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6 Ways Parallax Still Works in 2021

Parallax is a term that is applied loosely and frequently in the world of web design. As a trend, it has been popular and unpopular in equal measures for some time. However, it’s still one of the most valuable tools for animation in the digital world.

Parallax creates an illusion of depth when scrolling, a timeless effect that still has lots of value in the web design world.

Sure, parallax has its issues, from problems with usability, to concerns with mobile responsivity — but it’s also an interesting way to make a website stand out when done correctly.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the ways that parallax scrolling still works in 2021…

1. Parallax Tells A Story

Let’s start simple.

One of the most effective ways to use parallax scrolling in the modern age is to tell a story. Today’s consumers want to have an emotional connection with the brands they buy from – now more than ever. Five years ago, studies showed that around 80% of customers want brands to tell stories, and that trend remains consistent to this day.

In the age of digital consumerism, where people can’t get to know a company in person through face-to-face interactions with its salespeople, companies need new ways to connect with their clients. Telling brand-driven stories is a way to highlight that your company is more than just a faceless entity – it’s something with real soul.

Let’s look at the “Recap After Use” website, a portfolio belonging to the innovative Louie Sellers. This website showcases Louie’s skills with attention-grabbing visuals, including a parallax animation that makes it looks like Louie is drawing the page as you scroll through it.

This is the kind of exceptional animation that makes parallax scrolling more compelling. The animation isn’t there to make a visual difference to the page – it tells you something more about the person behind the website and what they can do.

2. Parallax Increases Website Visit Times

If a website effectively tells a story with parallax animation, you can also bet that’s going to keep customers or readers on a page for longer. Reducing bounce rate by increasing engagement is one of the main goals of any web designer. (Bounce rates, of course, refer to the percentage of site visitors that hit the back button after just seeing the first page of your website.)

While some people argue that parallax websites can hurt your SEO rankings if they slow down your site, there’s also the argument that the lack of a visually engaging page can harm SEO. Bounce rates drag down your ranking and make it harder to get audience attention.

A parallax animation that tells a story and engages your audience through carefully delivered information is a great way to keep people around – even just for a little longer than usual. For instance, if you check out Alex Dram’s portfolio page here, you’ll see several shapes coming together during the parallax scrolling animation.

The shapes merge to tell a story about the visual experiences that Alex can create for customers. It’s a way to draw the eye and connect with the viewer without just writing about what you do through text.

3. Parallax Develops Credibility

There’s a reason why both examples of parallax scrolling we’ve looked at so far are from creative portfolios. Parallax scrolling, with its excellent storytelling capabilities, is great for demonstrating your credibility as a digital expert. Basically, it’s a version of “showing” and not “telling” customers about your skills.

You can tell someone that you know how to use tricky techniques like parallax animation correctly, but they’re less likely to believe you that way. If you can show that you have the skills to create something amazing, that’s more engaging.

The OK Alpha team is a great company to reference when it comes to sensational design. This company seems to always be on the cutting edge of the latest trends, whether it’s bold typography or bright colors. To add to the impact of their website, the company has combined parallax effects into the mix to make everything more immersive as you scroll.

This is a beautiful example of how companies in the design landscape can use techniques like parallax scrolling to show what they’re capable of.

4. Parallax Makes Information More Fun

Most of us are naturally visual learners. We like to consume information in a way that’s refreshingly eye-catching and attractive. That’s why visual content generally earns more social shares and attention than written content. With parallax scrolling, companies that want to deliver valuable information and educational content to their audience can do so effectively.

Rather than just scrolling through a page and seeing lots of text, your customers can see images and graphs come to life alongside the blocks of text they’re reading. It’s like adding video demonstrations next to a textbook to help people better understand what they’re reading about.

Look at the Web Design and Art History microsite from Webflow as an example. The company wants you to understand how web design and art have evolved over the years, but it doesn’t want to deliver that information in a boring format. The bright graphics and parallax animation work together to give you a more contextual, meaningful experience.

5. Parallax Replicates Another Medium

What if you could remind someone of their experience when reading a book or watching a video while telling them about a video or a novel? Parallax scrolling and animation can help with that. It’s a way of making your website feel like a video presentation or slideshow without the added components of implementing video players into your back end.

Parallax scrolling also has another slight benefit over a standard video-based website. On a website that uses a video for a background, the video often plays automatically. This means that your visitors can’t control how quickly the video plays.

On the other hand, parallax animations driven by scrolling action allow your customer to collect information at a pace that suits them. Take a look at the Story of the Goonies website, for instance. This stunning parallax site introduces you to the details you need to know about the movie in a way that makes it feel like the intro to a film.

The great thing about the parallax on this site is that the slow video-style design also gives you a dose of nostalgia – which ties in perfectly with the movie.

6. Parallax Is More Memorable

What’s the main reason any designer does anything special to a website? To make it stand out, of course. Web design is all about conveying the unique essence of a brand, business, or entity in a way that’s going to make that client unforgettable. Although parallax isn’t as novel as it once was, it can still be a way to make your site stand out – if it’s used correctly.

The key to success with parallax scrolling for memorability is making it smart. The layout needs to feel simple and intuitive. Everything needs to work well together, from the lightly shifting font to the various parallax effects that work together to draw the viewer’s eye (and attention).

A great example comes from Jomor Design – another designer with a portfolio that really grabs your focus from the first second. The layout is beautifully done, with plenty of mini moments for engagement and interactions throughout. As you scroll through the site, you get a better idea of what the designer is all about. The little moments of animation make the whole experience so much more memorable.

When your site is more memorable and engaging than that of your competition, you can drive many major benefits for your brand, including an improved bounce rate.

What To Remember When Using Parallax

Parallax is just like any other design technique. There are ways you can do it wonderfully, which engage and delight your audience. However, there are also a lot of areas where you can easily go wrong. When using any design element, the main thing to remember is that the primary focus should always be your users’ experiences. Parallax shouldn’t just be a way to show off your design knowledge. It’s just another feature that you can use to create an amazing website.

Remember that user experience and visual appeal need to work perfectly together for parallax to work. If scrolling through the page is practically impossible for people on a mobile device, then you’re not going to get the results you want. If it’s difficult to take in the message you’re trying to send because the content is moving too quickly, again, your users will suffer.

Remember the following tips:

Simple is better: Reduce the amount of content and visual elements on your page whenever you can. The less information there is to capture your customer’s attention, the less likely it is that you’re going to end up with a problem.
Compress file sizes: Make sure that you’re not reducing the speed of your website by creating a huge single page with tons of high-quality images. You’re going to need to use the smallest possible file sizes.
Check responsiveness: Make sure that the parallax effect works just as well on your smartphone or tablet as it would on a desktop. As more people move their browsing experiences into their palms, you can’t afford to ignore responsivity.
Find the “wow”: Look at these examples of parallax websites. Every one stands out because it does something special with the scrolling effect. If you’re going to be using this strategy with your website, you need to make sure it’s worth the effort. Don’t just follow the same guidelines as everything else. Find the idea that’s going to make people take notice.

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19 mai 2021/par Service comm.

Create Beautiful WordPress Pages with Optimized Images Using Elementor and ImageEngine

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WordPress powers nearly 40% of all websites, thanks to its commitment to making publication possible for everyone, for free. Combined with premium plugins and themes, it’s possibly the ultimate tool for building attractive, unique, and feature-rich websites without any coding or design experience.

However, you do pay the price for this experience, with WordPress and its third-party products not always being built for performance – whether it’s page loading times or SEO.

Image optimization is a particularly big concern. Images are one, if not the largest, contributors to page weight, and it’s growing significantly by the year. So, while images are crucial for beautifying your website pages, they are also one of the biggest factors slowing it down.

In terms of image optimization, WordPress+Elementor brings very little to the table. WordPress core now comes with both responsive syntax and lazy-loading. Elementor itself also only comes with responsive syntax out-of-the-box. However, these are baseline techniques for image optimization that will deliver the bare minimum of improvements.

This means that, while Elementor makes it easy to design sweet-looking WordPress pages (with tonnes of creatively utilized images), you will probably pay the price when it comes to performance. But don’t worry. We will show you how to dramatically improve web performance by over 30 points on scoring tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insight.

Why Optimize Your Elementor Images with ImageEngine?

In general, image CDNs use various techniques to get image payloads as small as possible and deliver image content faster, all while minimizing the visual impact. ImageEngine is no different in that regard.

Firstly, ImageEngine, when used in auto mode, will apply all of the following optimizations that web performance tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insight recommend. For example:

Properly size images – ImageEngine automatically resizes images for optimal size-to-quality ratios depending on the screen size of the user device. ImageEngine supports Retina devices.
Efficiently encode images – Applies different rates of compression depending on the PPI of the user devices. For example, ImageEngine adapts and more aggressively compresses on higher PPI devices without losing visual quality.
Next-gen format conversion – Automatically converts images to the optimal next-gen format according to the browser, device, or OS. ImageEngine can convert images to WebP or JPEG-2000 as well as GIFs to MP4 or WebP. AVIF is also available in a manual directive mode.
Strip unnecessary metadata

While these features are standard for most image CDNs, ImageEngine is unique for its use of WURFL device detection. This gives ImageEngine much deeper insight into the user device accessing a website page and, by extension, its images. Using the screen size, resolution, PPI, etc., ImageEngine can make more intelligent decisions regarding how to reduce image payloads while maintaining visual quality.

This is why ImageEngine brands itself as an “intelligent, device-aware” image CDN and why it can reduce image payloads by as much as 80% (if not more).

ImageEngine also provides a proprietary CDN service to accelerate image delivery. The CDN consists of 20 globally positioned PoPs with the device-aware logic built-in. This allows you to deliver image content faster in different regions while also serving images straight from the cache with a ~98% hit ratio.

ImageEngine also supports Chrome’s save data setting. If someone has a slow connection or has activated this setting, ImageEngine will automatically compress image payloads even more, to provide a better user experience on slower connections.

How to Use ImageEngine with WordPress and Elementor

If you’re using WordPress and Elementor, then chances are you want to spend as little time on development and other technicalities as possible. Luckily, ImageEngine is a highly streamlined tool that requires little to no effort to integrate or maintain with a WordPress site.

Assuming you already have a WordPress website with Elementor, here are the step-by-step instructions to use ImageEngine:

Go to ImageEngine.io and sign up for a 30-day free trial.
Provide ImageEngine with the URL of the website you want to optimize.
Create an account (or sign up with your existing Google, GitHub, or ScientiaMobile account).
Provide ImageEngine with the current origin where your images are served from. If you upload images to your WordPress website as usual, then that means providing your WordPress website address again.
Finally, ImageEngine will generate an ImageEngine delivery address for you from where your optimized images will be served. This typically takes the form of: {randomstring}.cdn.imgeng.in. You can change the delivery address to something more meaningful from the dashboard, such as myimages.cdn.imgeng.in.

Now, to set up ImageEngine on your WordPress website:

Go to the WordPress dashboard and head to Plugins -> Add New.
Search for the “Image CDN” plugin by ImageEngine. When you find it, install and activate the plugin.

Go to Settings -> Image CDN. OK, so this is the ImageEngine plugin dashboard. To configure it, all you need to do is:

a. Copy the delivery address you got from ImageEngine above and paste it in the “Delivery Address” field.

b. Tick the “Enable ImageEngine” box.

That’s literally it. All images that you use on your WordPress/Elementor pages should now be served via the ImageEngine CDN already optimized.

ImageEngine is largely a “set-it-and-forget-it” tool. It will provide the best results in auto mode with no user input. However, you can override some of ImageEngine’s settings from the dashboard or by using URL directives to manipulate images.

For example, you can resize an image to 300 px width and convert it to WebP by changing the src attribute like this:

<img src="https://myimages.cdn.imgeng.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/banner-logo.png?imgeng=/w_300/f_webp">

However, use this only when necessary, as doing so will limit ImageEngine’s adaptability under different conditions.

What Improvement Can You Expect?

Let’s see what results you can expect from using an image CDN to improve your page loading times.

For this, I created two identical WordPress pages using the Elementor theme. The one page purely relied on WordPress and Elementor, while I installed and set up ImageEngine for the other. The page had some galleries as well as full-size images:

The pages used many high-quality images, as you might expect to find on a professional photography gallery, photography blog, stock photo website, large e-commerce site, etc. I then ran page performance tests using Chrome’s built-in Lighthouse audit tool, choosing scores representing the average results I got for each page.

For thoroughness, I tested both the mobile and desktop performance. However, I focused on the mobile results as these showcase more of the image CDN’s responsive capabilities. Mobile traffic also accounts for the majority share of internet traffic and seems to be the focus for search engines going forward.

So, first of all, let’s see the mobile score for the page without ImageEngine:

As you can see, there was definitely a struggle to deliver the huge amount of image content. Google has shown that 53% of mobile users abandon a page that takes more than 3s to load. So, clearly, this page has major concerns when it comes to user experience and retaining traffic.

The desktop version fared much better, although it still left much to be desired:

When digging into the reasons behind the slowdown, we can identify the following problems:

Most of the issues related somehow to the size and weight of the images. As you can see, Lighthouse identified a 3.8 MB payload while the total image payload of the entire page was close to 40 MB.

Now, let’s see what kind of improvement ImageEngine can make to these issues by looking at the mobile score first:

So, as you can see, a major improvement of 30 points over the standard WordPress/Elementor page. The time to load images was cut down by roughly 80% across the key core web vital metrics, such as FCP, LCP, and the overall Speed Index.

In fact, we just reached that critical 3s milestone for the FCP (the largest element on the visible area of the page when it initially loads), which creates the impression that the page has finished loading and will help you retain a lot of mobile traffic.

The desktop score was also much higher, and there was further improvement across the key performance metrics.

If we look at the performance problems still present, we see that images are almost completely removed as a concern. We also managed to bring down the initial 3.8 MB payload to around 1.46 MB, which is a ~62% reduction:

An unfortunate side effect of using WordPress and WordPress plugins is that you will almost inevitably face a performance hit due to all the additional JavaScript and CSS. This is part of the reason why we didn’t see even larger improvements. That’s the price you pay for the convenience of using these tools.

That being said, the more images you have on your pages, and the larger their sizes, the more significant the improvement will be.

It’s also worth noting that lazy-loaded images were loaded markedly faster with ImageEngine if you quickly scroll down the page, again making for an improved user experience.

Thanks to its intelligent image compression, there was also no visible loss in image quality, as you can see from this comparison:

Conclusion

So, as you can see, we can achieve significant performance improvements on image-heavy websites by using the ImageEngine image CDN, despite inherent performance issues using a CMS. This will translate to happier users, better search engine rankings, and an overall more successful website.

The best part is that ImageEngine stays true to the key principles of WordPress. You don’t have to worry about any of the nuts and bolts on the inside. And, ImageEngine will automatically adjust automation strategies as needed, future-proofing you against having to occasionally rework images for optimization.

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The post Create Beautiful WordPress Pages with Optimized Images Using Elementor and ImageEngine first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.

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6 mai 2021/par Service comm.

Quiz: Which CSS Snippet Is The Fastest?

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CSS is an awesome tool for styling websites. It’s small, fast, and easy to learn. But like all code, there’s a right way, and a wrong way to write it. Badly written CSS renders slowly, impacting on the perceived speed of your site, and even damaging your SEO.

Writing fast CSS is about knowing your CSS selectors, knowing your shorthand, and understanding how properties are best applied. What better way to spend the final Friday in April, than on a CSS pop-quiz. Have fun!

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23 avril 2021/par Service comm.

3 Effective Ways To Improve Your Site’s Carbon Footprint

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At the dawn of the web-era, there was much focus on how environmentally friendly websites were: we’d chop down fewer trees, ship fewer products, and travel less for business.

And because the web was small, any negative impact it had was relatively small. But the Internet’s no longer small, and neither is the impact it has on the environment. The average website uses 211,000g of CO2 per year, watching a video online outputs an estimated 0.2g of CO2 per second, and a single email can cost 50g of CO2.

In the next four years, the tech industry as a whole may use up to 20% of the world’s electricity and be responsible for 5.5% of global CO2 emissions.

The good news is that because websites are viewed many times, even small improvements can multiply into real change.

1. Reduce Energy Consumption

Through electricity use, the Internet generates around the same CO2 as most major countries. That carbon comes from two sources: the devices we use to access the Internet and the servers that host our data.

Computers heat up, and when they heat up, they slow down. Servers are especially vulnerable and use extraordinary amounts of energy to keep cool and functional, which is why Microsoft keeps throwing servers into the sea.

Make It Faster

The faster your site, the less data is used to serve it, and the less carbon it’s outputting; it’s that simple.

Reduce the Number of Resources Used

Everything you load on your site has an impact. You might think that a tiny PNG is too small to really impact your carbon footprint, but over thousands of page loads, its impact is multiplied. Anything you can do to reduce the number of actual files requested will reduce your carbon output. You can use sites like Ecograder to estimate your own site’s CO2 output.

Optimize Images

If there’s one thing you can do to reduce the size of your site, the amount of data that needs to be sent over the Internet to serve your site, and the resulting speed, it’s optimizing your images.

Nothing reduces a site’s footprint like optimizing images. It’s easy and free to reduce the size of JPGs and PNGs with a service like TinyPNG. Offer WebP to any browser that will accept them; it will boost your Lighthouse score and improve your CO2 usage.

Lazy Load Images

Lazy loading images means images are loaded as they are required; images at the top of a page always load, images further down only load when the user scrolls to them; if the user doesn’t scroll to the bottom of the page, they don’t load, saving you CO2.

Reduce The Amount Of JavaScript You Use

Yes, JavaScript is awesome. Yes, it can be hugely beneficial to UX. And yes, it munches on energy like it’s candy.

When a web page loads, it’s done, the total cost is in. If JavaScript keeps running in the background, redrawing the screen based on user interaction — as is the case with a parallax site — the web page keeps using up energy on the device.

Choose a Sustainable Hosting Company

You can reduce the power needs of a site, but you can’t eliminate them. One simple step is to opt for a hosting company that gets its electricity from sustainable sources such as wind power or solar.

Low←Tech Magazine is powered by a server that runs on solar energy and carries a warning that it may go offline. But it’s possible to host both reliably and sustainably. Many web hosts outsource their actual server management, so they have no control over how those servers are powered, but there are plenty of exceptions that guarantee green web hosting. Google Cloud aims to be the cleanest in the cloud industry. For green web hosting, I always recommend the all-round superb Kualo.

2. Be Inclusive

One of the biggest issues with the EV (Electric Vehicle) movement is that we’re replacing cars earlier than we normally would in a rush to move to “clean” driving.

A new EV certainly outputs less than a gas-powered vehicle when driven the same distance. Combine increased use — because owners think they are driving cleanly — with the fact that a new EV has to be manufactured, the minerals for batteries have to be mined (in horrific conditions), and it then needs to be shipped to you, and EVs are not as friendly as they appear — so go ahead, buy that vintage Porsche it’s probably better for the environment than a Tesla.

Support Legacy Devices

The same issue that applies to cars applies to devices. Every time we rush ahead to support the latest iPhone, we leave older generations behind. A device can and should last longer than two years.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t embrace modern web standards. Technologies like CSS Grid are excellent at reducing markup size and speeding up sites. CSS Grid has been well supported for over four years, and even “legacy” devices can handle it. If you can keep a phone for an extra six months, the environmental cost of that phone is reduced by 20%.

3. Help Users Make Good Choices

More and more people are trying to make good choices. We’re eating a healthier, balanced diet. We’re recycling clothes. We’re traveling by bike, and on foot, instead of by car. People want to do the right thing, and they seek out companies that aid them.

Improve Navigation

Anything that you can do to make your content more findable will mean fewer page loads and therefore consume fewer resources.

By improving your information architecture, improving your search accuracy, and improving on-page signposts like bread crumbs and link text, you help users find content faster.

Feelgood Feedback

When the environmental impact of a user’s actions are quantifiable, let them know. Users who care will appreciate it, and users who don’t will ignore it.

Raileurope.com adds a note to any quotation letting you know how much carbon you’ve saved by traveling by train instead of flying.

Don’t Remove the Shipping Rate

Many ecommerce sites offer free shipping, especially above a certain order value; it’s a good way to encourage higher sales. But absorbing the shipping cost implies that there is no shipping. By highlighting the shipping costs, even if they’re not passed on to the customer, you remind them that there is an environmental cost and a financial cost.

You can absorb the shipping rate without implying there is no cost by adding the shipping and then explicitly deducting it as a discount.

Sustainable Web Design Is Good For Business

The fundamentals of good web design are the fundamentals of sustainable web design.

Make it fast and usable, and you’ll also be making it energy efficient. Make it inclusive, and you’ll help the industry slow the ever-growing tendency to consume. Make it transparent, and you’ll help your users make good choices of their own. All of these things are not only good for the environment, but they also result in improved UX and SEO.

Featured image via Pexels.

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22 avril 2021/par Service comm.

Get Ready For Next Month’s Google Shakeup

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Google has been talking about the Core Web Vitals tool and the Page Experience Update for about a year now.

With the update scheduled to roll out in May 2021, now is the time to make sure your websites are prepared for it. It’s taking a lot of the best practices Google has recommended over the years and making them an official part of the search algorithm, so not taking this seriously could negatively impact your sites’ rankings.

Today, we’re going to look at everything Google has told us about the update and how to use the Core Web Vitals tool to ensure your site rankings don’t drop once it rolls out.

What We Know About the Google Page Experience Update

Google first told us about the page experience update back in May 2020. Here’s what we know about the upcoming update:

Google’s Search Algorithm Will Change in May 2021

Although there’s no specific day given, we do know that the page experience update will go live sometime in May 2021.

The Goal is to Reduce Friction on the Web

It’s not as though user experience is something that designers and developers overlook when building websites. Heck, there’s an entire disciple of UX design dedicated to it.

That said, Google hasn’t taken too hard line of an approach in enforcing its page experience suggestions, like mobile-first design, removing intrusive pop-ups, or improving page speed. With this update, though, Google is now telling every site owner that performance, accessibility, technical best practices, and SEO must be built into their websites.

Of course, the goal isn’t to create more work on your side of things. Google believes that by encouraging developers to build better web experiences that consumers will experience less friction and businesses will be more profitable as a result.

The Update Will Include Older Signals

According to Google, the page experience update is going to combine a bunch of older signals with the new Core Web Vitals:

The Core Web Vitals tool will now merge all of that data we once had to gather from various Google apps. That’ll make it more convenient for designers and developers to improve the on-page experience across a variety of areas.

The Page Experience Algorithm Will Change Over Time

Per Google:

Because we continue to work on identifying and measuring aspects of page experience, we plan to incorporate more page experience signals on a yearly basis to both further align with evolving user expectations and increase the aspects of user experience that we can measure.

So, don’t expect this to be a one-and-done thing. You’ll have to rely on the Core Web Vitals tool, and pay close attention to updates out of Google, to ensure your sites are keeping up with Google’s page experience standards.

Your Other Google Apps Have Already Been Updated with Core Web Vitals

If you hadn’t noticed, Google has already updated its other apps in anticipation of the page experience update.

Google PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, and Lighthouse all have Core Web Vitals data in them.

Here’s an example of how Lighthouse’s report on the Amazon website now looks:

By including these metrics within the tools you’re already using, you don’t necessarily have to add the Core Web Vitals tool to your growing toolbox. That said, there are some really valuable reports in there, so I’ll show you why you may want to add it anyway.

Google’s Top Stories Will Be Affected

In the past when someone did a news-related search on Google, they’d see “Top Stories” results like this one:

Until now, the only pages shown here were AMP-enabled ones.

Once the page experience update goes live, though, the AMP requirement is going away. So long as a page meets the page experience criteria along with Google News content policies, it can now rank in this section.

Google Search Results May Show a Page Experience Indicator

In the Top Stories example above, notice the AMP indicator I highlighted in yellow. Google is thinking about adding something similar to any search result that fulfills its page experience criteria.

While I think a small, eye-catching icon might draw a little more attention from Google users, I’m not sure if it’ll be that big of a deal to them. People working in this industry certainly know what that lightning bolt means, and we’ll also be the ones who recognize the page experience indicator, but I’m not convinced it’ll matter to users.

That said, this is something Google is thinking about rolling about, so it’s something to be aware of. At the very least, you can consider it a badge of honor when showing your websites to clients and prospects who want to see what you can do for them.

Content Is Still More Important Than Page Experience

Even if a website checks off all the page experience boxes, there’s no guarantee that it’ll start to rank better than websites that haven’t. The quality and value of the content on the page still matters greatly.

Using Core Web Vitals to Measure Page Experience

Alright, so let’s take a look at this Core Web Vitals tool. Here’s what the tool looks like when you enter the “Measure” tab:

It’s like most other Google analyzer tools. You enter the URL you want to audit and let the tool run. The results then spit out something that looks like this:

Core Web Vitals are graded on four categories:

Performance measures the loading speed, interactivity, and stability of the page.
Best Practices focus on the technical aspects of the page, including things like having an SSL certificate and making sure images fit within the parameters of the mobile screen.
SEO checks on the typical SEO signals like metadata, structured data, and so on.
Accessibility reports any issues with visitors not being able to see or access parts of the page.

If you scroll down just a little bit on the page, there’s more data available. It mainly has to deal with the technical stuff, like page speeds and unoptimized code:

Now, this isn’t really anything new. We can get this data about load time, interactivity, and content stability from Google’s other apps.

The real value is in the report, which you can access up top next to the date of your audit.

Open the report and you’ll find specific suggestions and pro tips to optimize each part of the page experience, like this SEO report:

Just like other Google tools, this one can teach you a lot about what makes one site more rankable than another. So, make sure you update your web design strategy going forward to integrate all of these ranking signals.

While you’ll have to do annual audits on your sites to see how much Google has changed the page experience signals, you’ll create less work for yourself if this baseline set of criteria are met with every site you build.

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12 avril 2021/par Service comm.

7 Skills You Need To Thrive As A Web Designer In 2021

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Web design is an ever-evolving field. Those of us that have been in the industry a long time (i.e., six months plus) have seen the launch of more products, the establishment of more ideas, and the promise of more growth than most industries see over a whole career.

While the tools we use, the terminology we employ, and the goalposts we shoot for are constantly changing, core skills are transferable and long-lasting and will ensure you not only survive in the industry but thrive in it.

These skills are characteristics that you can learn, that will help you grow in 2021, 2022, and beyond.

1. Decision Making

Life is a series of decisions, from which pair of socks to wear to which crypto to store your life savings in. Each of us has a finite amount of decision-making fuel in the day — the more decisions you make, the sooner you reach decision fatigue.

Most people burn their decision-making fuel by second-guessing themselves; they make a decision and then remake the same decision over and over as doubt creeps in.

The ability to make a decision, and stick to it, separates those people who still have the fuel to make strategic decisions after close of business and those people who can’t decide what to have for dinner.

2. Clarity of Purpose

It’s never a bad idea to brush up on design fundamentals. From color theory to typography to UI and layout, these core skills are not only beneficial to your design practice, but they help you think about design on a higher level.

Too often, designers fail to see the wood for the trees, focusing on the project at hand instead of a wider picture. The wider picture doesn’t mean your portfolio; it means the whole history, culture, and design context.

Many musicians can play multiple styles, but they tend to favor one instrument; they made a fundamental decision that freed them to explore music in greater depth

Despite the term, design fundamentals aren’t universal; they’re personal to you. For example, should you pair a script with a serif? Your answer is probably, “it depends” because you’re an awesome designer; my answer is “no,” because, for me, that is a design fundamental.

Design fundamentals can be limiting, but by providing default answers to common questions, they also free you to consider larger questions about what you’re doing and why, which leads to clarity of purpose.

Many musicians can play multiple styles, but they tend to favor one instrument; they made a fundamental decision that freed them to explore music in greater depth.

3. The Holy Trinity

The holy trinity in web design is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Learn what they are and what they do.

You need to understand them well enough to hold an intelligent boardroom-level conversation about them. You don’t actually need to know how to code them — although I’ve never actually met someone who knew enough about their roles to hold a strategic conversation, who didn’t also know how to code them from scratch.

I’m not talking about frameworks, libraries, or the latest build tools. Those things are just macros for coders. I’m talking about understanding the building blocks of a site, so if someone asks you whether you really need the company logo in the site footer, you can answer, and back your answer up with facts.

4. Simple Presentation

No matter what field of design you’re in, you’re going to need to present your ideas to someone who doesn’t share your knowledge. Whether you’re explaining the basics to a client or explaining your decision-making to a colleague, presenting your ideas simply is the best way to be heard.

a pitch is most effective when you exclude extraneous detail

Often, a persuasive presentation utilizes the less-is-more approach. Just as a design is finished when you’ve removed everything unnecessary, so too a pitch is most effective when you exclude extraneous detail.

Often you’ll find metaphor useful, especially if you have a passing knowledge of the person’s own area of expertise because it translates a concept into a format the person understands and is comfortable with.

“We should…because it will improve [a metric] by approximately…%” is often the most welcome language. If the person you’re selling your decision needs more detail — and they probably don’t need to know details, that’s what they have you for — they can ask.

5. Strategic SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation, for the two people in the world who don’t know what that acronym stands for) is a vast field with as many sub-divisions as there are UX job titles.

There are various branches of SEO that a site needs to consider. Technical SEO is the stuff that coders do; if you’re not a coder, you can ignore that. Content SEO is the stuff that marketers do; if you’re not a marketer, you can ignore that. Strategic SEO is a macro-view of a site’s plans; everyone on every project should understand strategic SEO.

Strategic SEO covers topics like landing pages, single-page sites, whether a blog is necessary, how, if at all, social media is employed. Strategic SEO feeds all other branches of SEO. It is so fundamental that it informs the earliest decisions about a site. If you want to do more than make things look pretty, learn more about strategic SEO.

6. A Second Language

You’ve probably noticed by now that the web extends beyond your town limits. It’s a global force, which means billions of people who don’t speak the same language.

If you’re not a native-English speaker, then it’s a no-brainer to learn a little English. You don’t need to be fluent; you certainly don’t need to be poetic, but the vast majority of documentation, GUIs, blog posts, forums, conferences, and the Web itself are in English, and translation code only gets you so far.

If you are a native English speaker, then learn something relevant to your region or the industry you specialize in. It doesn’t really matter what you learn; picking up a language, and culture, makes you a more rounded human being. And provided you don’t pick something obscure, you’re opening yourself up to millions or even billions of users you were previously missing out on.

7. Saying, “No.”

It doesn’t matter whether you’re a freelancer sofa-diving for spare pennies to meet the rent or a seasoned in-house designer with targets to meet; everyone struggles to say, “no.”

The fear is that if we decline a project, or a feature request, that we won’t be asked next time; eventually, we’ll be passed over for all projects until we have no career left.

The problem is that we only have so many hours in a day. If we do too much, we end up doing it badly, so there have to be limits. Every time you say “yes,” you’re increasing the chances that you will have to say “no,” to a future opportunity that’s great for you.

By all means, decline gracefully. Do it politely. Be kind. Offer to refer the client elsewhere. But it’s better to say “no” than to have to say “no” to the perfect project because you’re over-stretched.

Featured image via Unsplash.

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7 avril 2021/par Service comm.

Quiz: How Much Do You Know About SEO?

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For many, SEO is more of an art than a science, a mysterious process in which a tiny tweak to a site’s code can propel it to page one of Google or send it plummeting to the depths of page 50.

Myths abound, but the answers are readily available if you know where to look. How much do you know about SEO? Let’s find out!

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26 mars 2021/par Service comm.

Getting Started With Inclusive Web Design

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A key part of designing successful websites for clients is making sure that as many end-users as possible can access and enjoy that site.

So, what if you discovered that around 1 billion people couldn’t enjoy your designs? Even if those people manage to click on a link and visit the website that you create, they might not be able to understand what’s being sold or navigate to the checkout page.

According to statistics from the World Bank, there are 1 billion people with disabilities worldwide. That’s 15% of the total population of the globe.

Despite this, many designers fail to consider customers with differing abilities when creating an engaging app or website. Unless your client explicitly tells you that they’re supporting customers with disabilities, you might even not think about those users at all.

Learning how to embrace the concept of inclusive web design means that you deliver better results to your clients; the more customers your clients can reach, the more praise and positive reviews your designs will get.

So, how do you introduce accessibility in your design choices?

What Is Website Accessibility?

In broad terms, inclusivity refers to activities or behaviors that empower marginalized people in society. Designing for inclusivity means making your content more accessible to anyone dealing with a mental or physical issue that may make it harder for them to use a traditional site.

Ultimately, accessibility is one of the main goals of an inclusive design strategy. When you make websites or applications more accessible, you tweak aspects of your UI and code to make the site as approachable and usable as possible to people with certain limitations.

According to the Web Accessibility Initiative, many modern sites and web tools are designed without the needs of those with disabilities in mind. This creates accessibility barriers that make websites almost impossible for some people to use.

Here are just some of the different types of disability that can affect the way end-users interact with a website or app:

Cognitive issues: Affecting understanding and making it harder to navigate sites;
Auditory issues: Preventing customers from listening to videos and audio content;
Neurological issues: Making certain terms and actions more difficult on your site;
Physical issues: Making it hard to swipe or tap certain tools;
Speech problems: A common issue with voice UI designs;
Visual issues: Preventing a positive experience on highly visual sites.

Web accessibility can also be about making life easier for people who encounter problems in particular situations. For instance, those with muscular problems might have a harder time using buttons and links on a small screen.

So, how do you make your designs more accessible?

Know Your Audience

There’s more to inclusive web design than making your fonts a little bigger and hoping for the best. To deliver a truly accessible experience, you need to know the people and groups that your client is targeting. Spending some time going through your customer’s user personas and asking them questions about those with a disability can help you make informed decisions.

For instance, the Microsoft Inclusive Design toolkit asks designers to recognize exclusion, examining the parts of their website that might be inaccessible, and learn from diversity.

Before designing anything, ask yourself whether you can:

Address any unique needs, like sight issues or hearing problems;
Replace traditional solutions with something more unique. For instance, rather than relying on colors to highlight a portion of text, could you use font-weight instead? This might be ideal for someone with color blindness;
Create something that appeals to both customers with and without disabilities.

Design a Clean and Clear Layout

Any website design should be focused on clarity first.

Whether you’re designing for inclusivity or not, the aim should be to deliver as much of a simple and straightforward experience as possible, avoiding any web design sins along the way.

For instance, no-one likes a messy design full of unreasonable navigational signs. You need a site full of understandable links, buttons that are easy to click on any screen, and large fonts that are easy to read.

Whenever you’re creating a new element for a website or app, ask yourself how you can make life easier for customers from all backgrounds. For instance, Parramatta park uses excellent contrast, clear fonts, and ideal element sizing to ensure that its website feels as easy to use as possible for customers.

Notice how the buttons are clear and easy to press. The colors are bright and engaging on any screen, and the navigation is simple to follow too. Remember, when you’re designing an inclusive prototype:

Test navigation options and ensure they’re easy to use;
Don’t overcrowd the screen, remember that less is more when reducing cognitive load;
Make sure that your design remains easy to use on any screen.

Simplify Language

The visual elements on an inclusive website need to be as simple and easy to understand as possible. However, it’s important not to forget about the way that you handle the written word too.

Using simple terms instead of complex industry jargon can make a massive difference to those with reading issues. There’s also typography to think about, from the color and contrast of your words against your chosen background to the font’s clarity.

Remember, suboptimal design with both imagery and language affects those without disabilities too. Following basic rules for simplicity delivers a better experience for anyone that visits your site.

Make sure you:

Underline, bold, or re-size links for visual contrast;
Enforce proper line spacing with around 1.5x the font size;
Enable consistent paragraph spacing;
Use simple language to reduce cognitive load;
Describe abbreviations when using them;
Use clearly-worded headings to structure content logically;

Look at the design choices for text on the Nomensa website, for instance. Plenty of white space makes content easier to read. Simple words are understandable and engaging. Even the font choice mimics the logo while offering readability.

Optimize Web Design Colors

Inclusive web design trends will come and go. However, color and contrast will always be essential to your decisions.

By making sure that your design elements meet the minimum color contrast ratios defined by the WCAG means that you’re supporting readability for visually-impaired users and improving experiences for customers that aren’t visually impaired as well.

For designers who need extra help in this area, tools like Stark help measure color contrast. This tool also offers a range of other tools intended to support accessibility too.

Remember, the minimum ratio you need to access will depend on the element that you’re designing. The WCAG recommends the following guidelines:

3:1 ratio for graphical objects (charts);
3:1 ratio for focus, active states, and hover;
3:1 ratio for clickable items and form components.

While you’re working on your color contrast strategies with apps like Stark, make sure that you consider the needs of users with color blindness too. 4.5% of the world doesn’t see color the same way as everyone else. If you’re finding it difficult to achieve the right contrast while sticking to your customer’s brand guidelines, try underlining and bolding elements too.

Consider Video and Audio Elements

Finally, these days, more companies are opting to embed video and audio content into their sites. These visual and auditory tools can offer useful information about a brand and what it does. However, you could struggle to deliver vital information to some customers through video and audio alone.

Captions for video content could be essential for those with hearing loss. You may need to think about adding transcripts to pre-recorded videos that people with hearing impairments can access. These transcripts and captions are also helpful for anyone who doesn’t have access to audio on smartphones or computers.

Transcripts can also help those with visual impairments by giving a text-to-speech tool something to describe to your user. That way, everyone gains useful information. Look at this captioned video from the University of Washington, for instance. It ensures that everyone can understand what’s going on in the content. If you add transcripts to your website pages for clients, you could also help them benefit from improved SEO too. Transcripts deliver more keyword-ranking opportunities than videos and podcasts on their own.

Design for Accessibility First

For designers to excel at delivering truly inclusive UI environments, they need to become as good at creating websites for people with disabilities as they are at creating interfaces for people like themselves. As designers, we try to be as inclusive as possible, but it’s easy to get caught up thinking about making a website easier to use for us.

If you can step into the shoes of someone that isn’t like you, and think about uncommon needs first, then you may find that you deliver a stronger, more engaging experience for every user.

For instance, rather than designing a website for someone with the same visual needs as you, then thinking about making tweaks for those with color blindness or vision issues, think about the needs of those with disabilities first.

You can learn more about putting uncommon needs first by checking out Vasilis Van Gemert’s blog post on the “Method of Crisis.”

Accessibility is Good for Business

Inclusive web design, or designing for accessibility, is all about maximizing the potential audience that your clients can earn. Whatever situation end-users find themselves in, you should ensure that you’re taking advantage of inclusive design.

If you can prove to your clients that you can deliver for all customers’ needs, you can unlock a much larger audience and many more opportunities.

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15 mars 2021/par Service comm.

8 Domain Name Myths Every Web Designer Should Know

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A domain name is an essential element of every project, product, and company. It’s central to a brand and has a disproportionately large impact on user experience. Not only that, but it also impacts SEO and ultimately revenue.

Domain names are also one of the most commonly retailed elements in web technology, with most designers hoarding a small empire’s worth of domain names “just in case” the right side-project comes along.

Because so much of the information and advice on domain names is provided by companies selling domain names and is therefore not impartial, we wanted to bust some of the myths you’ll encounter.

Myth 1: Anyone Can Own a Domain Name

In fact, almost no one can own a domain name. As demonstrated by the (probably) annual renewal notices you receive, you are merely renting a domain name.

You pay a registrar, who registers the domain with ICANN (The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) — or an entity to whom ICANN has delegated the responsibility for a particular TLD.

Even when renting a domain, you do not have the right to use it; thousands of UK-based businesses have had .eu domains stripped from them as a result of being removed from the EU.

Myth 2: There’s a Perfect Domain For Every Project

Domains do not have inherent value; they acquire value over time.

25 years ago, if you were building a search engine, the ‘perfect’ domain might have been search.com, find.com, or perhaps look.com — the particularly cynical might have opted for webads.com. You almost certainly wouldn’t have registered google.com because it says nothing about search.

Any domain name can acquire value through longevity, SEO, and branding

google.com acquired its value through a simple, relentless branding strategy and a generous dollop of luck.

Any domain name can acquire value through longevity, SEO, and branding.

Myth 3: Your Domain Name Should Contain Keywords

If you’re at the point of registering a domain name, either your business is new, or your digital strategy is. In either case, you have hopefully carried out keyword research, but without a live site, your keyword research hasn’t been validated. In other words, you don’t know what your keywords are.

Even if you’re confident that you know exactly what your keywords should be at this time, your keywords may change. The pandemic has required most businesses to pivot to some degree. eatoutny.com isn’t much use if legal restrictions have forced you to switch to a delivery business — unless you’ve also registered eatinny.com.

Furthermore, in the area of ecommerce, customers tend to view keyword-heavy domain names as budget options because they are like generic-brand goods. It may be that your business will only ever be a budget option, but it’s not a wise business decision to restrict your options.

There is an SEO benefit to keywords in a domain, but it is minimal and will almost certainly vanish in the next few years — even for EMD (Exact Match Domains) — because it is too close to gaming the system.

Myth 4: You Don’t Need a .com

As frustrating as it may be to seek out a .com you’re happy with, nothing says “late to the party” like a .biz domain.

A .co extension is slightly better in some regions because the .co.** format is commonly used; .co.jp for example. However, .co tends to be typed as .com by users accustomed to the more common format.

nothing says “late to the party” like a .biz domain

It’s possible to opt for pun-based names using regionally specific TLDs like buy.it, or join.in. This kind of strategy will play havoc with your local search strategy because computers don’t understand puns; you’ll potentially do quite well in Italy or India, though.

If you’re registering a domain for a non-profit, then .org is perfectly acceptable. However, carefully consider whether a domain is worth the lost traffic if you can’t also register the .com (because people will type .com).

The one exception is industry-specific TLDs that communicate something about the domain’s contents to a target demographic. For example, .design is a great extension for designers, and .io is fine for an app if it targets developers (i.e., people who understand the joke). You should also register the .com if you can, and if you can’t, carefully consider whom you’re likely to be competing with for SERPs.

This is not to say that anything other than a .com is worthless, just worth less than the .com.

Myth 5: A Trademark Entitles You to Register a Domain

Trademark registration and domain registration are two entirely different processes, and one does not entitle you to the other. This has been legally challenged a few times and fails far more often than it succeeds.

Trademarks are rarely blanket registrations, which means the trademark owner needs to declare the industry in which it will operate; there was no enmity between Apple Inc. and Apple Corp Ltd. until the former moved into music publishing and no one could download the White Album onto their iPod.

There is, however, a limited value in registering a domain that has been trademarked elsewhere. Not least because you will be competing against their SEO, and if they’re big enough to trademark a name, they’ve probably grabbed the .com.

Myth 6: Premium Domains Are a Good Investment

Premium domains are domains that have been speculatively registered in the hope of attracting a huge resale fee. The process is commonly referred to as ‘domain squatting.’

Domain squatters bulk-register domains in the hope that one of them will be valuable to someone. As a result, they are forced to charge exorbitant fees to cover their losses; a premium domain will cost anything from 1000–100,000% of the actual registration cost.

Setting aside the cost — which would be better spent on marketing — premium domains often come with legacy issues, such as a troubled search engine history, that you do not want to inherit.

Myth 7: A Matching Handle Must be Available on Social Media

The business value of a social media account varies from company to company and from platform to platform. Even if it is valuable to you, numerous marketing strategies will accommodate a domain name: prepending with ‘use,’ or ‘get,’ or appending with ‘hq,’ for example.

More importantly, it’s unwise to allow a third-party to define your long-term brand identity; sure, Facebook is huge now, but then so was the T-Rex.

Myth 8: You Need a Domain Name

A domain name is an alias, nothing more. You don’t actually need a domain name — what you need is an IP address, which a domain name makes human-friendly.

Think of domain names as an accessibility issue; humans are less able to read IP addresses than computers, and domains bridge the gap. (See how helpful accessibility is?)

While a domain name is beneficial, question whether a sub-domain or even an IP address would do. Registering a domain is an exciting stage of a project that many people never get past, leaving themselves with a huge collection of domains that they pay an annual fee for, and never actually develop.

What Makes a Good Domain Name

Now we’ve dispelled some of the myths surrounding domain names, let’s look at the key characteristics shared by good domain names:

A Good Domain Name is Brandable

A brandable domain is non-generic. It’s the difference between a sticky-plaster and a band-aid. Unique is good, rare is acceptable, generic is a waste of money.

A Good Domain Name is Flexible

Keep it flexible. Don’t tie yourself to one market or one demographic. Your domain name needs to work now and fifty years in the future.

A Good Domain Name is Musical

Six to 12 characters and two to three syllables is the sweet spot. Names in that range have a musical rhythm our brains find it easier to retain and recall.

A Good Domain Name is Phonetic

There are 44 word sounds in the English language. Other languages have similar totals. If you use a domain name that is pronounced phonetically, it will be easy to communicate.

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10 mars 2021/par Service comm.

Popular Design News of the Week: February 15, 2021 – February 21, 2021

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Everyday design fans submit incredible industry stories to our sister-site, Webdesigner News. Our colleagues sift through it, selecting the very best stories from the design, UX, tech, and development worlds and posting them live on the site.

The best way to keep up with the most important stories for web professionals is to subscribe to Webdesigner News or check out the site regularly. However, in case you missed a day this week, here’s a handy compilation of the top curated stories from the last seven days. Enjoy!