In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about better ballot design, find out how accessible the Elementor page builder is, discover how to create a multi-column magazine layout for a restaurant 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!
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Tweet of the Week
A story is the best possible container for memory. We can train or learn or read something, but we will always remember a brief story told well.
— Chris Brogan (@chrisbrogan) February 6, 2020
User Experience
- The American user experience and design community this week was abuzz this week with talk about the failure of the Democratic Party’s Iowa caucus application. Dana Chisnell, Liz Steelman, and Aaron Walter take a closer look and discuss lessons every designer can learn.
- Good processes and good design result in better ballot designs, says Larry Norden. Avoid confusing voters with these common ballot design flaws and how to fix them.
- Small design changes make a big difference toward improving user experience. Marc Andrew offers nine visual tips to quickly improve your designs.
- In three lessons UX designers can take from Netflix, Suzanne Scacca explains how you can borrow from Netflix’s design and features for your own projects.
Personalization is great, but not necessarily if it’s at the expense of your customers’ time, sometimes the simpler feature is better.
- When I first learned about information scent and how users decide where to go next in my first user experience class, I was fascinated. I never knew what to call it, I only knew that I needed to provide clues to users about what information they would find on a page.
Accessibility
- If you’re looking for mobile-focused accessibility resources, Rob Whittaker has one of the best curated list of mobile accessibility resources focused on code, tools, guides, design, and articles. Thank you, Rob for including my post of accessibility and inclusive design meetup groups around the world.
- That’s how I was originally taught to code: HTML first.
Devs could avoid many accessibility issues, if they wrote HTML first and afterwards CSS & JS and not everything at once.
By looking at a page without CSS you get a better impression of the visual hierarchy and you may see that the div you made look like a link isn’t a real link.
— Manuel Matuzović (@mmatuzo) February 7, 2020
- My friend Claire Brotherton continues her exploration of WordPress page builder accessibility with a look at whether Elementor can build accessible sites. What did she discover? Not surprisingly, there’s room for improvement.
- In an excerpt from his Form Design Patterns book, Adam Silver walks you through the steps of building an accessible autocomplete control. It’s a bit complicated; native HTML form elements alone aren’t good enough.
- Glad that Winona Ryder’s Super Bowl commercial inspired Terrell Thompson to review Squarespace, Wix, and Weebly for accessibility. The results: you’ll do better with Squarespace and Wix, but you’ll need to take additional steps beyond what they provide by default.
WordPress
- Big news in the WordPress community as the popular All-in-One SEO plugin is bought by Awesome Motive, the company behind WP Beginner, Optin Monster, WP Forms, and other well-known plugins.
- While I understand the why behind the new changes to the support guidelines for linking to off-site resources in the WordPress theme and plugin support forums, I don’t agree with the change. They’re community forums. Where the community goes to get and provide WordPress help.
- After redesigning 80% of their home page with Gutenberg, ThemeIsle decided to redo it with Elementor. Find out what happened when they decided to redesign their site with both Elementor and Gutenberg.
- Whether you’ve attended a WordPress meetup in 2019 or not, the global WordPress community group wants your feedback about meetups in their annual survey. Share your thoughts, the survey takes less than three minutes to complete.
CSS and HTML
- How green is your website? In CO2 emissions on the web, Danny van Kooten highlights steps he took, and that we can take, with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to reduce our carbon footprint.
- Three types of code: is this how you categorize your code?
- Flip cards—where content is turned over to reveal what’s on the reverse side— is a popular way to add interactivity to your web designs. Here’s how you can use CSS to add flip cards and solve the common sizing problem.
If this approach seems obvious, rest assured that I spent many hours going through some really terrible ideas before thinking of it.
- I love how this turned out! Jonathan Snook explains his approach for playing with CSS Grid to create a list of restaurants with a multiple-column magazine look.
What I Found Interesting
- Launched this week, Source Code is a daily technology newsletter from Protocol, a new publication
dedicated to covering the people, power and politics of tech
. One of my favorite articles this week is their in-depth look at ethics in technology. - Don’t throw old seeds out, they may surprise you and sprout. As did these 2,000 year-old date palm seeds.
- Cool to read about one of Michigan’s best known birders, Jerry Jourdan in this week’s Great Lakes Moment: One man’s foray into high-tech, long-distance birding.
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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.
