In this week’s web design and development news roundup, you’ll learn about differentiating UX strategy from tactics, discover early mockups of the WordPress default Twenty Twenty-One theme, explore root causes of CSS bugs, 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
A small battle for you may be a big battle for someone else. It doesn’t mean you or they are doing it wrong.
The same waves hit us differently. You don’t know how long someone else has been in the ocean. You also don’t know if they’re facing other sharks underneath the waves.
— Julie Zhuo (@joulee) September 24, 2020
User Experience
- In this month’s Ask UXmatters, the expert panel discusses differentiating UX strategy from tactics. What is crucial for a UX team: a mature understanding of strategy.
- Information architecture can improve the design of our organizations, said Peter Merholz at this week’s EuroIA 2020 Conference.
“Organizations are abstractions. Information Architects are great at helping people with visualizing abstractions.” @peterme
— Peter Morville (@morville) September 22, 2020
- Care to share your opinion? Clearleft wants your help for their design maturity assessment survey, to better understand how design works within organizations. The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete, results are anonymized.
- The powerful decide is an excerpt from Scott Berkun’s book How Design Makes the World. His main point:
What makes good or bad design happen anywhere depends on who has the most power.
Accessibility
- September 23, 2020 marked the first day that public sector websites created before September 23, 2018 in the United Kingdom needed to meet accessibility rules. Richard Morton, head of Accessibility at the Government Digital Service explains what September 23 means for you and for accessibility.
- Want to make sure customers will be able to use your online product or service? Include them in your plans from project start, says Kim Krause Berg by marketing accessibility based on human life experiences. Don’t rely on marketing hype about overlays.
The more you understand how people use your web product, the more educated decisions you can make that benefit your users.
- Find out why the Tab key is so important for web accessibility in this eight-minute video from Eric Eggert. Did you know the Tab key allows you to access all focusable elements on the page?
- Zoom continues to improve accessibility in their service, announcing this week the ability to pin a speaker (which allows you to keep someone who is signing always in view) as well as the option to rearrange placement of videos.
WordPress
- Have you seen the first mockups of Twenty Twenty-One, the next WordPress default theme? Two things stood out for me: native system font stack and plans to make the theme compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines level AAA. Your thoughts?
- If you use WordPress Reader on your mobile app, new features announced this week provide a better way to discover blogs and get inspired. The new Discover tab recommends blogs and posts based on topics you follow.
- Over the past 14 years, I’ve seen more than my share of issues when clients copy and paste in WordPress and create formatting issues. Now I’ll point them to how to copy and paste in WordPress without formatting issues post from WP Beginner. The post provides details for both Classic and Block editor.
- My friend Claire Brotherton has published her most recent article on WP Shout, a WordPresss tutorial for PHP developers, where she walks your through a preview of the WP Shout’s guide to WordPress development.
CSS and HTML
- Love how Ahmed steps you through finding the root cause of a CSS bug. His explanation and code examples show how adding/modifying different properties affected the final outcome.
- With CSS Grid using
grid-auto-rows: 1fr;, all rows get the height of the tallest row. No JavaScript needed.
😍 Did you know that with #CSS Grid, you can declare the same height for all the rows according to the highest row?!
@CodePen:
https://t.co/3s6VfmMtWOThanks @leac for this great info🙂 pic.twitter.com/p35EIcmou3
— Elad Shechter (@eladsc) September 22, 2020
- When you create your websites, do you consider the impact your code, images, and scripts have on the environment? Specifically, the amount of energy they consume? Chris Coyier shares his thoughts on power usage and websites, and includes some helpful resources for you to learn more.
- As a follow-up to Chris’s post, this week’s post from The Markup about the high privacy cost of a “free” website has designers and developers checking sites for trackers. The Markup spent 18 months building Blacklist, a free public tool that inspects websites for privacy violations in real-time.
What I Found Interesting
- I’ve been a fan and supporter of Wikipedia for over 15 years. Glad to read Wikipedia is getting a new look for the first time in 10 years. Up first, a collapsible sidebar and maximum line width for easier reading.
- Google Maps will now allow you to view number of COVID-19 cases per 100,000 people for a given area and whether numbers are trending up or down. The new feature is rolling out to iOS and Android this week (not clear if it will be available on desktop). I haven’t seen it on my devices, have you seen it on yours?
- Learn something new in five minutes a day. Highbrow offers free 10-day courses via email. The photography courses caught my eye.
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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.
