In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about the HTML time element, find a helpful guide for testing your design decisions, discover a new web and video accessibility podcast, and more.
If you’re new to my blog, each Friday I publish a post highlighting my favorite user experience, accessibility, WordPress, CSS, and HTML posts I’ve read in the past week.
Hope you find the resources helpful in your work or projects!
Want more resources like these on a daily basis? Follow me @redcrew on Twitter.
Tweet of the Week
How to look like a genius:
1. Read and think about a topic for a few years.
2. Record any idea you have along the way—most will be bad or average.
3. Revisit your ideas. Remove anything that isn’t exceptional.
4. Polish and share the best stuff.
5. End up looking like a genius.— James Clear (@JamesClear) April 15, 2021
User Experience
- Looking to set up a quick design test to confirm your design direction? Paul Boag created a helpful eight-step guide, highlighting how to add a five-second test, adding questions to help you learn whether users identify your calls to action and messaging, and more.
- Pioneers of Design is a lovely Dribbble tribute by Josh Line to some of my favorite people in the user experience, design, and information architecture fields. Love Line’s spotlights on Peter Morville, Christina Wodtke, and Dana Chisnell.
- It takes time. Good design goes unnoticed.
OMG people have no idea how much thinking goes into making a great UX.
— Sarah Doody (@sarahdoody) April 12, 2021
- The Spring 2021 issue of the Journal of Information Architecture, a peer-reviewed scholarly journal, is published. The journal is open, free, and currently accepting submissions.
- Keywords signify whether qualitative or quantitative methods make more sense for your research. Jeff Sauro and Jim Lewis discuss 27 words to help you decide to conduct qualitative or quantitative research.
Accessibility
- When Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, died last week, train companies chose to show tribute by changing their websites to grayscale. Which caused issues for visually impaired users trying to use the sites. If the sites had been designed to not depend on color, there wouldn’t have been an issue with grayscale.
- Hey, communication professionals! Make sure your toolkits have alternative text.
This is why anyone in communications needs to provide alt text in their toolkits.
Non negotiable. I’m tired of getting toolkits and doing this part of your job for you…
*Also correction on video: blind or low vision. pic.twitter.com/8ld0wdGvOo
— Imani Barbarin, MAGC | Crutches&Spice ♿️ (@Imani_Barbarin) April 15, 2021
- Microsoft is looking for screen readers users to participate in their online survey to get feedback about screen reading experiences. The survey takes about 15 minutes to complete. According to the survey page, your responses are not associated with your personal information.
- 3Play Media launches their new podcast, Allied Podcast this week, about the web and video accessibility. Hosted by Elisa Lewis, the first three episodes go live . Of course, transcripts are provided (along with notes).
WordPress
- Released this week, the WordPress 5.7.1 security and maintenance release includes two security fixes and 26 maintenance updates.
- With Google’s Page Experience Update expected to roll out in , now is a good time for you to review and optimize Core Web Vitals for your WordPress site. Thank you to WP Beginner for their helpful guide.
- One of my favorite resources, Easy WP Guide for WordPress 5.7 has been released. The free online guide is for anyone who manages WordPress content.
- The ongoing spat between WordPress and Wix leaders continued this week. My colleague Eric Karkovack shares his take on Wix going after WordPress.
While Wix has every right to communicate and declare its self-described advantages, the manner in which they’ve chosen to do so seems unnecessarily abrasive.
- The new milestone notifications in WordPress.com will notify you with a celebratory alert when your WordPress.com site reaches or surpasses a certain number of views.
CSS and HTML
- Smashing Magazine released another one of their helpful compilations of helpful tools, templates, guides, and techniques this week, A Complete Guide to HTML Email.
- Learn about CSS container queries, what they are, how they’ll make your design life easier, and why they’re a better choice than CSS media queries. Note: CSS container queries are currently (as of ) only available in Chrome Canary.
- With 70 close captioned video lessons, over of content, and a 30-day money back guarantee, Kevin Powell’s Flexbox Simplified course looks like a winner. (No, I haven’t taken the course, but I know his other courses are well-received and respected.)
- It’s time to learn about
time. (I couldn’t resist!) Jen Kramer and Erika Lee continue their #30DaysOfHTML series with a closer look at thetimeelement.
What I Found Interesting
- Did you know the typos you make in Google Docs get added to its custom dictionary? And that typos you make in your writing can get added to your Mac or Windows custom dictionaries? I didn’t. Thanks to Zapier, now I know how I can remove typos from custom dictionaries in Mac/Windows operating systems as well as Microsoft Office and Google Workspace.
- If you’re responsible for protecting your workplace from cyber security threats, Newcastle University’s Intisute of Coding is offering their free online How to Protect Your Workplace: Smart Building Security and Ethical Hacking Cyber Security Masterclass & Q&A webinar on .
- You can now view the effects of climate change on Earth’s geography with the new Google Earth 3D Timelapse feature that launched this week.
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Did I miss some resources you found this week? I’d love to see them! Post them in the comments below.
