Let’s make 2021… fast! An annual front-end performance checklist, with everything you need to know to create fast experiences on the web today, from metrics to tooling and CSS/JavaScript techniques.
Read more…
Implementing best SEO practice can produce immediate results, but long-term performance requires long-term maintenance. Besides, the journey is more important than the destination, isn’t it? The most beautiful, spectacular site in the world won’t do anyone much good if people can’t find it on Google (or Bing, or DuckDuckGo).
This is not an exhaustive list, but hopefully there is enough to help you win over some of the most tedious search engine optimization issues.
Read more…
Meet our Smart Interface Design Patterns Checklist Cards, a deck of 100 cards with questions to ask when designing and building any interface component — carousel, hamburger, table, date picker, autocomplete, slider, onboarding, pricing plans, authentication, web forms and many others. Check the preview (PDF) and jump to description ↓Read more…
Let’s make 2020… fast! An annual front-end performance checklist (PDF/Apple Pages/MS Word), with everything you need to know to create fast experiences on the web today. Updated since 2016. Kindly supported by our dear friends at LogRocket, a frontend performance monitoring solution that helps reproduce bugs and fix issues faster.
Read more…
Let’s make 2019… fast! A front-end performance checklist (PDF/Apple Pages/MS Word), with everything you need to know to create fast experiences today.
Read more…
How would you design a responsive car configurator? How would you deal with accessibility, navigation, real-time previews, interaction and performance? Let’s figure it out. In this article, Vitaly Friedman dives deep into the dos and don’ts of designing a perfect configurator. As designers, we might try to make our configurators advanced and sophisticated, but too often we overwhelm customers with too many non-trivial options.
Read more…
Design patterns can be extremely helpful, mostly because they save time and get us better results, faster. We don’t need to apply them exactly as they are to every problem we encounter, but we can build on top of them, using our experience to inform our decisions because we know they’ve worked in other projects fairly well. Today, Vitaly Friedman brings you a summary of observations and experiments made throughout the time. Tighten up your seat belts: in this new series of articles on SmashingMag, we’ll look into examples of everything from carousels to filters, calculators, charts, timelines, maps, multi-column tables, almighty pricing plans all the way to seating selection in airline and cinema websites.
Read more…
Are you using progressive booting already? What about tree-shaking and code-splitting in React and Angular? Have you set up Brotli or Zopfli compression, OCSP stapling and HPACK compression? Also, how about resource hints, client hints and CSS containment — not to mention IPv6, HTTP/2 and service workers? A front-end performance checklist of things to keep in mind when optimizing for performance.
Read more…
It’s nearly impossible to provide an accurate quote to a prospective web design client without first gathering information about what that particular client needs. Some designers do this in either a face-to-face meeting or over the phone, but more often, they have a questionnaire that prospective clients fill out. This is preferable for a couple of reasons, but the most important is probably that this document then becomes an integral part of the design process and is available to refer back to along the way.
Read more…
One thing that can be said about human beings is that we are, by and large, creatures of habit. We establish routines, consciously and subconsciously, that help us accomplish tasks or move us more quickly or comfortably through our day. Habits are formed in the design and development community just as they are in nearly every other professional and personal environment, and they serve any number of purposes. In design and development circles, one established habit is seen with the launch of a website or project.
Read more…