Not sure if it was on everyone’s calendar, but this past week should have been named “Responsive Design” week for all the great design posts and tutorials published on the web. Hope you find this week’s roundup of resources helpful.
Responsive Design
- Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Designing Responsively (part 1): The first in a five-part series from .net Magazine. Paul Robert Lloyd from Clearleft takes you through the process of creating a responsive site with practical advice toward the design and coding.
- Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Typography and Grids (part 2)
- Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Images and Video(part 3)
- Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Media and Queries (part 4)
- Build a Responsive Site in a Week: Going Further (part 5)
- Responsive Design Conditionally Loading Content: Jeremy Keith shares his approach for managing content on multiple devices. Check the comments for good discussion and ifferent approaches.
- Handling Typography in Responsive Design: It’s not enough to have a responsive layout and scaling images; you need to manage how your typography looks across devices.
- Examples of Great Responsive Design: Not just a showcase of responsive designs, this article from TripWire Magazine highlights tools you can use to test your responsive design.
- Freebie: Responsive HTML5/CSS3 Template: If you’re not interested in building your own responsive site, check out this one page template with jQuery gallery, sticky header, and jQuery image glider.
- Responsive Web Design: Layouts and Media Queries: Detailed explanation of responsive layouts and media queries with stylesheet examples from Stéphanie Walter.
User Experience
- Apple’s 27 Guidelines for Mobile User Experience: You’ll nod as you read these guidelines, most are good common programming guidelines. But I personally need to be reminded of guideline #25 daily.
- Gamification and UX: Where Users Win or Lose: Use gamification wisely.
Gamification is here to stay, and unfortunately many people will continue to use it the wrong way.
- Researching Meaning: Making Sense of Behaviour: A long read, but worth your time.The article highlights several examples of user behavior on website and argues the need to balance goals with activities.
- Mental Model Diagrams (Cartoon): Great cartoon to share with people who aren’t on a design/development team or those who don’t understand user behaviors and interactions.
WordPress
- Jetpack Adds Support for Custom Contact & Email Forms: Jetpack just keeps adding more and more features. The Grunion Contact Form, used by many people on WordPress.com, is the lastest feature to be added. Depending on your contact form requirements, you might find you can delete your standalone contact form plugin and use the Jetpack contact form instead.
- Theme Options Gallery: Konstantin Kovehsnin started a new blog this month focused on theme options. His tagline? The best and the worst theme option screens around.
- 10 Admin Menu Plugins to Improve Your WordPress Site’s User Interface: Rename menu items, move menu items around, or color code your menus are just a few of the options these plugins provide for your site or your clients’ sites.
- Giving WordPress That New Car Smell (Part 2): Mika Epstein walks us through the steps she took to update her sites with three premium WordPress themes. I liked her approach for managing StudioPress child themes.
- Super Useful WordPress Action Hooks and Filters: From Cats Who Code, a collection of hooks and filters to allow you to prevent automatic image compression, enable threaded comments, add post thumbnails to the RSS feed, and more.