Articles

The Latest Research for Web Designers, August 2020

While a lot of the research for web designers that’s come out this year has to do with COVID-19, we’re starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel. Many of these reports aren’t just looking at the effects of the pandemic on business and marketing today. They’re now looking at what consumers plan to do once the pandemic is gone.

So, I have some very interesting research for you here today. Three of the reports have to do with coronavirus side effects — pertaining to ecommerce, market research, and freelancing — and one of them is just a really great argument against using PDFs on websites.

1. The Digital 2020 Survey Says Ecommerce Growth Will Continue Post-Coronavirus

Obviously, everyone is paying close attention to COVID-19’s impact on the world. For the purposes of the work you do as a web designer, you should be clued into what it’s doing to the business and marketing fields. Because, if those opportunities dry up or companies begin to pivot, you need to be ready to adapt.

The Digital 2020, a joint monthly report from we are social and HootSuite, brings interesting news about the state of ecommerce thanks to COVID-19.

Because the pandemic has forced consumers indoors, online shopping has increased. But, according to about half of those surveyed for this report, this isn’t some temporary solution. They plan on doing more online shopping even after the pandemic ends.

This means that web designers are sitting in an enviable position now and for the foreseeable future. If you’re not already helping businesses sell through their websites, now is the time to do so as more and more businesses are going to need reliable online stores to sell their offerings through.

2. eMarketer Shares Data on Social Listening

When conducting research at the beginning of a design project, what kinds of sources do you turn to for quick and reliable information? Your client provides you with information on their business, industry, and the competition, of course, but what else?

You can conduct user surveys and interviews, but those take time and resources. It also usually means working with clients who have existing businesses and user bases to tap into. Unless you’re working as a UX designer where that’s a big part of the work you do, you might not have the ability to do that level of research.

As reported by Gartner (via eMarketer), leading marketers are now learning about their target audiences through the following channels:

Thanks to the surge of traffic online right now, social listening platforms have become really useful resources for learning about one’s users, with 51% of marketing leaders using them.

If you feel as though your initial research and planning phases could use a boost, I’d recommend taking advantage of one of these social listening tools now.

If you build websites for a specific niche, you can set up keywords/hashtags that are universally relevant to (most of) your clients. By listening in on these conversations regularly, you can become more attuned to what the visitors of your websites actually need and you can proactively build better experiences for them as a result.

3. Upwork Reports Increasing Numbers of Freelancers Entering the Market

The main focus of the Upwork 2020 Future Workforce Report is on how employers are changing their approaches to hiring now and in the near future. And the basic premise is this:

  • It’s long been predicted that more and more of the workforce would be allowed to work remotely.
  • COVID-19 has escalated those predictions to the point where most of the workforce is remote right now.
  • Businesses see the value in remote work arrangements, especially if it enables them to get work done more quickly and cost-effectively by freelancers.

While this is certainly great news for web designers looking for new clients, the report also provides us with this data:

64% of professionals in the top of their field work independently. That statistic alone means you’re up against some tough competition. But there’s also the 50% rise in signups on freelancer marketplaces that should have you worried.

Even though business demand for freelance talent is growing, this unprecedented rise in freelance competition may pose some problems. So, if you’re not already doing everything you can to position yourself as the web designer in your niche, get going on that now so you don’t get drowned out by the rising number of competitors.

4. NNG Says That PDFs Are Unsuitable for the Web

While I don’t have statistics to share with you from the Nielsen Norman Group’s post on why the PDF is “Still Unfit for Human Consumption”, I do have a ton of usability arguments against them that are worth summing up here:

  1. PDFs are written in the style of print documents, which means that strategies we use to design content on websites — like making a page scannable and accessible — don’t apply.
  2. They’re not designed to be as concise or attractive as a web page.
  3. They don’t operate like a website, which disrupts the seamless experience you’ve worked so hard to create when one is opened up from your site.
  4. The website navigation disappears and any sense of orientation (besides the browser “Back” button) goes out the window.
  5. There’s no way to build an internal navigation in a PDF document, save for internal linking or a table of contents.
  6. If they’re formatted for paper sizes, scrolling through them can be difficult for mobile users.
  7. They load more slowly the bigger they get, so unless it’s something like a small and optimized menu, expect visitors to wait for the download to appear.

And those are just the arguments that came from NNG’s researchers. Take some time to read through real user complaints about PDFs and you’ll never want to include one on a client’s website again.

Wrap-Up

Thankfully, the research for web designers and marketers is finally starting to move away from the confusion and speculation we saw a lot of earlier this year.

Just as with anything we do on the web, the more time you give it, the more data you can collect. And, luckily for us, the data suggests that there’s a pretty positive outlook for web designers if they position themselves the right way now.

 

Featured image via Unsplash.

Source


Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

/par

How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and SEO

,

Contentful; Webster’s Dictionary defines “contentful” as… not found. Clearly someone made up this word, but that is not necessarily a bad thing.

The world of user experience metrics is moving quickly, so new terminology is needed. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) is one of a number of metrics measuring the render time of content on a web page.

What is Largest Contentful Paint?

Google defines LCP as “the render time of the largest content element visible within the viewport.” For what we are talking about in this blog, we will consider “content” to be an image, typically a JPEG or PNG file. In most cases, “largest” points to a hero image that is “above the fold” and is one of the first images people will notice when loading the page. Applying optimization to this largest content is critical to improving LCP.

It is probably more instructive to view LCP relative to other metrics. For example, First Contentful Paint (FCP) and Visually Complete book end LCP.

Each metric has its pros and cons, but LCP is a happy medium. LCP marks when web page loading starts to have a substantial impact on user experience.

In Google’s opinion, to provide a good user experience, LCP should occur within 2.5 seconds of when the page first starts loading. Poor values are anything greater than 4 seconds.

How Does Largest Contentful Paint Impact Lighthouse Scores and SEO?

LCP is now part of several “Core Web Vitals” scores that Google will measure in its ranking algorithm. Each of the Core Web Vitals represents a distinct facet of the user experience, is measurable in the field, and reflects the real-world experience of a critical user-centric outcome.

In the case of the overall Google Lighthouse score, LCP represents 25% weighting on the performance score of Lighthouse version 6.0. This makes LCP the most important Core Web Vitals metric in determining the performance score.

While Google has indicated that content is still the most important factor in SEO ranking, a better user experience (as measured by Core Web Vitals) will generate higher rankings in a crowded field. If there are many websites competing for the top search engine spots, then Largest Contentful Paint will play a critical factor in rankings.

How to Improve Largest Contentful Paint

Now that you know that LCP is important, what can you do to improve it by making content load faster? Google provides a number of suggestions, but the most effective technique is to optimize content for the device requesting it.

For example, a website includes an 800kb JPEG image that is intended for high resolution desktops. On a smartphone, that would be optimized down to less than 100kb, with no perceptible impact on quality. LCP can improve by more than 60% — or several seconds — through this single optimization.

Find Savings in Largest Contentful Paint by using Image Speed Test

Image Speed Test is a great tool offered by ImageEngine.io that provides an analysis of LCP improvement opportunities. Just paste in the URL of the web page you are interested in optimizing, and the test will show you:

  • Image Payload Reduction
  • Speed Index
  • Largest Contentful Paint
  • Page Load Time (Visually Complete)

It also provides a video of the web page loading with and without optimizations. Finally, it analyses each image to provide an estimate of payload savings. In this case, the “largest content” on the page is this image. With optimizations, the image payload is reduced by 94%. That delivers a huge improvement in LCP.

How Does ImageEngine Improve LCP

ImageEngine is an image content delivery network (CDN) service that makes image optimization simple. Basically, for each image on the page, the image CDN will:

  1. Detect the device model requesting the web page;
  2. Optimize the image in terms of size, compression, image format;
  3. Deliver via a CDN edge server that is geographically closest to the user.

ImageEngine improves web performance for every image on the page, including the largest. You can learn more about ImageEngine here, and also sign up for a free trial.

Best Practices: Preconnect

In addition to using an image CDN like ImageEngine, a few other best practices can improve LCP. Using the resource hints to provide a preconnect for your content can streamline the download process.

For example, putting the following link statement in the HTML will accelerate the download process. The link statement will make the browser connect to the third party as early as possible so that download can start sooner. ImageEngine’s optimizations make each image download smaller and faster, but preconnect save time in the connection phase.

Best Practices: Minimize Blocking JavaScript and CSS

When JavaScript or CSS is “blocking” it means that the browser needs to parse and execute CSS and JavaScript in order to paint the final state of the page in the viewport.

Any website today relies heavily on both JavaScript and CSS, which means that it is almost impossible to avoid some render blocking resources. On a general note: be careful with what kind of CSS and JavaScript is referenced inside the <head> element. Make sure that only the strictly necessary resources are loaded in <head>. The rest can be deferred or loaded asynchronously.

When looking to improve the LCP specifically, there are some practices worth looking into more deeply.

Inline Critical CSS

It is not an easy task, but if the browser can avoid making a request to get the CSS needed to render the critical part of the page – usually the “above the fold” part – the LCP is likely to occur earlier. Also you will avoid content shifting around and maybe even a Flash of Unstyled Content (FOUC).

The critical CSS — the CSS needed by the browser to set up the structure and important styles of the part of the page shown above the fold — should in-inlined. This inlined CSS may also refer to background images, which of course should also be served by an Image CDN.

Do Not Use JavaScript to (lazy) Load Images

Many modern browsers natively support lazy loading, without the use of JavaScript. Because images usually are heavily involved in the performance of LCP, it is best practice to leave image loading to the browser and avoid adding JavaScript in order to lazy load images.

Lazy loading driven by JavaScript will add additional latency if the browser first has to load and parse JavaScript, then wait for it to execute, and then render images. This practice will also break the pre-parser in the browser.

If an image CDN is used to optimize images, then the benefits of lazy loading become much smaller. Especially large hero images that are above the fold have a large impact on LCP and will not benefit from being lazy loaded with JavaScript. It is best not to make JavaScript a blocking issue for rendering images, but rather rely on the browser’s own ability to select which images should be lazy loaded.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ImageEngine –]

Source


Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

/par

Grab Free SSL Certificates From ZeroSSL

Like it or not, we’re slowly edging towards a two-tier web: those sites that are secure, and…everything else.

There was a time on the web, when we didn’t have SSL certificates, and lots of people’s data got stolen. To address the problem, and regain users’ trust SSL certificates were introduced to secure sites handling sensitive data. And because they were initially a niche technology, you paid through the nose for them.

(An SSL certificate, for those that don’t know, is the difference between http:// and https://)

Then, thanks in part to privacy initiatives, and in part to high-profile data breaches, a few big players decided that all data should be protected. And the next thing you know, Google’s using SSL certificates as a ranking factor. And then suddenly browsers are warning people that non-SSL certified sites are insecure and they should “Get Out of Here!” And before long your hobby blog about cat-friendly board games is being billed hundreds of dollars a year just to be seen on the web.

Choosing whether to jump on the SSL bandwagon is simple: you have to have one. Finding an affordable SSL certificate, now that’s a challenge.

Most hosting companies will provide you with an SSL certificate as an add-on, and they’ll charge you anything up to $200 per year for it.

That’s why we’re blown away by ZeroSSL, because ZeroSSL is the first practical opportunity to grab an SSL certificate for your site, for free!

Get an SSL Certificate for Free

Now, it must be said that ZeroSSL isn’t the first place to offer a free SSL certificate. Plenty of hosts offer a “free” SSL certificate for the first year, when you pay for premium hosting. And there’s Let’s Encrypt which offers free certificates if you can work out how to access them.

ZeroSSL is just the first place to offer a genuinely free SSL certificate that you don’t need a post-grad degree in server engineering in order to use.

Get a Free SSL Certificate from ZeroSSL

Using ZeroSSL’s free-forever plan you can register three 90-day certificates entirely free. You’ll never need to pay for them, just renew every few months.

ZeroSSL also offers a variety of packages for simplifying your SSL management. The Basic package for example starts at $8/month and offers unlimited 90-day certificates, and even three 1-year certificates so you can renew annually and forget about them the rest of the time.

ZeroSSL also scales; if you need unlimited 1-year certificates — because you have, erm, unlimited websites? — that’s possible too.

Where ZeroSSL Excels

ZeroSSL offers a number of benefits over its competitors.

Firstly there’s the full-featured management console, that makes SSL management transparent. It sounds like a little thing, but with many other suppliers the first thing you know about your SSL certificate expiring is your site breaking.

ZeroSSL…makes managing your certificates…insanely easy.

ZeroSSL has an easy-to-use REST API, which can be used with the language of choice: PHP, Ruby, ASP, anything. It makes managing your certificates for multiple sites insanely easy.

Verifying SSL certificates can be confusing, and technically difficult. But ZeroSSL streamlines the process with automatic CSRs and one-step email validation (even for multiple domains) — considerably faster and easier than industry standard DNS validation. There’s even a one-click check to make sure your certificate is installed correctly.

Most importantly, ZeroSSL offers superb technical support on all of its paid plans. So if you’re one of the many people who started reading this post without fully understanding what an SSL certificate is, you can be confident that if you run into difficulties getting set up, there’s someone available 24/7 to dig you out of the hole.

Getting Started with ZeroSSL

If by now you’re planning to try ZeroSSL, the best place to start is the free-forever plan. ZeroSSL allows you to upgrade, downgrade, or cancel at any time, so it makes sense to start with the no-credit-card option and upscale if you need it.

Using ZeroSSL’s dashboard you can create a free 90-day SSL certificate in minutes, and the step-by-step installation instructions will guide you all the way through.

ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection

ZeroSSL auto-generates certificates in different formats depending on your choice of platform, to speed up installation.

You can register certificates for multiple domains — you will have to verify each domain individually, but it’s simple to setup. Premium plan users can even use wildcards, allowing you to secure a site with multiple sub-domains, from a single certificate.

ZeroSSL’s 1-year certificates are the gold-standard of SSL protection and are the option that most site owners will come to rely on.

If you’re running an agency and you’re responsible for maintaining multiple client sites, ZeroSSL is made for you. ZeroSSL’s dashboard gives you one central location to monitor the status of all of your SSL certificates, and you can set expiry reminders to notify you by email when a certificate is about to expire.

Automated SSL Renewal with ZeroSSL

If that sounds too much work, and you’d like to automate your SSL certificates, ZeroSSL has you covered.

ZeroSSL works with both its own dedicated ACME Certbot, and more than ten other third-party ACME clients to fully automate your SSL certificates absolutely free, on a rolling 90-day schedule.

If you really know what you’re doing, you might even consider the ZeroSSL’s REST API. It enables certificate creation, validation, renewal, and management using HTTPS Get calls and JSON responses. The API handles millions of requests per month using 256-bit bank-level HTTPS encryption. You can access the API for free, and the Pro plan offers unlimited access.

Go Get Certified

There are millions of sites that drop traffic every month because they lack an SSL certificate.

Whatever your site, it’s not a question of whether you need an SSL certificate, it’s how you can affordably manage to create, install, and monitor a certificate.

ZeroSSL solves all of the problems of SSL certificate management, and for the majority of users, its free-forever plan is all you’ll ever need.

Head over to zerossl.com today to boost your traffic with a free SSL certificate.

 

[– This is a sponsored post on behalf of ZeroSSL –]

Source


Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

/par

Exciting New Tools for Designers, July 2020

Some of the changes we are seeing with where we work are starting to pop up in the type of new tools made for designers and developers. More tools with remote collaboration as a key feature are increasing in popularity. (You’ll find a few of those here.)

Here’s what new for designers this month.

Webdesign Toolbox

Webdesign Toolbox is a collection of tools, apps, and resources all in one location for designers and developers. The best part of this resource is that it is human-curated, so every tool is quality checked and makes the list because it has been tested and researched. Search the collection by design, dev, stock, typography, UX, or workflow tools (and more) and use them to help create more efficiently. The collection is constantly growing, too.

CodeStream

CodeStream might be the new-world workflow tool for web designers and developers. It is made for remote teams to review code right inside your IDE without breaking from development flow. You can post and review changes and comments are all independent of the code itself, even though they link to it.

Litur

Litur is a color management app for iOS. Use it to find and collect color swatches, create custom palettes, and even check color combinations against accessibility standards. The app can even generate color codes for you from swatches you find from a photo or image upload or create. The app works on mobile and desktop Mac devices and is a paid app.

Editor X

Editor X, which is still in beta, is a website building tool that combines advanced design and prototyping capabilities with secure web hosting and integrated business solutions. Go from an idea straight to production in a highly intuitive design workspace. The best feature might be exact design precision tools.

Grid Cheatsheet

Grid Cheatsheet is a visual and code-based set of “cheats” based on the W3C CSS Grid Specifications. What’s nice is it makes these guidelines easier to understand and use if reading through them makes you a little uneasy.

Tutorialist

Tutorialist brings together some of the best development tutorials on the web. All of the tutorials are free videos available on YouTube, and this project collects them all in one place.

Pure CSS Halftone Portrait from JPG

Pure CSS Halftone Portrait from JPG is a beautiful pen from Ana Tudor that shows how to change the visual representation of an image. The examples are brilliant and in true halftone fashion. The code snippet works with color, or black and white images as well.

VoiceText for Slack

VoiceText for Slack is another work from home productivity tool. Integrate it with Slack and send messages with text that’s transcribed right in your channels. It’s a free integration and supports 18 languages.

Feature Peek

Feature Peek is a developer tool that helps you get frontend staging environments on demand and gather team feedback earlier in the development process. It’s made for use with GitHub and works with a variety of other tools as well.

Formbutton

Formbutton is a simple and customizable pop-up form. (And we all know websites have plenty of them right now.) It connects to other services you already use, such as Google Sheets and MailChimp, and is simple to set up.

Blocksy Theme

Blocksy is a WordPress theme that’s made for non-coders. It’s a zippy and highly visual theme made for Gutenberg. It works with other builders and allows the user to customize pretty much everything visually. (There’s even a dark mode.) The theme is packed with tools and options and is a free download.

Oh My Startup Illustrations

Oh My Startup Illustrations is a set of vector illustrations in several categories featuring a popular style on many projects. Use the characters and scenes to create a semi-custom story for your startup project.

1mb

1mb is a code editor and host where you can create a static website with a custom domain and SSL included. The editor works in-browser and everything is saved in the cloud.

Linear

Linear is an issue tracking Mac app for teams. It’s designed to help streamline software projects, sprints, and tasks, and can integrate with standard tools such as Github, Figma, and Slack.

Hosting Checker

Hosting Checker solves a common issue – a client wants you to work on their website, but has no idea who hosts it. Hosting Checker shows the user hosting provider and IP address the website uses, along with where its server computers are located and the host’s contact details. It also claims to be 82% faster than other similar tools.

Spike

Spike alerts you to website incidents before customers. Create alerts and get a phone call, text message, email, or Slack notification right away. The tool provides unlimited alerts and integrations to you can stay on top of issues before they become real problems.

Magnus UI

Magnus UI is a framework that helps you building consistent user interfaces in React. It comes with plenty of components ready to use and you can customize the theme.

SpreadSimple

SpreadSimple uses data in Google Sheets to create styled websites with features such as filtering, search, sorting, cart, order collection via forms, and much more. Update the sheet and instantly see changes on the website.

WebP vs. JPEG

Google is starting to suggest using it’s WebP image format to decrease load times, because of the lighter file size. But is WebP better than the traditional JPEG? Developer Johannes Siipola tested the file types at different sizes to answer the question. The answer is a bit complicated, but sometimes it might be better; read the full analysis for more.

Oh Dear

Oh Dear is a website monitoring tool that can help you keep a check on websites. Monitor uptime, SSL certificates, broken links, and more with notifications that come right to you if there’s an issue.

Airconnect

Airconnect is a Zoom video conferencing alternative that you can use for your brand with a custom header, colors, and portal for clients. The tool includes video calling as well as the ability for customers to access their data and automate your onboarding process.

Free Faces

Free Faces is a curated collection of free typefaces that you can browse and use in projects. Search by type style with visual results that include a download link.

All the Roll

All the Roll is a fun novelty font for just the right type of project. It includes 167 characters with swash characters that can be added before or after certain letters.

Backrush

Backrush is a handwriting-style typeface with easy strokes and a pen-like feel. It includes thicker letterforms with nice swashes and a full character set.

Thuner

Thuner is a slab display font with interesting quirks. It’s made for larger than life designs. It includes a full uppercase character set and numerals.

Source


Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

/par

Building on Ethereum (Part 3): Set Up and Test

,
In this series, I’m discussing the phases of a project encompassing a non-trivial set of Ethereum smart contracts and the React/Redux application that communicates with them.

The project, called In-App Pro Shop, aims to help Ethereum developers easily support in-app purchases, and it was written over the last half of 2018 as a way of learning about the Ethereum development ecosystem.

This project revealed many aspects of the power and constraints of Ethereum and its programming language Solidity. I hope to pass as much of that on to you as possible in this series.

Source de l’article sur DZONE

/0 Commentaires/par