October 25, 2019: My Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development News

In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn how organizations can better prepare their sites for emergency situations, discover what features will be in the upcoming WordPress 5.3 release, find out the differences between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, 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

Me, writing an email:

I’m using an exclamation point so you know I’m friendly and excited! But now I’m using a period so that you know I’m not crazy. Here’s another sentence with a period as a buffer, proving my normalness. Thanks so much!

— Grace Segers (@Grace_Segers) October 24, 2019

User Experience

• Are you planning to switch your career to user experience? Meghan Wenzel offers advice on how to learn more about the user experience field and connect with UX professionals. For longtime readers of this blog, you won’t be surprised I agree with their recommendation to attend local meetups.
• When Nielsen Norman Group recently researched users 65 years and older, they discovered three major changes in how they use technology compared to seniors they first researched nearly 20 years ago. Takeaway: understand who you’re designing for.
  
• Lessons learned from the California power cuts highlights how organizations can better prepare their websites to manage emergency situations. Make key information easy to navigate.
  

  When confronted by uncertainty, the first instinct of most people is to do a web search.

• In her UX101: Complete Guide to In-Person User Research, Sarah Kahn explains the what, why, when, and how of conducting user research and how to analyze results and report to stakeholders.

Accessibility

• Creating accessible digital products and services is the responsibility of everyone on the team, not only one person. Learn what designers, developers, content writers and others can offer in this role by role guide for digital teams by Perkins Access.
• If you’re looking for a job in the accessibility field, this post by Raghavendra Satish Peri offers a slew of resources and tips to help you find a job in digital accessibility. I agree with his tip for connecting with people in the community, either on Twitter or email lists.
• What alternatives to post-its can you offer?
  

  How do we make design more accessible? Not everyone can see and interact with a lot of post-it’s, in a room with a lot of people – “Too many of our methods exclude too many people. We need to change this.” @operanomad #a11yscotland

  — Fern Williams (@fern_rae) October 25, 2019

• My answers to why accessible websites are so hard to build are: it’s not built in from the beginning of the process and team members aren’t aware/familiar with how to create accessible websites. What do you believe is the reason?
• Did you know cartoons are now incorporating accessibility best practices to be more inclusive? Scott Vinkle explains how Peppa Pig’s embedding audio descriptions in each of their episodes benefits all young children.

WordPress

• The second release candidate for WordPress 5.3 is now available for download and testing. As usual, you don’t want to test the release candidate on a production site.
• Join us at our November 21, 2019 West Metro Detroit WordPress meetup when Cliff Nowicki presents Bringing Over Adobe XD Assets into Divi.
• Not surprised to learn that GoDaddy will now offer an eCommerce tier for managed WordPress hosting to customers, partnering with WooCmmerce.
• Wondering what the upcoming WordPress 5.3 release will include? Two of the top features people are talking about are all the Gutenberg improvements as well as the new default theme: Twenty Twenty.
• A curated list of WordPress themes in the repository happened once before. It didn’t go well. It’s back for a second try, with a few changes.

CSS and HTML

• When HJ Chen created and styled a basic chat interface using Flexbox and box alignment properties, they discovered auto margins were a better alternative to justify-content for displaying margins. Read about box alignment and overflow to learn their solution.
• In their 25 Days of CSS Journey on CodePen, Tee Diang set a challenge to learn CSS animations in 20 of the 25 days. Instead, they spent the entire 25 days coding CSS animations. Discover what tools and process Diang used to teach themselves motion design with CSS in 25 days.
• With this week’s release of Firefox 70, you’ll find secure password generation, new options for styling underlines, inactive CSS rules indicator, and many more helpful features.
• Now this is a fun way to describe the difference between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, using a house as an analogy.

What I Found Interesting

• From stock images to icons to mockups, you’ll find all kinds of helpful free design resources in this collection from Web Designer Depot.
• Did you know October is National Cybersecurity Awareness Month in the United States? Here are seven tips to keep you safe when you’re online. My favorite tip? Use multi-factor authentication.
• Can you draw a perfect circle in this online game? Seems I can’t, but I came close with a 94.5% score.

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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.