September 18, 2020: My Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development News

In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about developing your tone of voice, find out how to make headings and lists more accessible, discover how to create a WordPress theme from scratch, 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

Can’t be the Head of Design without being the Spine of Business and Heart of Users.

— Frank ☼ Bach (@francois_bach) September 14, 2020

User Experience

• Your tone of voice on your website isn’t only what you say, but the words you use to say it. And knowing your audience is a key part of developing your tone of voice, says Seda Manucharyan.
  

  Their behaviours, interests, culture, slang, and anything else that can help you get to know your users better.

• Excellent resource! All the recorded talks from this summer’s SofaConf 2020 are now available online.
• 50 designers reimagine the toilet paper holder in the new Under/Over exhibit at the Marta gallery in Los Angeles. You can also view the exhibit online through November 4, 2020.
• This is a not-to-miss event, with Ginny Redish, author of Letting Go of the Words, presenting UX Writing in Relation to Technical Communication on September 30, 2020. I’m attending, join me?

Accessibility

• In this five-minute video from Aquent Gymnasium, Clarissa Peterson explains how to make headings and lists more accessible. One key point: use heading levels in order, h1, h2, h3, etc., without skipping a level.
  
• Learn about WCAG 2.1, whether your laws require it, and the best methods for conformance to WCAG 2.1 in the free webinar 12 Things You Need to Know About WCAG 2.1: How it Impacts Your Work & Laws Around the Globe on October 1, 2020.
• Wish more trainers would hear this from students!
  

  Received the most wonderful piece of feedback in training today. The class was “Accessibility for UI/UX Designers” and this designer said:

  “This is the 1st time in 30+ years that an #a11y class intended for designers actually speaks to me as a designer”.

  Totally made my day.

  — Denis Boudreau (@dboudreau) September 17, 2020

• If you missed this week’s ACCESS at Home online conference, you can catch up on one of the sessions with my recap of The State of Video in 2020.
• I’m enjoying the Design in the Browser video series from Google Chrome Developers. The video show covers a wide range of web design and development techniques and strategies. The latest, a 12-minute video by Una Kravets, explores navigation and keyboard accessibility.
  

WordPress

• If you’re looking to start developing WordPress themes, there’s no better place to learn how to create a WordPress theme from scratch than Eric Karkovack’s post.
• Not good news for WordPress users who’ve embedded Instagram or Facebook links in their blog posts. An upcoming API change will break Facebook and Instagram oEmbed links, starting October 24, 2020.
• Learn how to edit the footer in WordPress, including adding widgets, removing the “Powered by WordPress” text, and add code to the footer (using the Insert Headers and Footers plugin).
• In part 5 of the From Idea to Customer series, Lynn Jatania discusses how to choose an operating system. Examples of operating systems you can use for your store are: WooCommerce, Shopify, Wix, or Etsy.

CSS and HTML

• Rachel Andrew walks you through how to use CSS masking with the mask-image property in CSS. Note: browsers only partially support the standard CSS masking property. You may need to use feature queries to detect support.
• Staying current with the latest web development techniques and methods is challenging. Which is why I’m always interested in how other people do it. Thanks to for sharing his post on what he reads to stay up-to-date.
• Start your website project with a good foundation: use semantic HTML.
  

  #SEO can be tricky but there simple steps to help improve.

  Start by building your sites with semantic #HTML.

  A document flow that makes sense to browsers improves #a11y & helps Google trust your site.

  Build trust. Use semantic HTML.

  — Rey van den Berg (@ReyTheDev) September 12, 2020

• If you’ve ever wasted time trying to figure out how to center something horizontally or vertically, you’ll appreciate this helpful post by Ahmad Shadeed on CSS centering. Shadeed provides code examples for vertical centering, horizontal centering, and both horizontal and vertical centering together.

What I Found Interesting

• Do you like to do online word quizzes? I do, but I didn’t do very well with this dog words quiz from Merriam-Webster. How about you?
• One of my favorite events, TEDxDetroit returns September 20 as a virtual event. And this year, it’s a free event.
• For years, Ron Pittaway has published the Winter Finch Forecast in mid- to late-September. Not this year, as he announced his retirement. But no fear to birders who have long relied on the forecast for their winter birding plans, Pittaway has passed the torch on to Tyler Hoar.
• Two services from Firefox Test Pilot Program bit the dust this week: Firefox Send and Firefox Notes have been shut down. With Mozilla’s restructuring announcement in August 2020, I’m not surprised, but I am disappointed. Like Firefox Hello, these were two helpful services.

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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.