In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about making your website more usable, discover what Full Site Editing offers in the upcoming WordPress 5.8 release, find out how container queries will change your workflow, 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
While it’s very possible to fix accessibility issues with legacy digital products, It’s much easier and cost-efficient to build your digital products with #accessibility in mind from the beginning.#a11y #webDev #inclusiveDesign #UX #AUX
— xirclebox 💻 (@xirclebox) May 26, 2021
User Experience
- In their research study of 16 direct-to-consumer brands with small product catalogs, Baymard Insitutute uncovered 1,370 usability issues, resulting in users abandoning the sites due to issues with site layout, design, content, or features. One key finding: search and user reviews were barely used.
- Have you considered this issue in your forms?
Designers, when designing forms can you please make them twin friendly? The number of booking sites that don’t let you add two children of the same age/birthday to your booking is just 🤯
— Dr Joanna Choukeir (@JoannaChoukeir) May 24, 2021
- I was glad to attend Make your website more usable in 10 easy steps session at the WordSesh 2021 virtual WordPress professionals conference. If you weren’t able to attend, catch my recap of Monique Dubbleman explaining how implementing 10 design principles can create a more usable website.
- Since qualitative usability studies have few users, the numbers from those studies can be poor predictors. Which is why Raluca Budiu says you can’t trust numbers from qualitative usability studies, without using statistical instruments, such asconfidence intervals and statistical significance.
Accessibility
- Join the Accessibility New York City meetup group on June 1, 2021 when Sam Proulx, Accessibility Evangelist at Fable presents Accessiblity Testing with People with Disabilities. Proulx will discuss why testing with people with disabilities is crucial, provide tips and advice, and highlight practical examples of websites and companies.
- As an organization, is this your intent?
What I hear: “This part of the app is only used by our employees, not customers, therefore it doesn’t need to be tested for accessibility.”
What that says: “We have no plans to hire people with varying abilities and accommodate them to do their job.”#A11y #Accessibility
— Black Lives Matter : Asian Lives Matter (@deconspray) May 26, 2021
- There is more work to be done, says University of Bath Professor Dr. Rachel Forrester-Jones about the accessibility of online health and social care information in the time of Covid-19.
A lack of clear information can sometimes become a breeding ground for mis-information, and at times, conspiracy theories.
- Discover what the team behind the 2021 Presidential Inauguration and Biden for President campaign did to make digital accessibility and inclusion a priority in the free Perkins Access webinar on digital accessibility lessons on June 15, 2021.
WordPress
- Happy 18th birthday, WordPress! On May 27, 2003 the first version of WordPress was released? Did you know Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little are the co-founders of WordPress? Here’s Matt’s post about WordPress’s 18th.
- The story of the WP User Avatar plugin rebranding which caused so much user outrage continues this week as Justin Tadlock shares his thoughts in WordPress users get to hold creators accountable. I agree with his comment about plugin developers:
We have a responsibility to behave ethically, rightness and wrongness as defined by our users.
- Luke Carbis digs into the details for Full Site Editing in WordPress 5.8, expected to be released in July 2021. Key takeaway: the Site Editor is only available if you’ve installed a compatible “Block Theme” that supports Full Site Eidting.
- Did you know WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world? WordPress powers over 41% of the web.
CSS and HTML
- In The new responsive: Web design in a component-driven world Uma Kravets explains why container queries and scoped styles are so important in combining macro layout with micro layout.
- To follow up on Uma’s new responsive article, Ahmad Shadeed’s container queries for designers takes a closer look at what CSS container queries are, the problems they solve, and also describes how it will change your design workflow.
- Your thoughts? Personally, I think this would be great to have in native HTML, with accessibility by default.
HTML isn’t done!
We’re working with @openuicg to bring new elements like `<popup>` and `<selectmenu>` to the Web Platform. These should enable easy popup and select-like UI that are accessible by default and work with auto-fill.
— Chrome Developers (@ChromiumDev) May 24, 2021
- What a fun read! Eric Meyer looks back at his own story of 25 years of CSS which kicked off 25 years ago this month.
What I Found Interesting
- Jeff Jarvis echoes my feelings in a thank-you note to the web: grateful for the Internet during COVID-19.
- Gorgeous. Did you catch a view of the super blood moon and lunar eclipse earlier this week? With cloudy skies, we didn’t have a view here in southeast Michigan. But I was able to watch online.
- Hard to believe it’s taken this long, but Google Docs is finally rolling out the feature to place images behind and in front of text. Something Microsoft Word has had since 1997, almost 25 years ago.
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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.
