When creating free or premium WordPress themes, you’re bound to make mistakes. WordPress has its own coding and theming standards. While you can write PHP the way you want to in your template files, it’s best to actually stick to “the WordPress way,” even if it’s not necessarily “the best way.” In this article, Nauris Pūķis will show you how you can avoid them in order to save yourself time and focus on actually creating themes people will enjoy using!
Read more…
Communication failures are human problems, so they’re messy and hard to solve. Design systems are one kind of tool that people look to in order to solve problems that are fundamentally about failures in collaboration and alignment. In this article, Amy Thibodeau will include practical advice that will be useful to anyone who is thinking about creating a design system to enable harmonious, integrated, and fundamentally successful product development.
Read more…
The best design follows an iterative process. The earlier in the process you can identify and fix problems, the easier and the less expensive it is. This is where prototyping comes in. Techniques such as wireframing and prototyping have transformed how user experience designers work nowadays. In this article, Christopher Murphy will take a closer look at the benefits and the process.
Read more…
WordPress is a free and open-source software (also known as FOSS) project. There are plenty of ways you can contribute some of your time back to the WordPress project without having to look at a line of code. Pick your favorite, and you’re off! You would be surprised to find that there are many ways that people can contribute back to the project without even writing or understanding a line of PHP. Interested? Then let’s get cracking, shall we?
Read more…
For the March 2018 desktop wallpapers, we wanted to try something different. That’s why we started a little creativity challenge and asked the community to design wallpapers around the theme “Exploring New Worlds.” Today, Cosima Mielke is happy to present the result of this creative experiment, and the lucky winner, too, of course. Here are the results.
Read more…
Today is the 200th issue of our precious li’l Smashing Newsletter, and in this issue we’d love to highlight the people behind this little project — the entire team, writing and editing and proofreading and pushing that damn “Send” button. 200 newsletter issues, thoroughly researched, written and edited by the SmashingMag team. We’re celebrating today’s issue by highlighting a part of the team behind this magazine.
Read more…
GDPR requires you to be more thoughtful about the sites and services you build, more transparent about the ways you collect and use data, more considerate of your users, and more thorough in your development and documentation processes. In this article, Heather Burns will explore what you, as a developer, need to know about the new data protection regime. At the end, you’ll understand how the challenges posed by the privacy overhaul will ultimately help to make you a better developer.
Read more…
When it comes to websites there is often a failure to plan properly or at all. In Part 1 of this series, Ben Seigel emphasized on the importance of recognizing the purpose of your website, and why planning for the web is just as important as planning for anything else associated with your business. In this article, he’d like to go into more detail of evaluating a plan, choosing web professionals, and determining your site structure.
Read more…
Adobe is launching a unique design challenge: Take one of three exclusive icon kits and make an app prototype that helps fellow creatives explore your city. Now’s your opportunity to let fellow creatives see your city through your eyes — and to put your design skills to the test at the same time. Show them where you get your creative juices flowing, where you relax after a long day at work, or whatever else might spark your love for the place you live each day anew.
Read more…
It’s a well-known fact that it’s not easy for WP websites to implement code-splitting through Webpack. In this article, Leonardo Losoviz takes things into his own hands and implements his own version of code-splitting for an open-source framework named PoP. He will analyze the performance of a website with and without code-splitting, and the benefits and downsides of using a custom implementation over an external bundler. We hope you enjoy the ride!
Read more…