The web is wonderfully diverse and unpredictable because of wonderfully diverse people shaping it. In this new series of short interviews, we talk to interesting people doing interesting work in our industry and sharing what they’ve learned. You probably have heard of JAMstack — the new web stack based on JavaScript, APIs, and Markup — but what does it mean for your workflow and when does it make sense in your projects? We’ve kindly asked Phil Hawksworth to run a webinar explaining what JAMStack actually means and when it makes sense, as well as how it affects tooling and front-end architecture.
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Using a Structured Content Management System (SCMS) can be a great way to free your content from a paradigm that begins to feel its age. In this article, Knut Melvær suggests some overarching strategies, with some concrete real-world examples on how to think about working with structured content. This is the guide Knut wished had the last couple of years when running projects with headless Content Management Systems (CMSs), and we hope it will be helpful to you!
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Everyone knows that if a website is slow, users will abandon it. Many studies demonstrate the connection between website performance and conversion rates. Being an easy-to-use inclusive and versatile piece of software, WordPress comes with a plethora of options that are not necessarily utilized in each and every project. As a result, website performance can suffer. In this article, Denis Žoljom shares his experience and the basics of creating a decoupled WordPress.
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So, should companies use Advanced website builders? At some point, will they replace custom development? In short, yes. Advanced website builders produce websites that look and feel like they were designed and coded by humans. They’re also software as a service, which is a different business model than traditional, custom-developed websites. Self-serve website-builder platforms are quietly becoming very powerful. A lot of us write them off without much thought, but it’s time for agencies and custom development shops to pay attention. It won’t be hard to stay ahead of the builders… once we acknowledge they’re coming for us.
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After building several client websites, ranging from small cafés to growing startups, Stefan Judis figured out that the holy WYSIWYG editor is not always the silver bullet we’re all looking for. These interfaces aim to make building websites easy, but there are always more use cases for your content on different platforms. In this article Stefan Judis will show you what he built and how his website surprisingly turned out to be his daily companion.
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ProcessWire is a content management system distributed under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0 and MIT License. It is designed to tackle the issues caused by exactly this kind of opinionatedness by being non-opinionated. At its heart, it is based on a few simple core concepts and offers an exceptionally easy-to-use and powerful API to handle content of any kind. ProcessWire is a good fit if you want to develop a JSON REST API, an image-resizing app for employees, a front end for managing millions of products, a web application for displaying the financial results of companies, a simple blog, a website for a big university, or just a simple one-page informational website. Let’s get right into it!
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The simplicity of Jekyll’s theming layer and writing workflow is fantastic; however, setting up the website takes a lot longer than expected. It isn’t for every project. The biggest disadvantage of a static website generator is that incorporating dynamic server-side functionality becomes difficult. Jekyll’s strength is its simplicity and minimalism, giving you just what you need to create a content-focused website that doesn’t need much dynamic user interaction — and no more. This makes it perfect for your blog and portfolio and also worth considering for a simple client website. In this article, Barry Clark will walk you through the quickest way to set up a Jekyll powered blog, how to avoid common problems with using Jekyll, and much more.
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Jeff Eaton works with media, publishing and enterprise clients. Those businesses produce so much content and manage so many publishing channels that keeping presentation and design-specific markup out of their content is an absolute requirement. Unfortunately, this doesn’t mean that editors and writers are content with rigid, predictable designs for the material they publish, and this is where many well-intentioned content models break down. In this article, Jeff will share five techniques he used on recent projects to solve these problems.
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According to W3Techs, almost 55% of the 1 million most visited websites that are run on a content management system (CMS) are run on WordPress. WordPress is a darn fine CMS and is stable and easy to use, but so are Joomla and Drupal. So, why does WordPress have the lion’s share of the top 1 million websites?
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Designing and indeed front-end development for a website that will have content edited by non-technical users poses some problems over and above those you will encounter when developing a site where you have full control over the output mark-up. However, most clients these days want to be able to manage their own content, so most designers will find that some, if not all, of their designs end up as templates in some kind of CMS.
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