May 10, 2018 — Search engines have evolved in leaps and bounds these past few years. This year, there are a number of things that need to be kept in mind with regard to SEO. There are some key SEO concepts that experts in the field struggle to communicate clearly to designers. This can create friction and the impression that most well-designed websites are very poorly optimized for SEO. In this article, Myriam Jessier aims to provide all the information you need to know. Read more…

May 9, 2018 — If you haven’t contributed to an open source project before, MDN is a brilliant place to start. MDN has been documenting the web platform for over 12 years and is a go-to resource for many. Its strength is the fact that it is a very straightforward, and an excellent way to give back to the community if you have ever found these docs useful. And the best part is that anyone can contribute and help to improve it. In this article, Rachel Andrew explains how. Read more…

May 8, 2018 — Have you ever wondered whether it’s possible to do anything on the web without JavaScript? How many sites use progressive enhancement in practice? In this article Chris Ashton will try to use the web under various constraints, representing a given demographic of user. A good core experience is indicative of a well-structured web page, which, in turn, is usually a good sign for SEO and for accessibility. It’s usually a well designed web page, as the designer and developer have spent time and effort thinking about what’s truly core to the experience. Read more…

May 7, 2018 — Some time ago, designers and developers built the same kinds of websites over and over again, so much so that they were mocked by people in our own industry. Today, the design landscape has changed completely. We’re equipped with new and powerful tools — CSS Grid, CSS custom properties, CSS shapes and CSS writing-mode, to name a few — that we can use to exercise our creativity. In this article, Zell Liew explains how. Read more…

May 4, 2018 — UX professionals are constantly pressured to reduce the time they need to conduct UX research. Find out which techniques and ideas can make the user research process more transparent and collaborative. In this article, Zoe Dimov will take a closer look at some challenges and propose a new approach known as ‘FAST UX’ in order to solve them. This is a powerful tool that you can use to speed up UX research and turn stakeholders into active champions of the process. Read more…

May 3, 2018 — Macular degeneration is the leading cause of legal blindness in the United States. Bud Kraus shares his story of lessons learned from his disability as a tool to help him communicate and teach WordPress to others. Everyone works with WordPress differently, and Bud has discovered that for most people technology makes things easier. And for him, it makes things possible. Read more…

May 3, 2018 — SmashingConf Toronto is coming! Join us for a conference without slides, and see how experienced designers and developers work live. With lots of time for deep dive-ins. June 26–27. All talks will be live coding and design sessions on stage, showing how speakers, including pattern libraries setup, design workflows and shortcuts, debugging, naming conventions, and everything in between. Read more…

May 2, 2018 — With the help of this article, you will finally be able to learn the basics of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda and Simple Email Service (SES) APIs to help you build your own static site mailer on the Serverless Framework. Today, Brian Holt will show you the basics of Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda and Simple Email Service (SES) APIs to build your own static site mailer on the Serverless Framework. The full service will take form data submitted from an AJAX request, hit the Lambda endpoint and return a response for our users. Brian will guide you through getting Serverless set up for the first time through deployment. It should take under an hour to complete, so let’s get started! Read more…

May 1, 2018 — Printing pages directly from the browser is an experience that can lead to frustration with enormous images being printed out. We have covered print stylesheets in the past here on Smashing Magazine, but in this article, Rachel Andrew takes a look at the state of printing from the browser today. She will show you how you should include print styles in your web pages, and look at the specifications that really come into their own once printing. Read more…

April 30, 2018 — Let’s celebrate the beginning of May with some fresh and inspiring desktop wallpapers. Since more than nine years, artists and designers from across the globe challenge their creative skills and design monthly wallpapers for you to indulge in. In this post Cosima Mielke brings you their artworks for May 2018. Designed with love by artists and designers from across the globe, this wallpapers all come in versions with and without a calendar, so that you can continue using your favorites even after the month has ended. Read more…