PHP is a widely-used open-source multi-purpose scripting language, which can be embedded in HTML and is especially suitable for Web development.
This article mainly introduces how to use the php-mqtt/client client library in PHP projects to implement the functions of connection, subscription, unsubscribing, message receiving and sending between MQTT client and MQTT server.
Agile, which started off as a better and more practical method of software development proposed by a group of developers, is now transforming the way in which organizations are run. Agile is now adopted by banks, manufacturers, research & development centers, hospitals, and even airports for execution.
When the scale and reach of Agile increased, newer frameworks such as Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large Scale Scrum, Nexus, and so on gained popularity. Enterprise agility and business agility is radically changing the way in which organizations are structured.
With more and more digitalization, there are more requirements for mobile and mobile apps that we use daily. The increase in mobile storage spaces raised to 256 GB, which is sure to increase as we meet customer needs, add new features, and support apps on different screen sizes.
Based on the report, 74% of the world uses Android, and around 70% of users look for the app size before installing any app.
User Experience is a crucial consideration for any web developer or designer; the only way to ensure that you’re delivering a successful website is to ensure that the end-user or customer will feel comfortable using it.
A strong user experience increases your client’s chances of successful audience engagement and conversions.
What you might not realize, however, is that the strategies you use to enhance UX as a web developer or designer can also influence how the search engines respond to a website.
Though many designers assume that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the work of a copywriter or content producer, there are design elements to consider too.
After all, the definition of optimization is “the action of making the best version of a resource.”
So, how are UX and SEO connected?
SEO used to be easy. To stand out on the search results, you just needed to stuff a page full of as many keywords and phrases as possible. Now, it’s a little more complicated.
Leaders in search engine development, like Google and Bing, know that they need to offer their customers excellent experiences to keep them. In this new experience-focused landscape, SEO and UX share common goals.
Search engines don’t just want to provide customers with any answers to their questions. Instead, Google and its competitors are using everything from artificial intelligence to machine learning algorithms to ensure that search results are accurate, relevant, and engaging.
In the same way, user experience is about providing users with easy access to the information and resources they want.
Now that SEO is a multi-disciplined approach, UX is just one of the essential tools that makes it possible for developers to optimize their websites properly.
There are plenty of connections between UX and site indexability.
We all know that since 2018, site speed has become a crucial ranking factor for companies in search of better search results. As a developer, it’s up to you to ensure that there aren’t too many elements weighing a website down that would prevent it from delivering fast results.
Bounce rate is another critical factor in search engine ranking algorithms. When customers click on a website, Google wants to see that they get the answers they want. If your navigation is difficult to understand, or the correct information isn’t easy to see on a page, end-users will just hit the back button.
Let’s take a closer look at how developers can influence SEO with their UX strategies.
It’s no secret that today’s digital consumers crave easy-to-use sites.
A complex website with pages ranking for different terms might seem like an excellent idea for SEO. However, from a UX perspective, the easier it is to navigate your website, the more your end-users will benefit.
According to a study from Ahrefs, well-optimized pages that rank for several keywords can be more beneficial than dozens of pages ranking for similar terms. At the same time, if the search engines have difficulty crawling all your pages due to a poor site navigation strategy, then some pages won’t get indexed.
So, how do you improve navigation and SEO at once? Follow the proper structure for your site first, categories and subcategories on the retail page help customers find exactly what they need. A solid internal linking structure allows the crawlers to examine your website and index each essential page individually.
Keep navigation simple when designing a website for both UX and SEO potential.
There are countless cases where poor layout design and formatting disrupts SEO potential. For example, cluttering a page with too much information makes it tougher to read and index. At the same time, if your pages aren’t attractive and easy to navigate, customers are more likely to hit the back button.
If customers come to a website and immediately leave it again, this tells the search engines that they’re not finding what they need on those pages. That means Google will bump you to a lower position on the SERPs.
So, how do you make your layouts more UX and SEO-friendly?
Today, SEO is less about building hundreds of landing pages for individual queries. Now, it’s more important to take a simple, de-cluttered approach with your website. SEO can determine what kind of architecture you need to create for a successful website.
For instance, say you wanted to rank for eCommerce SEO. There are tons of related words that connect to that primary search term. Rather than making dozens of different pages that try to rank for distinct phrases, you can cover a lot of other ideas at once with a larger, more detailed piece of content.
If a topic is too big to cover everything on a single page, then you might decide to create something called “pillar” content out of your main terms. This involves using one main page where you discuss all of the topics you will cover. Then, you design several smaller sub-pages that link back to that central pillar.
Once again, this helps the search engines to navigate your website and index your pages while assisting the customers in finding the correct information. At the same time, you combine more pages on a website and remove anything that might be detracting from your site’s authority or not offering enough value.
It’s easy to forget as a developer that a customer’s first experience with a website won’t always happen on that site’s homepage. Usually, when your customers are looking for solutions to a problem, they’ll find your website on the search engine results instead.
This means that you need to ensure that you make the right impression here:
There are a few ways that developers can ensure the search engine listings they create for their clients are up to scratch. For instance, a reasonable title tag for each page that includes appropriate keywords is excellent for SEO and UX. A title tag lets your customers know they’re in the right place and helps them find the information they need.
Remember, around eight out of ten users on search engines say that they’ll click a title if it’s compelling.
Another component you have control over as a developer or designer is the “rich snippet.” Rich snippets are the informative chunks of content that Google adds to a search listing to help it stand out. You can use rich snippet plugins on a website to tell Google what kind of extra information you want to include on a page.
For instance, you might want a company’s ratings to show up on your search results, so customers can see how trustworthy they are:
When you’re creating a website for a company, it’s easy to forget about local rankings. We see the digital world as a way of reaching countless people worldwide. Local orders are easier to overlook when you have a global scope to work with.
However, as a developer, you can boost a company’s chances of attracting the right local audience and boosting its credibility. For instance, you can start by ensuring that the correct directory information appears on your client’s website and social media profiles.
Another option is to create dedicated location pages for each area the company serves. This will make it easier for clients to find the contact details they need for their specific location.
At the same time, pages that have been carefully optimized to rank for specific locations will earn more attention, specifically from search engines. The more of the search engine landscape your client can cover, the more chances they have to attract new customers and leads.
In a world where experience is crucial for every business, it’s no wonder that UX and SEO are blending more closely together. There are a lot of areas where SEO and UX work in harmony together if you know where to find them. Improving your client’s SEO ranking with UX doesn’t just mean ensuring that their pages load quickly anymore.
Simple strategies, like making sure a call-to-action button is clickable on a mobile page, can simultaneously boost a website’s UX potential and SEO performance. At the same time, adding images and alt text to a website provides search engines with more information while adding context to your content.
The key to success is understanding how SEO and UX work together. If you look at SEO and UX as part of the same comprehensive strategy to give end-users a better online experience, achieving the right design goals is much easier.
Of course, just like any strategy, it’s also worth making sure that you take the time to track the results of your UX and SEO campaigns. Examine which systems help you, and examine customers from an SEO perspective with design and development strategies.
Features image by gstudioimagen on Freepik
The post 5 Ways That UX Developers Influence SEO first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
There were mixed reactions on Thursday morning when Adobe announced it had acquired Figma.
Excited press releases extolling the benefits of the “collaboration” followed the news. Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, said: “There is a huge opportunity for us to accelerate the growth and innovation of the Figma platform with access to Adobe’s technology…”
The reaction from the design community has been a little less enthusiastic.
The problem for the design industry is that we’ve been here before. The acquisition of Macromedia followed a period in which Adobe tried to compete, failed to update its legacy code, lost the battle, and purchased the victor. You only need to look at the number of former Macromedia products in Adobe’s stable (zero) to see where Figma’s heading.
Figma has grown faster than any of its rivals in the last eight years. It is, of course, easier to grow when you start at zero. But there’s no denying Figma is a well-managed business and probably a good investment — if not worth the $20bn that Adobe reportedly paid.
Figma’s technology will give Adobe a leg-up in the collaborative design stakes, where it is clearly lacking. And Adobe’s resources will iron out some of the kinks in Figma, especially around typography, which is, if we’re honest, a bit hacky in places.
Adobe will provide a good home (we hope) for the Figma team, who will have the opportunity for career advancement in a much wider pool of development teams.
And, of course, Figma’s annual revenue will begin to trickle into Adobe’s vault — although it may be some time before it makes a dent in that $20bn hole.
But Adobe didn’t buy Figma for its business model, collaborative technology, team, or revenue stream. Adobe bought Figma’s users, all four million of them.
Adobe‘s approach to design software is upselling. It lures you in with free apps, and when you’re engaged, it integrates them with other parts of its ecosystem until suddenly, without meaning to, you’ve agreed to a Creative Cloud subscription.
Adobe was losing customers to a competitor. And more importantly, due to Figma’s free-use approach for individuals, it was losing young customers to a competitor. If it hadn’t bought Figma, Adobe would have needed to invest heavily in its own products while providing them to freelancers for free; that isn’t viable for a company with as many commitments as Adobe.
Yes, it is entirely accurate to say that competition drives innovation, and with fewer competing apps, there is less need for companies like Adobe to build high-quality, reliable products. However, it is also true to say that a lack of competition creates opportunities for new apps.
Somewhere out there, in a dorm room, or a basement, or on a kitchen table, someone is working on Adobe’s next big acquisition. It’s probably an AR design app; we need a few more of those.
For Figma, the next 12 months will be bright as Adobe works to retain the customers it’s bought. Within five years, you’ll probably need an Adobe Fonts subscription and a Photoshop plugin to use Figma. In ten years, it will be stored in a code archive next to Freehand.
Some designers will turn to Sketch; others will turn to Affinity; some will shrug and keep using Figma; others will shrug and keep using XD.
If an app is intrinsic to your design work, it’s probably time to switch apps. Your skills are transferable. I’ve switched apps many times; some I loved, some I just needed. I’ve never encountered an app that improved my work, although plenty have improved my mood while working.
Figma took a great approach and will continue to be great until it isn’t. Tools come and go, Adobe’s acquisitions team, it appears, is eternal.
Featured image uses photos by Afrika ufundi, Andrea Piacquadio, Andrea Piacquadio, Anna Tarazevich, cottonbro, fauxels, Ketut Subiyanto, Mikhail Nilov, Moose Photos, Pavel Danilyuk, Pavel Danilyuk, Polina Tankilevitch, Tima Miroshnichenko.
The post Adobe Has Acquired You first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Apple has released an OS update. Packaged in with it is the latest version of Safari, 16.
Expected to be released ahead of next month’s macOS 13, Safari 16 is packed with updates, making it one of the most capable browsers available.
For web designers, the significance is the forward momentum in web technologies that enable freer design work and fewer hacks to achieve complex layouts. Little by little, CSS recommendations are being implemented to the point that using JavaScript for layout is rapidly becoming as unnecessary as it is disliked.
Some of this was announced in June in the Safari 16 beta. But a lot has been added in the last couple of months. So here’s what’s new in Safari 16 today.
The most exciting addition to Safari 16 is CSS Container Queries.
It is hard to understate how in-demand this feature has been; if you imagine an edit button on Twitter that gifted you crypto every time you corrected a typo, you’d be getting close to how popular this feature is.
Until now, media queries have detected the whole viewport. And so, if you have an element like a card, for example, that needs to change at smaller viewports, you need to calculate the available space and adapt the element’s design accordingly. Unfortunately, this frequently gets out of sync with edge cases causing more than a few headaches for front-end developers.
Media queries are severely restrictive to modern layout methods like Grid that wrap elements automatically because there is no way to detect how the elements are laid out.
Container Queries solve this by allowing you to define styles based on the size of the actual containing element; if a div is 300px wide, the contents can have one design, and if it’s 400px wide, they can have a different design—all without caring what size the whole viewport is.
This is dangerously close to OOP (Object Orientated Programming) principles and almost elevates CSS to an actual programming language. (All we need is conditional logic, and we’re there.)
The latest versions of Chrome, Edge, and now Safari (including mobile) support CSS Grid. Even discounting the rapid decline of Twitter, this is way more exciting than any edit button.
Speaking of Grid, if you’ve built a site with it (and if you haven’t, where have you been?), you’ll know that matching elements in complex HTML structures often results in nesting grids. Matching those grids requires careful management, CSS variables, or both. With CSS Subgrid, grids can inherit grid definitions from a grid defined higher up the hierarchy.
CSS Subgrid has been supported by Firefox for a while but is not yet part of Chrome or Edge. Until there’s wider support, it’s not a practical solution, and using a fallback negates any benefit of using Subgrid. However, its introduction in Safari will surely herald rapid adoption by Google and Microsoft and moves the web forward considerably.
CSS Subgrid is likely to be a practical solution within 18 months.
AVIF is an exceptionally compact image format that beats even WebP in many instances. It even allows for sequences, creating what is essentially an animated GIF but smaller, and for bitmaps.
AVIF is already supported by Chrome, with partial support in Firefox. Safari now joins them.
AVIF support is one of the more valuable additions to Safari 16 because you’re probably already serving different images inside a picture element. If so, your Safari 16 users will begin receiving a smaller payload automatically, speeding up your site and boosting UX and SEO.
Safari 16 introduces some significant improvements in animation, but the one that catches the eye is that you can now animate CSS Grid.
Yes, let that sink in. Combine Container Queries and animation. The possibilities for hover states on elements are tantalizing.
Safari 16 also supports CSS Offset Path — known initially as CSS Motion Path — which allows you to animate elements along any defined path. This enables the kind of animated effect that previously needed JavaScript (or Flash!) to accomplish.
Chrome, Edge, and Firefox all support CSS Offset Path; the addition of Safari means it’s now a practical solution that can be deployed in the wild.
Announced as part of the beta release, Web Inspector Extensions allow web developers to create extensions for Safari, just as they would for Chrome.
Web Inspector Extensions — or Safari Extensions as they’re destined to be known — can be built in HTML, CSS, and JS, so the learning curve is shallow. It’s a good route into app development for web designers.
Because the underlying technology is the same as other browser extensions, anyone who has made a Chrome, Edge, or Firefox extension will be able to port it to Safari 16+ relatively easily. As a result, there should be a rapid expansion of the available extensions.
Accessibility is key to an effective and inclusive web. Be like Bosch: everybody counts, or nobody counts.
When testing a design for accessibility, emulators don’t cut it. In my experience, Safari has some of the most reliable accessibility settings, especially when it comes to Media Queries like prefers-reduced-movement.
Further gains in this field mean that Safari continues to be an essential tool for QA tests.
Finally, I want to throw up my hands to celebrate the reduced number of non-standard CSS appearance settings.
For years we’ve been prefacing our style sheets with elaborate resets like Normalize, designed to undo all the assumptions browser developers make about design and the UI preferences of their engineers.
Safari 16 has reportedly “Removed most non-standard CSS appearance values.” How effective this is and how much we can rely on it given the other browsers on the market remains to be seen. However, like many of Safari 16’s changes, it’s a step towards a browser that’s on the developers’ side instead of an obstacle to overcome.
The post Exciting New Features in Safari 16 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Typically in low-latency development, a trade-off must be made between minimizing latency and avoiding excessive CPU utilization. This article explores how Chronicle’s Pausers — an open-source product — can be used to automatically apply a back-off strategy when there is no data to be processed, providing balance between resource usage and responsive, low-latency, low-jitter applications.
In a typical application stack, multiple threads are used for servicing events, processing data, pipelining, and so on. An important design consideration is how threads become aware that there is work to do, with some general approaches including:
Technology is constantly evolving, and that too at a rapid pace. The need for better Internet speed, improved connectivity, and easier accessibility has been the driving force behind the constant technological advancements.
5G or fifth-generation wireless cellular network is the most recent technology built to deliver high-speed performance. The technology is expected to significantly improve network connectivity. It is also believed that the introduction of 5G will make it easier and more convenient to connect devices to obtain and share information due to its unified connectivity fabric.
The JavaScript language has a long history. There are a lot of developers out there who are still learning the basics. But, if you’re trying to learn the language and make your first steps into it, you need to know what mistakes new developers make.
You have already researched JavaScript development tutorials, and you know that it’s one of the most popular languages in the world. You’ve started to use it for your website or app, but there’s still something that feels wrong with it, isn’t it??
In a fast-paced world, more teams have microservices architectures and are making the shift to Continuous Deployment and Trunk-Based Development. For one of our client’s teams, that meant no feature branches, pairs always committing to main, pushing frequently (multiple times per hour, as often as every 1–4 commits) and those changes landing in production 20–30 minutes later.
With pair programming, no feature branches, and such continuous change, code reviews would seem redundant or extremely difficult with little in the way of tooling support. How on earth would you use GitHub’s Pull Request review features in this setting when there’s no feature branch to diff?
