March 30, 2021 — Choosing to use a new technology can often bring much desired productivity, security, and efficiency to a project. It is also fraught with risk and uncertainty. How and when to adopt a new technology for client projects is at the heart of leading a great agency. In this article, Michael Rispoli explains how he evaluated the decision of whether or not to adopt a serverless database for client projects. Read more…

March 29, 2021 — In a new series of posts, we highlight some of the useful tools and techniques for developers and designers. Last weeks, we’ve covered CSS auditing tools, CSS generators and accessible front-end components. This time around, Iris Lješnjanin will take a look at SVG generators — for everything from shapes and backgrounds to SVG path visualizers and SVG → JSX generators. Read more…

March 26, 2021 — UX practitioners can play an important role in growing the UX maturity of the organizations and products they work with. This article, the second in a three-part series, presents two additional tactics that can be helpful for those working in organizations that have started engaging in UX, but are still at the lower to middle stages of maturity: knowledge sharing and mentorship. You can use these tactics stand alone, together, or in tandem with the ones covered previously. Read more…

March 25, 2021 — How do we get media performance right while staying within performance budgets? In this article, Akshay Ranganath will take a look at the recent stats and data around performance budgets, video playback performance issues and some techniques and tools to address these issues. Having a performance budget as a standalone metric might not be of much help. That’s why we must correlate performance to organizational goals. Read more…

March 25, 2021 — Reactivity is the ability for a variable (array, string, number, object, etc) to update when its value or any other variable that it makes reference to is changed after declaration. In this article, Timi Omoyeni is going to look at reactivity in Vue, how it works, and how you can create reactive variables using newly created methods and functions. Read more…

March 24, 2021 — Eleventy (aka 11ty) is rising in the ranks among static site generators. This Node-based builder is attractive due to its zero-config starting point, purely static output, and ease of achieving the coveted top Lighthouse performance score of four perfect 100s. Let’s dive into what else makes it unique, and learn about some essential concepts to help you successfully get started. Read more…

March 23, 2021 — One of the drivers of the popularity of headless options is that expectations for the quality of user experience are constantly going up. We have a wealth of tools to help developers build things fast so results are expected quickly. Going headless lets your team take full control of the user experience instead of wrestling with a large tool that doesn’t do quite what you wanted. In this article, Aaron Hans will explore what headless means, use cases for it, and how to decide if headless is a good fit for you. Read more…

March 22, 2021 — In a new short series of posts, we highlight some of the useful tools and techniques for developers and designers. Recently we’ve covered CSS Auditing Tools and CSS Generators, and this time we look into reliable accessible components: from tabs and tables to toggles and tooltips. We sincerely hope that these tools and techniques will prove to be useful in your day-to-day work — and most importantly help you avoid some time-consuming, routine tasks. Read more…

March 19, 2021 — Wondering what’s happenin’ at Smashing? Well, we’ve been busy. Here’s a little story of how we removed floating labels, improved performance on mobile, and launched a new series of articles. Oh, and how you can contribute to Smashing, too. Read more…

March 18, 2021 — The secret to growing a successful web design business is thinking of design as a service, not a product. When you focus on recurring revenue and sell to one targeted niche, you can grow a business faster than ever. In this two-part series, Stephen Roe shares the agency growth lessons we’ve learned. In this first part, we break down the pricing model that’s worked best for us and explain how to leverage it in your business. In the next article, we’ll share proven sales techniques you can use as you scale. Read more…