In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how to prevent your product from becoming a tool for abuse, find a helpful guide for color contrast, discover the versatility of the HTML description list, 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
People use so many excuses as to why they can’t be happy, but you have to learn to see the good in everything. Happiness attracts happiness.
— Law of Attraction (@LAWOFATTRACTlON) August 11, 2021
User Experience
- Three different approaches can help you better understand customers’ needs as you build products, says Antonio Rotolo. Read his article to learn how the founders of Ludwig listened to their users and made a better linguistic search engine.
- Information architecture (IA) focuses on organizing, structuring, and labeling content to help users find info and complete tasks. Menu structure is only one piece of IA.
Because I can’t say it outloud, I’ll say it here:
“The IA” is not the same as a menu structure. Stop using those terms as interchangeable.
The menu structure is one aspect of the information architecture.— Carrie Hane (@carriehd) August 9, 2021
- In the latest UXPod episode, How to prevent your product from becoming a tool for abuse, Gerry Gaffney talks with Eva PenzeyMoog, author of the the recently published book Design for Safety.
- Using personal landmarks or life events is one of the six ways to improve participant recall for surveys and other usability research methods. In addition, findings indicate landmarks may help memory organization and retrieval.
Accessibility
- Creating accessible content with good color contrast is a lot easier with Stark’s helpful guide on understanding accessible contrast ratios and A-levels. And if you use Chrome, Stark’s Chrome extension will test text, graphic or other objects on the page for color contrast.
- Wonderful news to share! Announced this week.
Woohoo!
You can now add a captions file (.SRT) to videos you upload via web Twitter. (I tried it, it works!)
cc @merylkevans #a11y #accessibility https://t.co/2ZUSH05AET
— Deborah Edwards-Oñoro (@redcrew) August 12, 2021
- In her Why we can’t solve accessibility with a one line script post, Claire Lipskey explains that the web is (generally) accessible by default and why bolt-on fixes like AccessiBe don’t create accessible interfaces.
- According to Baymard Institute’s research of 33 top-grossing sites, 55% of ecommerce sites don’t use alt text to communicate the core content of ‘informational images’. Disappointed.
- I’m not sure why, but I rarely see coding example demos with explanations as often as I did 10 or 15 years ago. Which is why I liked Crystal Preston-Watson’s 30-minute video discussing semantic HTML and accessibility, with demos of two website versions. One version used divs, the other semantic HTML elements.
WordPress
- With the move in the last two years to the block editor, block-based widgets, and full site editing, WordPress offers opportunities for users to adapt to the changes, says Eric Karkovack. Not sure about all the changes? Take a step-by-step approach.
- Jay Forrest is one WordPress user frustrated with the direction WordPress has taken with the block editor and block widgets. What did they do about it? Moved their site from WordPress to ClassicPress. What do they think of ClassicPress?
My rating at this time is four stars.
- Big news: Yoast announces they have been bought by Newfold Digital. They’ll join many other familiar companies bought by Newfold, including Network Solutions, Blue Host, and HostGator.
- Did you know WordCamp US 2021 has put out their call for speaker nominations? The deadline is August 15, 2021 to submit names of folks you’d like to speak at the October 1, 2021 event.
- Need more reasons to invest time and money to keep your WordPress site updated and secure? The 2021 mid-year WordPress security report from Wordfence and WPScan points out the increase new WordPress vulnerabilities as well as the increase in password attacks.
CSS and HTML
- I missed On the <dl> article by Ben Myers last week about the HTML description list, formerly known to veteran HTML coders like me as the definition list. I love using dl in my code and wish more people were aware of its versatility. Thank you, Ben!
- In the almost eight-minute First steps to getting a great Page Experience video from Google Search Console, Patrick Kettner explains the second part of Page experience: HTTPS, mobile friendliness, and lack of interstitials. Not a fan of his promotion of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages).
- Over 80,000 developers participated in the Stack Overflow 2021 developer survey in May 2021. Some of the more interesting findings: almost 60% of participants learned how to code from online resources and 42% of participants have a Bachelor’s degree.
- How do you approach responsive design? Do you design for mobile first or desktop? Ahmad Shadeed explores the state of mobile first and desktop first, exploring what each option means and offers some helpful tips.
What I Found Interesting
- What fun! Google added an interactive periodic table to search. I remember having to learn the periodic table in seventh grade, this one is a lot more fun to use (especially testing the 3D model for each element).
- Disappointed to learn my favorite VPN (Virtual Private Network) is listed as one of several popular VPNs that promise privacy, but have trackers. Find out how private your VPN is in the latest post from The Markup.
- If you’re worried about climate change and want to manage your anxiety, check out how becoming a parks department super steward helped Stephanie Foo overcome her feeling of helplessness.
If you like what you’ve read today, share the post with your colleagues and friends.
Want to make sure you don’t miss out on updates? Subscribe to get notified when new posts are published.
Did I miss some resources you found this week? I’d love to see them! Post them in the comments below.
