June 5, 2020: My Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development News

In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about climbing the UX career ladder, find out how to improve social media image accessibility, discover how to use color in 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

“We all have different gifts, so we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are.”

— MisterRogersQuotes (@MisterRogersSay) June 5, 2020

User Experience

• Save the date! The UXPA (User Experience Professionals Association) hosts a free webinar on June 12, 2020 with Debbie Levitt speaking on why you want to stop evangelizing UX and what to do instead.
  

  How do you get CX and UX buy-in or start leveling up your company’s maturity?

• When I worked at the college, one of our projects was redesigning the intranet. It turned out to be a very political project. Wish we had these guidelines and tips from Nielsen Norman Group at the time to create a successful user-centered intranet redesign in 11 steps.
• What is the difference between remove and delete? And which one should you use in your copy? Whichever one you use, make it clear what the difference is to your users.
• You’ve been working in the user experience field for a while and you’re ready to move on to a more senior role. In her UX Booth article, Diana Glozman explains how to climb the UX career ladder.

Accessibility

• On June 16, 2020, IxDA Pittsburgh hosts a virtual talk with Jet Townsend speaking on How Do We Make Things Accessible? Townsend will discuss the importance of universal design.
• When someone talks about web accessibility, they often mention the POUR acronym, which stands for the four guiding principles of accessibility: perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. In her latest Dev.to post, Ren Estep explains what POUR means.
• As of May 2020, Twitter has finally updated their alt text support to be more fully-featured. I’ve updated my post with the latest changes, here are 10 things to know about Twitter’s alternative text for images.
  
• Closely related to my post on Twitter’s alt text for images, my friend Claire Brotherton has updated her post on how to improve social media image accessibility with the latest info for Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.

WordPress

• Kinsta’s extensive guide to using WordPress permalinks explains how permalinks work, how to optimize them for your site, and how to configure them in the dashboard. Handy guide worth bookmarking!
• Are you using Shopify for ecommerce and considering moving to WooCommerce? Colin Newcomer discusses the advantages WooCommerce offers in this step-by-step guide to migrating from Shopify to WooCommerce.
• Will Morris shares 5 ways you can use Code Snippets in your development. The Code Snippets plugin comes in really handy for adding functionality to your site, without having to edit the functions.php file.
• Shoutout to Ben at LayerWP for his 30 best WordPress themes 2020 version, a parody of all the “best WordPress blah-blah” posts that are only published to garner affiliate links for the post author.
• WordPress names 5.5 release leads, plans all-women release wquad for 5.6. Scheduled for release in August 2020, WordPress 5.5 will be led by Matt Mullenweg, Jake Spurlock, and David Baumwald.

CSS and HTML

• Wondering what CSS variables are all about? Lea Verou has you covered with her user’s guide to CSS variables to help you better understand what CSS variables are and how you can use them in your projects.
• Sara Souiedan walks you through her two favorite ways she uses global and component style settings in CSS variables to organize and maintain styles in her projects.
• Interesting. Did you know adding the new aspect-ratio to an element will calculate a height based on the auto width? Chris Coyier takes a first look at the new aspect-ratio property.
• Everything you ever wanted to know about using colors in CSS, from types, specific keywords, and when to use each one. Appreciate Ahmed Shadded including use-cases and examples in their post. I didn’t know border-color defaulted to currentColor.

What I Found Interesting

• The all-inclusive “Scarlet’s Playground” opens today in Commerce Township. The southeast Michigan playground is designed for children of all abilities to come and play together.
• Because you might need some distraction in your day, an amusement park filled their roller coaster seats with giant teddy bears.
• You’ll want to think twice about embedding Instagram posts without permission. The Instagram post author can sue you for breach of copyright.

If you like what you’ve read today, share the post with your colleagues and friends.

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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.