Yay! Spring seems to have finally arrived in southeast Michigan, despite some snow flakes we saw last week. Glad to see the forsythias in bloom.
In this week’s roundup of web design and development resources, you’ll learn about the HTML5 <canvas> element, discover how to create a centered responsive image using only CSS, find out how to make your homepage copy more readable with one simple step, learn about the progress in making WordPress accessible, and more.
Which resource did you bookmark? Or which one did you find most useful for your projects? Let me know in the comments.
Favorite tweet of the week:
https://twitter.com/AnnaAmbart/status/326441708667670529
CSS and HTML
- All About HTML5 <
canvas>: Open web advocate Molly Holzschlag discusses HTML5 <canvas>, its API, how designers and developers can use it, DOM and accessibility challenges, and browser support. - Stop standardizing HTML: Simon St. Laurent suggestion for developers to stop standardizing HTML and use their own vocabularies had a lot of people talking in the comments, with many disagreeing with his suggestion. What do you think?
- Object Oriented CSS: Are you using object oriented CSS? David says,
It’s the one thing I would tell any designer or front-end developer that they should change about the way they write CSS.
- How to Create a Responsive Centered Image in CSS3: Using CSS3 and media queries, Craig Buckler walks you through the steps to display responsive images, and provides fallback for IE8 and below.
Responsive Design
- Responsive Inspector (Beta) Released!: This Chrome extension (in beta) allows you to view the media queries for a website, resize the browser, and take and save screenshots.
- Using Responsive WordPress: Slideshow of Clarissa Peterson’s presentation at this weekend’s WordCamp Ottawa 2013.
- Should Users Have the Option to Switch Off Responsive Design?: Craig Buckler of SitePoint discusses the advantages of responsive web design, and wonders if the ability to disable responsive design on a website is an
over-engineered solution looking for a problem.
User Experience
- Jan Chipchase On Mapping The Lives Of Your Users: In this excerpt from Hidden in Plain Sight: How to Create Extraordinary Products for Tomorrow’s Customers, Jan Chipchase discusses design research, journey maps, and threshold diagrams.
- User Experience Magazine: Nice. The User Experience Professionals Association has posted their first online edition of their magazine. So glad it’s not a PDF.
- Make Your Homepage Copy More Readable in 1 Easy Step: Georgina Laidlow shows how easily the content on the Flickr home page can be improved with this one easy, and free step.
- Usability Checklist: Use this helpful online checklist to review common usability issues with user experience, home page, accessibility, search, navigation, and formsbefore testing and launch.
- UX Archive: Cool. An archive of the various user flows for apps, including Tumblr, Rdio, Pocket and Spotify.
Accessibility
- ARIA’s Application Role: Léonie Watson discusses ARIA’s application role, explaining how to use it and when to use it. Léonie says,
If you’re using standard HTML5 elements you shouldn’t need to use role=”application.”
- Accessibility and WordPress: Slideshow of Joe Dolson’s presentation at WordCamp Minneapolis this weekend. Joe highlighted issues in the front and back end of WordPress including abuse of title elements, default “read more” text is meaningless out of context, custom menu management, keyboard navigability, and more.
- Mobile Accessibility Guidelines: Available as a PDF download, Funka has created guidelines for developing accessible mobile interfaces. This looks to be a very useful guide, based on tests, analysis of existing interfaces, and interviews with people with different disabilities.
WordPress
- 5 Basic Tips to Improve WordPress for SEO and the User Experience: Basic tips for improving user experience and search engine optimization. What I liked: how Alex explained why each tip is good for SEO. Wish he would have the done the same for why the tip is good for user experience.
- GenerateWP: This online tool looks pretty amazing. Based on filling out a form, GenerateWP will create the code for a sidebar, menu, shortcode, taxonomy, wp-config.php file, and more.
- Are you using these tools to help your site?: Want to improve your blog or website? Check out these ten plugins that have helped Chris Lema help his blog go from 0 daily visitors to 1,500 a day, without barely selling anything.
- How to Display Last Visited Posts to a User in WordPress: The Last Viewed Post plugin uses cookies to keep track of posts a user has last seen. You have options to customize the number of posts to display and the cookie expiration.
What I Found Interesting
- 14 Handy Tips on How to Better Use Google Images: This quick reference guide from Education Technology and Mobile Learning will help you find images by size, shape, color, published in a particular geographic region, free to use, and also shares keyboard shortcuts for managing search results.
- 10 Top Time Saving Tech Tips: Five minute TED video of David Pogue sharing simple tech tips. When you’re typing on your smartphone, don’t change layout from alpha to numeric, press the space bar twice. Watch the video, or read the transcript.
- 30 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Life: We all need to get out of our regular schedule. Take a swim, visit the zoo, talk to a stranger. I liked number 6, 8, and 35. Which ones do you plan to do?
