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Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development Resources: October 10, 2014

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Lunar eclipse in the early morning hours

In this week’s roundup, you’ll hear how The New Yorker finally figured out the Internet, find out why keyboard usability is more important than you think, learn what you can do with advanced CSS3 selectors, and more.

If you’re new to my blog, each week I gather some of my favorite resources for user experience, accessibility, WordPress, CSS, HTML, and responsive design and compile them in a weekly resource post.

If you want to stay-up-to-date daily with resources like these, follow me @redcrew on Twitter.

This week’s photo is of the lunar eclipse in southeast Michigan earlier this week. Our area was blessed with clear skies for the entire time of the eclipse. I rose early that morning at 5:00am to watch the Earth’s shadow cover the Moon, which turned a lovely shade of orange.

Favorite Tweet

User Experience

  • How The New Yorker Finally Figured Out The Internet: 3 Lessons From Its Web Redesign: Since the relaunch of The New Yorker website this summer with a new responsive design, time spent on the site has increased 23 percent and weekend traffic has grown by 25 percent. What were their lessons learned? One was a move to a popular content management system.
  • The Importance of Navigation Design Patterns: Chris Banks of UXPin reviews 16 navigation design patterns used in well-known websites and web applications, highlighting the problem and solution solved by each navigation design pattern.
  • Users Leave Search Box Empty: What should happen when someone presses the search button on your website or web application, but hasn’t entered anything in the search box?

  • 2 days, 200 customers, and conclusive results: the new user testing: At their annual user conference last month, Atlassian designed a test lab for their clients to drop in, and give feedback on early and late-stage features to their products. In addition to in-person feedback, they tried out a new experiement using a kiosk set up with UserTesting.com. Interesting read.

Accessibility

WordPress

Responsive Design

  • Responsive Web Design Bootcamp: Jonathan Stark, mobile strategy consultant and author of three books on web development, hosts a free one-hour O’Reilly Media webcast on October 16. Focused on web designers and developers who want to build mobile websites and web apps, Stark will discuss the “one web” philosophy, media queries, code organization, and more.

  • Responsive Images For Designers: The HTML5 picture element: Given the previous tweet about Chrome supporting the <picture> element, here’s how to work with it and use it with responsive images. Check the comments for further discussion.
  • Responsive Web Design: Harvard University: With my background working in higher education, I looked forward to the latest Responsive Web Design podcast with Harvard’s chief digital officer Perry Hewitt talking about responsive design initiatives at Harvard University.

    For us, responsive design was never an “if.” It was definitely a question of how soon.

CSS and HTML

  • Managing Color Values with Sass: Using Sass maps and a single function, James Steinbach shows you how to choose a group of base colors and use the same dark/light/transparent variations for each of those colors.
  • 16 CSS3 Selectors You Should Know: There’s some pretty powerful things you can do with CSS3 selectors. Have you used :root in any of your projects?
  • Litmus Builder: A Code Editor for Email Design and Development: The first code editor built for email designers by email designers, Litmus Builder allows you to build your email from scratch or use any of the pre-built templates using customizable snippets, HTML/CSS inline auto-completion, and Emmet integration.

What I Found Interesting

  • Why You Need a Password Manager. Yes, You.: Have you been putting off using a password manager? Tanya Snook explains why you want to use a password manager and benefits, including the time you’ll save. Do it!
  • 10 Tips for Evernote Users: I’ve been an Evernote user for years. In fact, I was a beta tester when it first came out. I’m always looking for more tips about how to use it. Did you know you can search for text wihin images? Great time saver for those expense reports.
    Evernote nested tags
  • Introducing polls on Google+: I wasn’t surprised with this week’s announcement from Google that you can add interactive polls to your Google+ posts. With Google’s purchase of Polar last month, it was only a matter of time before I thought we would see the polls integrated into Google’s products. Well done, Google!

Related posts:

  1. Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development Resources: December 12, 2014
  2. Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development Resources: October 3, 2014
  3. Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development Resources: October 17, 2014
  4. Weekly Roundup of Web Design and Development Resources: October 31, 2014

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