September 24, 2021 — You’ve seen them before. Confusing and frustrating design patterns that seem to be chasing you everywhere you go, from one website to another. It’s time to fix them for good in a free Smashing online workshop next week. Today, Vitaly Friedman will take a look into carousels, modals, infinite scroll, parallax and scrolljacking, mega-dropdown menus, disabled buttons, inline validation, frozen filters, CAPTCHA, authentication and privacy. Read more…

September 23, 2021 — The new CSS accent-color property makes it quick and easy to roll out our brand colors to certain form inputs by leveraging user agent styles. It has the potential to provide quick and easy styling for many of our form elements, especially where extensive customization isn’t needed, as well as allowing the browser to pick the best options for accessibility. In this article Michelle Barker will take a look at what it does and how to use it alongside color-scheme for simple, accessible checkboxes and radio buttons — and imagine how you might use it in the future. Read more…

September 22, 2021 — We love little useful tools and techniques to help folks get their work done better and faster. Today, we’d love to shine the spotlights on a little helper that helps spot common performance bottlenecks easily: ct.css. Read more…

September 21, 2021 — Building a development environment with the shell as a keystone offers multiple benefits. You can use tools that fit nicely with each other, you can customize everything depending on your own needs, and the biggest of all, you can control your entire development environment with your keyboard. This can save a lot of cognitive energy as well as deliver a pleasant user experience. Read more…

September 21, 2021 — The last 18 months have been a time of unprecedented turbulence. As the people of the world have flooded online, businesses have joined them, using web development tools to adapt in real-time. Several years ago there seemed to be a gulf between drag-and-drop tools and full-blown web development. Today, it’s heartening to see the likes of Wix adding more code-heavy options to their repertoire. Read more…

September 20, 2021 — In the right circumstances, your web analytics or real user measurement data can offer visibility into the world of imposter domains, used by web scrapers to re-publish your site content on their servers. Content scraping is a fact of life on the Internet. When you think of web scraping, you probably do not think about the scrapers turning around and immediately serving your entire, whole page content on another website. But what if your site content is being re-published? It might be already happening. Read more…

September 17, 2021 — Gatsby Functions provide front-end developers a way to write and use server-side code without the hassle of maintaining a server. If making money from open-source is of interest to you and your site isn’t built using Gatsby, Paul Scanlon brings you an approach that may well be the answer you were looking for. Read more…

September 16, 2021 — Twenty years ago, Elie Sloïm chose to dedicate his professional life to web quality assurance. He started asking, ”What does quality mean for a web user?” Well, this article explains everything he has learned along the way. Read more…

September 16, 2021 — Neglecting to cater your business website to your customers is not only detrimental to your sales but can also hurt your team’s productivity and operations. Integrating a CRM with your business website has numerous benefits. You equip various departments within your company with tools to organize and automate work and improve efficiency.  In this article, Zara Cooper explains what these benefits are and why websites should be integrated with a CRM platform. Read more…

September 15, 2021 — Front-end development is exciting and fast-moving. With newer CSS properties, we can brush the dust off our old techniques and give them another look. For years, pseudo-elements have faithfully helped front-end developers implement creative designs. While they still have an important place, we can now leave pseudo-elements behind in some scenarios, thanks to newer CSS properties. Read more…