In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about conducting user research for a global product, find a helpful guide for optimizing images, discover how to set up your CSS to be sustainable, 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
The simplest questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change.
– Richard Bach, writer (b. 23 Jun 1936) pic.twitter.com/7lGyzq70a2— A.Word.A.Day (@awad) June 23, 2021
User Experience
- If you’re conducting user research for a global product, collaborate with local researchers in each of the high-priority markets, says Michael Lai.
Beyond overcoming language barriers, the biggest challenge is the impact the cultural context has on conducting research and interpreting the results.
- Have you registered? Early bird registration for the User Experience Professionals Association 2021 conference has been extended to June 30, 2021.
- Avoid “read more” in your content, craft meaningful text links.
As a…
– website visitor
I want to…
– learn more
so that….
– I know more pic.twitter.com/Tq3tU6pzcz— Shit User Story (@ShitUserStory) June 22, 2021
- Don’t disrupt the user experience, says Oliver Lindberg. Nobody wants to be interrupted when they’re using an app to complete your survey. His advice? Put the user first as you design your in-app survey; consider complimenting your survey with moderated user research.
- Have you struggled to create wireframes? Kelley Gordon walks you through the steps to sketch a wireframe (even if you can’t draw), highlighting common components and conventions.
Accessibility
- Shoutout to my friend and Refresh Detroit co-organizer Nick DeNardis who wrote about creating a browser extension/add-on to visualize alt text on social media sites. I’ve been using it for the past week, it’s so helpful!
- Many people in the accessibility community rejoiced this week when the National Federation for the Blind revoked accessiBe’s sponsorship of their 2021 National Convention. (Accessibe offers a website overlay product they claim makes websites compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. It doesn’t.)
- Live your commitment, advocate for accessibility. Whether you choose to educate journalists about video captions or make your social media posts accessible, you can make a difference in creating a more inclusive world.
- If you missed Ken Nakata’s presentation earlier this month at the Access at Home online conference, he’s published the 35-minute video of What the Winn-Dixie Reversal Means for Digital Accessibility.
- To create accessible content, you have to know HTML. It’s the foundation of the web. Sadly, for many developers who use JavaScript frameworks, HTML is a lost art.
WordPress
- Final release of WordPress 5.8 is scheduled for July 20, 2021. The third beta version is available for download and testing. Can you help?
- Justin makes good points when he discusses the pitfalls of WordPress theme lock-in, silos, and the block system. Site owners (and their designers/developers run the risk of losing custom styling across dozens, if not hundreds of pages/post when changing themes.
- Well, that’s a bit of a surprise. The official WordPress.com app in the Microsoft store has an M rating (for mature).
- Excellent guide from Astra (worth bookmarking) on optimizing images for your WordPress site. You’ll learn about quality, size, dimensions, and compression plugins.
- I’ve always thought of the P2 theme as a group collaboration theme, but never thought of it for project management. In this week’s blog post, Lena Morita from Automattic explains how P2 can be used as a flexible project tracking tool.
CSS and HTML
- The new TablesNG, improvements to
tablerendering in Chromium, is a complete rewrite of table code. Which bring some long-waited features: rotate headers in tables as well the ability to hide entire table columns withvisibility: collapseon a column in acolgroup. - Set up your CSS to be sustainable: organize your CSS declarations alphabetically. And do it consistently. I agree!
- The difference between using a link and a button element:
Please stop using <a> elements to “trigger” modals and popups and video overlays, etc. That is why <button>s exist.
<a>: when you want to navigate the user to a URL/location
<button>: when you want to trigger an action on the current page, like revealing a modal#a11y— Rachel Cherry 🍒 (@bamadesigner) June 22, 2021
- If you decide to customize a scrollbar with CSS, and personally I don’t recommend it, don’t change the scrollbar width. And don’t remove the scrollbar.
- Looking for some inspiration? Check out this Pokemon Battle, created by Elisabeth Diange with only with CSS and HTML.
See the Pen
Pokemon Battle (Pure CSS) 🎮✨ by Elisabeth Diang (@elisabethdiang)
on CodePen. - Since I primarily work with WordPress, it’s been over two years since I created an HTML template from scratch. Thankful to Louis Lazaris for his HTML5 boilerplate template, especially the explanations and links to helpful resources.
What I Found Interesting
- How cool is that? During the COVID lockdown, 16,000 volunteers digitized centuries of handwritten rain data in the United Kingdom. The earliest records date back to 1677.
- Yes, you can charge more for your creative work. Value your time, find the ideal customer, and charge for the value you bring to the table, says Pamela Wilson as she explains how to do it.
- After working more than 20 years of email newsletter, I’m no longer involved with email marketing. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in reading about best email design practices and types of graphics to use.
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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.
