starting with how to apply responsive design intelligently, why responsive design should not be your website’s goal, and ending with the performance issues of the technique to help us understand the problem. According to Guy Podjarny’s research, 72% of responsive websites deliver the same number of bytes regardless of screen size, even on slow mobile network connections. Not all users will wait for your website to load. With just a basic understanding of the problem, you can minimize this loss.
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Is drawing the best way to begin to design an interface? Luca Leone started by writing an imagined human-computer conversation, and only afterwards he continued by drawing. The easiest tool is to imagine an interaction. The diagrams and sketches come afterwards. This changed his way of thinking and he never went back to drawing first. In this article Luca will explain the reasons behind his decision.
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Smashing Mystery Riddles are little experiments that challenge us to come up with something new, original and a bit crazy—every single time. The ideas are usually a synthesis of the things we discover, stumble upon or try out ourselves—and oh my, they take quite some time to get right. The basic idea for the most recent riddle was simple: as usual, you have a series of animated GIFs containing clues. One animated GIF leads to another, and every animated GIF contains a key that have to be discovered. Once you uncover all the keys, you construct a solution and send out a tweet containing that solution. Doesn’t sound too difficult, does it?
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Since Adobe decided to feature-freeze Fireworks in 2013, there is no replacement available for this Software, and, as every designer out there knows, Fireworks works best with extensions! However, there are many extensions that might help you improve Fireworks. In this article, Michel Bozgounov will show you some of the most useful Fireworks extensions that will help you work faster and be more effective with Fireworks; he has tested many of them himself, to be sure that they work flawlessly.
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To make the right choices for your project, you need to start with a general approach, or methodology. You probably already know of BEM, one of those methodologies developed by a big company, but Maxim Shirshin decided to try BEM on a smaller scale. He wanted the same benefits that Yandex gets from BEM: code sharing, a live style guide, scalability, faster development. He is now convinced that BEM applies to small projects as well. Maxim has written down his findings, in case you find them useful!
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This article concludes the series on how to sell and profit from digital products. In this piece, Nathan Barry will be discussing more of the tactics required for a successful digital product business, and he hopes you’ll learn some valuable techniques to make selling digital products more profitable! Let’s jump in.
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To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf Whistler, our very first conference in Canada, we’ve prepared a yet another riddle, and of course this time it’s not going to be any easier! How does it work this time? Below you’ll find the first of a few hidden animated GIFs that contain a secret Twitter hashtag. Once you’ve reached the last level, just tweet out all the hints in one single hashtag to @smashingmag on Twitter! Let’s get to business. Are you ready?
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To celebrate the launch of the SmashingConf Whistler, our very first conference in Canada, we’ve prepared a yet another riddle, and of course this time it’s not going to be any easier! How does it work this time? Below you’ll find the first of a few hidden animated GIFs that contain a secret Twitter hashtag. Once you’ve reached the last level, just tweet out all the hints in one single hashtag to @smashingmag on Twitter! Let’s get to business. Are you ready?
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Back then, when every home had broadband and before anyone had a smartphone, we were living in the Golden Age of web development. We never knew how easy our jobs were. Because of all the things we have to support now, testing has become really difficult and also super-expensive. Now with responsive web design, we have at least 15 browsers working on a myriad of different-sized devices, with many different input types, multiple pixel resolutions and hugely varying connection speeds. There must be a better way to deal with the problem that responsive design has created for testing. In this article, Tom Maslen will devise a testing strategy so that you don’t have to test every device every time you want to update a live website.
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The method of pitting two versions of a landing page against each other in a battle of conversion is called A/B testing, and it lets you test two entirely different designs for a landing page or you can test small tweaks, like changes to a few words in your copy. Running A/B tests on your website can help you improve your communication with visitors and back up important design decisions with real data from real users. With the multitude of tools available, split testing has become easy for even non-technical people to design and manage.
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