In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about the user experience of four popular fitness and nutrition sites, find a helpful guide on WordPress website accessibility, discover how to create a slideshow with only CSS, 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
So many design teams fail to accurately define the problem before launching into design activities. They end up solving for the symptoms, not the problem. If you don’t accurately define the problem, the best you can hope for is to solve the wrong problem very well.
— Larry Marine (@uxstrategy) January 16, 2020
User Experience
- The first of the year is that time when many people make fitness and health resolutions. How timely that Measuring U conducted a user experience study of four popular fitness websites. I’m not surprised with the outcomes, are you?
- You may not have a lot of time in your project, but…
Today’s tip: A little usability testing early goes a long way.
— Carrie Hane (@carriehd) January 15, 2020
- You’ll find prioritizing your user research is a lot easier with these five questions to ask when assessing research priorities from Lija Hogan.
- Which of these 33 must-read user experience books are on your bookshelf? I have several on my shelf, but found a few more that I’ve added to my reading list.
Accessibility
- My friend Claire Brotherton has published an excellent guide: a deeper dive into WordPress website accessibility, detailing what developers and content authors can do to improve accessibility. First step: choose an accessibility-ready theme.
- Improving web accessibility starts with education.
We need more people to talk about web accessibility at coding bootcamps. We don’t stand a chance if new devs don’t at least have accessibility on their radar screens…#a11y
— Nicolas Steenhout (@vavroom) January 15, 2020
- A small thing, such as opening a website image in a new tab, shouldn’t be hard. Unless the developer has gone out of their way to avoid using semantic HTML, as Manuel Matuzovic discusses in bad accessibility equals bad quality.
Accessibility is a perfect indicator for the quality of a website.
- Train yourself or your organization to conduct accessibility reviews. With this helpful training package from Gov.uk, you can customize your own learning plan.
WordPress
- If the Postie plugin suspension in early January 2020 has you scrambling, here are three alternative plugins for posting to WordPress via email.
- My client wanted to display random content—media or text, not only from their website—in two sections on a new website page. I researched, talked with colleagues, and found a solution with the Random Content plugin.
- In addition to providing a customer support source, a knowledge base helps build trust for you and your products. Tom Rankin offers advice as well as recommended plugins for creating a knowledge base.
- The block directory, expected in a future WordPress version, will change how you add functionality to your website by allowing you to add a single block to your website. But can the block directory and business interests co-exist?
CSS and HTML
- It’s here! The long awaited Microsoft Edge based on Chromium is available for download. If you’e a Windows 10 user, you can wait for it to be installed when Windows 10 updates.
- I’m always glad to see updates on the HTML5 Doctor website, it was my go-to place to learn HTML5 when it launched years ago. On HTML Belts and ARIA braces by Steve Faulkner discusses default implicit ARIA semantics in HTML elements. And why you the answer is often “no” on adding ARIA role attributes.
- Can you take a guess how many CSS properties there are? I didn’t come close with my guess. How about you?
- Have you considered adding a CSS-only slideshow? Flexbox,
overflow, andscroll-snap-typemake it all work. No JavaScript needed.
What I Found Interesting
- Did you notice the change in Google search results on desktop this week? There’s a bold black “Ad” label in front of paid ads.
- If you’ve ever wanted to be a lighthouse keeper, the Tawas Point Lighthouse Keeper Program is accepting applications for their 2020 program, which offers a two-week volunteer work stay at the Tawas Point Lighthouse on Lake Huron in Michigan.
- For my classic car fans, the 1968 Ford Mustang Bullitt GT driven by Steve McQueen in Bullitt was sold for 3.74 million U.S. dollars.
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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.
