In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to design better breadcrumbs, find out how to build an author template in the WordPress Site Editor, discover a wonderful showcase of HTML-only websites, 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
Keep your website simple and launch it quickly.
— David Hartstein (@davharts) April 7, 2022
Overcomplicating a site is one of the most easily avoidable stumbling blocks I come across.
You can always add more content and complexity down the road.
User Experience
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When you share research findings in your reports, incorporate storytelling techniques (such as anecdotes, analogies, and writing for your audience) to create engaging reports and asynchronous presentations.
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At the April 13, 2022 Ladies That UX Boston A seat at the table – helping leadership understand the value of design meetup, Ellen Chisa will discuss how to build long term relationships with leadership to maximize the impact and benefit of design. Free event, pre-registration required.
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Not surprised, the home page is key for grocery and food delivery website customers. Allowing users to add “past purchases” to the car from the home page makes it much easier for customers to complete their orders.
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Personally, I’m a fan of breadcrumbs, those pathways on a web page that allow readers to quickly understand which page and what part of the site they’re on. In his latest post of the designing better interfaces series, Vitaly Friedman highlights patterns and techniques for designing better breadcrumbs.
Accessibility
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Save the date! Nomensa hosts Virtua11y, their free virtual web accessibility and inclusivity conference May 17-19, 2022. Each conference day has three one-hour sessions, which makes it easier to attend vs. a full-day of sessions. Register today!
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This week, 45 years ago, 504 protests were launched in multiple U.S. cities, demanding Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act was signed Section 504 was the first disability civil rights law to be enacted in the United States prohibiting discrimination against disabled people.
It’s the 45th anniversary of the 504 Sit-In. Demonstrations took place at federal buildings across the U.S. to demand that the Section 504 regulations be signed. I was at the HEW office in San Francisco, where we took over the building for a sit-in that lasted 26 days. pic.twitter.com/8QKkcPwv9k
— Judy Heumann (@judithheumann) April 6, 2022 -
I hope it’s not only lawsuits that’s driving web accessibility to become a priority for chief information officers. It’s the right thing to do to create websites that are accessible to everyone. Glad advocate, philanthropist, lawyer, and quadriplegic Joshua Basile pointed that out in the article:
We come back again and again because we had a good experience, and we share with our community how our quality of life has been improved.
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Join me on April 14th for Knowbility’s Be A Digital Ally: Video Captions session. Jay McKay will provide an overview of video captioning, discussing services and tools for captioning, how to add captions manually, and more.
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Trying to understand accessible descriptions when you have little background or experience with screen readers, Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA), or testing is a lot easier with Adrian Roselli’s accessibile description exposure.
WordPress
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The WordPress 5.9.3 maintenance version was released this week, fixing nine bug fixes in core and 10 bug fixes in the block editor.
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On this week’s WP Tavern Jukebox podcast, Nathan Wrigley chats with Chris Coyer who talks about why he sold CSS-Tricks. I’ve been a long time reader and fan of CSS-Tricks, met in Chris in person years ago at the In Control conference in Orlando. I will miss Chris’s voice on the CSS-Tricks website.
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Looking for a short and focused WordPress email newsletter? Check out Daniel Schutzsmith’s new TinyPress Weekly WordPress Email Newsletter which is launching today. Each Friday he’ll be sending out his top three WordPress design and development links. Yes, I subscribed!
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I’m enjoying Justin Tadlock’s ongoing series testing Full Site Editing. In this week’s test, Tadlock built an author template from the WordPress Site Editor using the Archeo block theme.
CSS and HTML
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Yes, it’s true. HTML is all you need to build a website. No shiny things like frameworks, libraries, build tools are needed. Check out the HTML-only showcase of websites.
It was wonderful to see that there are plenty of developers out there who are unashamedly building HTML-only websites.
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As Christian Heilmann says, the devil is in the details. You now have alternatives to having to add JavaScript. Using HTML details and summary elements will expand sections when you use Chromium browser “find in page” menu option.
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For folks creating HTML email, it’s challenging when you want to make sure the styling is supported across email clients. Which leads to Mark Robbins tip for using text shadow in email, with good support.
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The retirement of Internet Explorer (IE) is about two months away, on June 15, 2022. If you still need to support IE, learn how to set up IE mode in Microsoft Edge in this helpful five-minute video.
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When it comes to designing in the browser, Ahmad Shadeed prefers to tweak in the browser. For Shadeed, writing HTML/CSS code and thinking about the design takes far too much time compared to using a tool like Figma.
What I Found Interesting
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There’s good news for Twitter users receiving dozens of tweet replies, but who no longer want to be part of the conversation. Announced as a trial, Twitter will finally let you ‘unmention’ yourself in tweets. The test is web-only, no access on mobile.
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Looking for a new book to read? Here are eight sites to do a book search by plot or subject. I love that you can send an email message to Ask a Librarian at the Library of Congress and get recommendations from real librarians.
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Want to check night-time bird migration in different regions of the United States? Thanks to the Nexrad radar maps from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, you can. Select the reflectivity loop link for the area you’re interested in. (Not sure why the Midwest region only shows the western portion of Michigan, the whole state is in the Midwest.)
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