« Make the world become more programmable. »
That’s the goal of Nordic APIs, which holds a series of conferences and events throughout Scandinavia and, more recently, the US, to help organizations make smarter tech decisions and streamline their operations through APIs and strategies. Their work explores the API sector and sheds to light various emerging technologies and trends through their events and blogs.
If you’ve ever written code you’ve probably heard of Stack Overflow.
Most of us have learned from them or shared knowledge on their site. They’ve also got one of the most inclusive and positive engineering cultures out there.
On this week’s episode of Dev Interrupted I bring on Ben Matthews, Director of Engineering at Stack Overflow, to give us the inside scoop on Stack’s operations, teams and company culture. Ben also discusses their newest product launch – Collectives – and why he thinks they will be a game changer for dev teams.
MySQL is the most popular open source cloud database in the world, and for good reason. It’s powerful, flexible, and extremely reliable. Tens of thousands of companies use MySQL to power their web-based applications and services every day.
But when it comes to data analytics, it’s a different story. MySQL is quickly bogged down by even the smallest analytical queries, putting your entire application at risk of crashing. As one FlyData customer said to us, “I have nightmares about our MySQL production database going down.”
There’s no shortcut to success when it comes to Google search results. That is unless you count pay-per-click advertising.
While pay-to-play will shoot your site to the top of the SERP immediately, it’s not a sustainable strategy for maintaining your position there. So, you’re going to have to get serious about SEO.
This guide will show you what to do to improve your SEO ranking and start seeing results this year:
If you can improve your SEO ranking — and get your pages closer to, if not on the highly coveted top SERP — you will:
That said, search engine optimization is most effective when it’s an ongoing strategy as opposed to something you set up and forget about. So, some of the suggestions below will only need to be implemented once, while others you’ll have to return to every six months or so to make sure your site is on track.
Let’s get started.
If you haven’t yet begun tracking your website’s activity with Google Analytics, it’s the very first thing you need to do.
While Google Analytics alone can’t tell you how well or poorly your website ranks, there’s valuable data in there about what happens to the traffic that arrives from Google. Or any search engine your visitors use.
You can find this information under Acquisition > Source/Medium:
What you want to see here is that (1) you’re getting lots of visitors from organic search results (as opposed to paid) and (2) that they’re highly engaged. So, that means:
And if you configure Google Analytics to track different conversions on your site, you can see how well those organic visits convert.
Obviously, there’s a lot more you can track here. But you must understand if your SEO efforts are working in the first place, and that’s where you’ll get your confirmation.
HTTPS has long been one of Google’s SEO ranking factors. Yet, of the two billion-plus websites that are online today, BuiltWith data shows that only 155 million have an SSL certificate installed:
Security and privacy are major concerns for consumers. So if you want to increase their confidence in your website, installing an SSL certificate is an easy thing to do. And it’ll put you in Google’s good graces, too.
If you don’t have one already, get one for free from Zero SSL.
Mobile loading speeds became a Google ranking signal in July 2018.
It was something we saw coming ever since smartphones overtook the desktop as the primary device people used to access the Internet. Once it became a ranking factor, though, mobile page speed was something we could no longer treat as a “nice to have.” It became a must.
And with Google’s most recent Core Web Vitals algorithm update, there’s no ignoring how big of a role your site’s mobile loading speeds (i.e., performance) play in ranking it.
To ensure that your site meets Google’s expectations for speed, bookmark the Core Web Vitals tool. It’ll tell you how your site performs across all four of the major ranking categories.
You’ll find your speed-related issues at the bottom of the page, along with resources to help you resolve them.
Most of those tips will have to do with optimizing your code. However, there are other things you can do to make your site load quickly:
It’s also not a bad idea to review your web hosting plan. You might not have the right amount of server power or resources to keep up with your existing activity.
On a related note, a mobile-first design can also improve your site’s loading speeds. Rebekah Carter wrote a really helpful guide on how to do this last year.
In addition to speeding things up — since you won’t be trying to jam a bunch of desktop-first design and content into a smartphone screen — it’s going to help your site rank better.
Just be careful when you do this. A mobile-first design doesn’t mean creating a scaled-back version of the larger site for smartphone users.
In fact, Google explicitly tells us not to do that and why:
“If it’s your intention that the mobile page should have less content than the desktop page, you can expect some traffic loss when your site is enabled mobile-first indexing, since Google can’t get as much information from your page as before.”
And if your response is that the content on desktop-only doesn’t matter, then it really shouldn’t be there. Don’t waste your visitors’ time with useless or repetitive content, as it’ll only give them more reason to abandon your site.
Accessibility has come to the forefront of the SEO discussion thanks to Core Web Vitals.
Now, running your site through the tool will tell you if there are any inaccessibility issues that Google will ping you for. But that doesn’t make your site completely accessible.
Considering the rise in website accessibility-related lawsuits, you’ll want to take this seriously.
Because a bad experience due to inaccessibility won’t just cost you visitors and a lower search ranking, it’ll cost you a lot of money, too.
Here are some things you can do to ensure that your site and all its content is accessible.
Technically, image optimization falls under the page speed tip. However, that’s not the only way you should be optimizing your images, which is why I wanted to address this separately.
According to HTTP Archive, the average weight of a mobile web page these days is 1917.5 KB. Images take up a sizable chunk of that weight:
Because of this, bloated image sizes are often to blame for slow pages.
You can do several things to optimize your images for speed, like using lightweight formats, resizing them, and compressing them. You’ll find 6 other image optimization tips here.
While those tips will help you speed up your site and, consequently, improve your SEO ranking, there’s something else you need to do:
Add alt text to your most important images.
One reason to do this is to improve accessibility. Another is so your web page can rank in both the regular Google search results and image results as this search for “WordPress by the numbers” does:
If you can write alt text that perfectly describes your graphic and matches the image searchers’ intent, you can create another ranking opportunity for your page.
There are many technical ranking factors you have to pay attention to if you want to create a good experience for your visitors and rank well as a result. However, none of that will matter if your content sucks.
So, how do you make great content? It really depends.
Think about the difference between a page describing your web design services and a product page for a blender.
Your web design services page would need to:
That would be a comprehensive and useful page. If business owners searched for “hire a web designer near me” or “should I hire a web designer?”, that page would sufficiently answer their query.
A product page, however, would need to:
The last thing a shopper would want is to be directed to a product page that reads like one of your services pages.
So, great content not only needs to be well-written and error-free, but it needs to match the searcher’s intent and expectations. If you can do that, your visitors will stay as long as they need to read through everything, which will help strengthen the page’s ranking.
Including necessary details and in the right format is an important part of making a page’s content valuable to the visitor. The structure is going to help, too.
For starters, you want to make sure every page is human-readable. So, that involves:
By making a page less intimidating to read and easier to scan for a quick summary of what it is, you’ll find that more visitors are willing to read it and follow your calls to action.
You can use a tool like Hemingway to improve your page’s readability. Quickly pop the text of each page into the editor and follow the recommended suggestions:
You’re also going to have to think about how well Google’s indexing bots can read your page. They’re smart enough to pick up on cues but not smart enough to sit down and read your article on the benefits of Vitamin D or how to install a new showerhead.
So, you’ll need to use HTML meta tags as well as hierarchical header tags to tell the bots what the page is about.
If you’re building a WordPress site, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to analyze how scannable and readable each page of your site is (among other things):
To get eyeballs on your really great content, the brief preview users see of it in search results needs to be able to lure them in. Get more clicks to your site from search, and Google will take notice.
But they can’t just be superficial clicks. If Google notices that your page is getting a ton of traffic that almost immediately drops off once they see the content on the page, your page will not fare well in search results.
So, your goal is to stay away from clickbait-y title tags and meta descriptions and make them click-worthy.
The first thing to focus on is the length. Google only gives you a certain amount of space to make your pitch.
There are many tools you can use for this, but I prefer Mangools’s SERP Simulator:
It allows you to play around with your URL, title tag, and meta description and to watch in real-time as it fits the allotted space. You can also compare it to the pages that currently rank for the keyword you’re going after, which can be a really useful reference point. After all, if those sites have made it to the first SERP, then they’re doing something right.
Another thing to think about when writing click-worthy titles is how engaging they are.
The tool I recommend for this is CoSchedule’s Headline Studio:
I don’t find this useful so much for basic web pages. You don’t need to get creative with something like your About or Contact pages. But for content marketing? If you want to beat out competing articles for attention in Google, this tool will be very useful.
It’s not as though you can add a keyword tag to your page, and Google will automatically rank your site for it. That’s not what keyword optimization is.
Instead, what you do is select one unique keyword per page and write the content around it. So, it’s really more about creating a clear focus for yourself and then comprehensively unpacking the subject matter on the page.
Keep in mind, though, that if you want to improve your chances of ranking for the keyword, it needs to be relevant to your brand, useful for your audience, and your site needs to actually be able to compete for it.
You can use the Google Keyword Planner to find keywords that fit those criteria:
Ultimately, you should choose a keyword that:
Now, if you’re writing great content that addresses your visitors’ questions and concerns, then optimizing for your focus keywords will happen naturally. The same goes for related keywords you might want to target. As you write the content for each page, the keywords will organically appear.
But remember how I said Google’s indexing bots need certain HTML and header tags to “read” the content on the page? This means you’ll need to include the focus keyword in some of those areas, so there is no question about what the page is about.
Here’s where your focus keyword should show up:
It should also appear throughout the page, along with variations of the keyword that people might search for.
You can use the Yoast SEO plugin to analyze this as well.
Okay, so here’s where we start to get into SEO strategies that Google might not directly care about, but that can still drastically improve how well your site ranks.
Internal links, in particular, are valuable because they create an interconnected structure for your site. Here’s a basic example of why that’s important:
Let’s say these are the pages on your website. Each of them can be accessed from the home page and main navigation. This structure tells us that each page is related to the overall message and mission of the company, but they are not related to one another. And that doesn’t make sense, right?
When you’re educating visitors on your Web Design services, it’s naturally going to come up that you also happen to specialize in WordPress and eCommerce design. So, those internal links should appear on your Web Design page. And vice versa.
In addition, your Portfolio and Contact Us pages are likely going to be the most common CTAs on the site. Your prospective clients shouldn’t be forced to backtrack to the homepage or scroll up to the navigation to take action. By including these internal links or buttons within the content of the services pages, you’re giving them a quick and direct line to the next steps.
The more intuitive you make the user journey, the easier it will be for them to convert.
This is one reason why websites with a strong internal linking structure perform well in search results. Another reason is that internal links help Google’s bots find all of the content on your site and better understand how they relate to one another.
Link juice is one of the reasons why business owners are obsessed with getting backlinks. We’ll get to that shortly.
But it’s also something that comes into play when choosing external links to include on your site.
Link juice is the idea that one site can pass its authority to another through a dofollow link. So, by linking out to authoritative and trustworthy sources, your site may raise its own clout with the search engines because of that connection.
However, it works both ways. If you create external links to websites with misinformation that pose a security threat to visitors or are otherwise untrustworthy, that bad reputation can do your website harm.
So, make sure that every external link you use is necessary and reliable. If not, get rid of it.
I said earlier in this post that pay-per-click advertising is the only way to shortcut the SEO process and get on the first page of Google. That’s not entirely true.
We’ve already seen how optimizing your images for Google Images search can shoot your site to the top of results. Another way to get ahead is by optimizing your page using structured data to land a spot as a featured snippet.
Like this page from Bankrate that answers the question “how do you get a loan”:
Remember that structured data alone won’t instantly move your web page into the featured snippet space. The content needs to be the best it can be, and the structured data needs to be well written.
Schema.org was created to help you pick the right category and write the structured data for it:
Use this to write up the relevant microdata for the pages to make the most sense to do so. For instance, an About page probably wouldn’t benefit from having structured data attached to it. However, a lengthy blog post that explains a step-by-step process would.
There are WordPress plugins (Yoast is one of them) that will help you insert this code into your pages if you prefer.
Backlinks pointing to your website are a huge indicator to Google that your site is share-worthy and authoritative.
However, like everything else in SEO, you can’t cheat your way into a bunch of backlinks. They need to come from authoritative sources, and they need to be relevant. That’s why paying or bartering for backlinks isn’t usually effective. If your web page’s backlink doesn’t organically fit within the content on their site, visitors aren’t going to click on it.
There are lots of ways to go about building up a repository of backlinks that do generate authority for you and improve your SEO ranking in the process:
Get active on social media and become an authority there: The rule is generally that 80% of your posts need to be non-promotional. By sharing content from all kinds of sources that are relevant to your audience, you’re going to get more meaningful engagement. And this’ll eventually put the spotlight on your own content and get people to share it on social media, too.
This is something that Google will look at when ranking your site: What sort of social signals are coming from your brand?
Get featured as an expert: You don’t need to become an influencer for people to view you as an expert in your field. It’s all about your reputation.
By leveraging your reputation to get speaking gigs, you’ll grow your authority even more. Just make sure they’re relevant to what you do. So, look for podcasts, webinars, and conferences in your field that are looking for experts.
Become a guest blogger: If public speaking isn’t your forte, that’s okay. Turn your attention instead to lining up guest blogging gigs.
By writing high-quality content for authoritative websites (whether you get paid or not), you’ll bring more attention to your own brand. And Google will pass that authority onto your site.
Any business can create a Google My Business page. There are a number of SEO-related benefits to doing this.
The first is that local businesses can literally put themselves on the map with Google My Business. Here’s what a Google search for “restaurants near me” looks like:
Even if your site doesn’t appear on the first SERP, the map that sits at the top of search results can give you a front seat anyway.
Another reason to create a My Business page is that you get to control your knowledge graph sidebar, like Ford’s Garage does here:
By including high-quality graphics, pertinent details about the business, and collecting positive customer reviews, this knowledge graph could do your brand’s reputation a lot of good in the eyes of Google and your prospects.
This is useful for all of the content on your site, even your most high-performing pages.
If your site is starting to gain traction, take a close look at your Google Analytics data. You may find a few pages that no one seems to be paying attention to or, worse, that they always seem to bounce from.
In Google Analytics, go to Behavior > Site Content to figure out which pages are underperforming.
Then, ask yourself:
With the most popular pages on your site, it’s not unreasonable to expect that at least part of what you originally wrote will go stale or become irrelevant within a year or two. So, it’s a good idea to refresh these as well.
To do that, it’s simple. Do a search in Google for your focus keyword. Read through the top five results and see what sort of information your post is missing. Then update it accordingly.
Anything outdated or irrelevant should also be stripped out.
Last but not least, you should keep your eyes on Google Search Console.
There’s a lot of valuable information in here that will tell you why your site might not be ranking as well as it could. You’ll find issues related to:
You’ll also find data on how well your site is ranking in general. You’ll find this under the Performance tab:
Use this to identify:
You can learn a lot about how strong your SEO strategy is. Just use the Clicks, Impressions, and Position tabs to sort your data so you can better understand what’s going on.
Then, prioritize fixing the pages that can and should be bringing your site highly qualified traffic but aren’t.
If you’re wondering how long it’ll take before you see an improvement in your SEO ranking, it depends. If your domain’s current authority is low, it can realistically take about six months to see major changes. That said, if you implement all of the suggestions above, you can certainly expedite that.
Just remember that there are no real shortcuts in SEO. You need to have an authoritative and trustworthy website and brand before anything else. So, take the time to build your credibility online so that these SEO tactics can really work.
The post 17 Things You Can Do To Improve Your SEO Ranking In 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
With the widespread acceptance of web standards, and the resulting deprecation of browser prefixes, there has been a noticeable change in the browser market. Where once browser manufacturers would try to lure users in with promises of feature support, now the focus is on privacy, speed, and developer tools.
When it comes to web development, you should really be testing on every browser and device you can lay your hands on; you’re probably already doing so using an app like LambdaTest, or BrowserStack.
When quality assurance testing, you probably work by market share: starting with Safari on mobile, Chrome on desktop, and working your way down to Opera and (if you’re a glutton for punishment) Yandax; naturally, when testing, it’s the largest number of users that concerns us the most.
But before you reach the QA stage, there are a number of browsers designed to assist development. Browsers that offer tools, especially for front-end developers, that assist with code and speed up development. Here are the best browsers for web development in 2021:
LT Browser is an app for web developers from LambdaTest. Like many of the apps in this class, it offers side-by-side comparisons of a site in different viewports. Additionally, LT Browser has a number of features that make it stand out.
As well as previewing web pages, LT Browser offers developer tools to rival Chrome, which is handy if you want to see how changes across different devices affect your Lighthouse scores. LT Browser also supports hot-reloading, which means when you make a change to your code, you don’t have to hit ‘refresh,’ the viewports simply reload — it’s surprising how much of a time-saver that simple addition is.
LT Browser requires a LambdaTest account, there is a free plan, and paid plans start at $15/month.
The best conventional browser for web development in 2021 is the developer edition of Mozilla’s Firefox.
The standard edition of Firefox is an excellent browser, packed with features, and privacy-focused. The developer edition adds to this with a suite of tools aimed at developers. The CSS and JavaScript debugging tools are superb, and the Grid tools are unparalleled for coding layouts with CSS Grid.
Firefox Developer is free to download.
Polypane is one of the new generation of web browsers that are firmly intended as development aids rather than browsers. Polypane allows you to compare different viewports and platforms by placing them side by side. Interactions like scrolling are synced.
Polypane takes a step further than many browser apps in this class by showing social media previews. It even has a suite of accessibility tools, including some handy color blindness simulators.
Polypane has a 14-day free trial, and plans start at $8/month.
Blisk is another browser for developers that allows you to line up a collection of viewports in a single app. URL and scrolling are synced, making testing interactions and animations effortless.
Blisk is awesome fun to play with and delivers a great preview of a responsive design. But be warned, synced viewports can be addictive, and it’s easy to line up browsers and become hypnotized by the synchronized movement; you’ll need a very large screen to get the most out of Blisk.
Blisk plans start at $9.99/month.
Sizzy is another app that allows you to view multiple viewports at once. It also has synchronized interactions, and like many competing apps, Sizzy allows you to screenshot different views.
Sizzy also includes a very clever synchronized inspect tool, so you can focus on individual elements across different viewports. It’s an excellent option for debugging, particularly if you’re digging into someone else’s code.
Sizzy has a 14-day free trial, and paid plans start at $7.15/month.
Brave is a privacy-focused browser that runs up to three times faster than Chrome. If you’re someone who balks at rendering speeds on most sites, Brave could be for you.
Brave’s main benefit for developers is that it supports Chrome extensions while maintaining privacy — it can even access the Web using Tor if simple privacy mode isn’t enough for you. There are hundreds of useful Chrome extensions, and if you avoid Chrome due to privacy concerns, then Brave solves your problem.
Brave is also pioneering a new system for monetizing site revenue, allowing viewers to tip sites, and soon, to control how advertising revenue is distributed.
Brave is free to download.
Boring it may be, but Chrome is still the world’s most popular browser from the US to mainland China. Where once sites were “best viewed in IE,” Chrome is now the Web’s default.
No matter the site you’re designing, it has to work well in Chrome, and no simulator is as good as the real thing.
In addition to being the benchmark for page rendering, Chrome developer tools are the simplest way to access your Lighthouse scores, which helps you track down issues that may be holding you back in Google’s search results.
Chrome is free to download.
The post 7 Best Browsers for Developers in 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Welcome to a new series of articles, in which we round up the best new fonts released from some of the top designers on the Web.
In this inaugural edition, the collection includes fonts released or expanded over the last few months. Many of the fonts have free weights available. If you use any of them in your work, be sure to let us know!
Cedar is a unique angular serif built by wrapping vector shapes around calligraphic structures. It has its roots in woodblock printing but creates a very modern aesthetic.
Tome Sans is a very usable business-like type family of ten weights, plus italics. It features some awesome ligatures that you don’t often find in a sans-serif.
Midnight Sans is a chunky sans serif, suitable for display sizes. There’s a rounded variation for added warmth and dozens of OpenType features. It’s a good alternative to Impact.
Nouvelle Grotesk is a workhorse sans serif that you’ll come back to all the time. The humanist forms are a little more considered for digital usage than Akzidenz Grotesque or Helvetica.
Glaser Babyfat is the first typeface designed by the late, great Milton Glaser. It has been released posthumously by P22 alongside three other fonts based on Glaser’s designs.
Kristal is a flexible and highly readable serif, suitable for large blocks of text in small sizes. It has some beautiful details, including a selection of ligatures and a fine set of italics.
Lightbox 21 is a redesigned version of Lightbox; the original made use of the golden ratio for its geometry, the redesign completely abandons that resulting in a more readable typeface.
Irregardless is a tall sans serif with organic shapes that feels almost like lettering. Unusually for this style of typeface it has upper and lowercase letters. It’s perfect for a retro design.
Futura Now is Monotype’s redrawn version of Paul Renner’s classic Futura. As well as being massaged for screens and expanded to cover more languages, it’s also now available as a variable font.
Granite is a slab serif with high-contrast strokes, giving it the feeling of an Old West woodblock font. There’s a stencil alternate set that adds to the rustic aesthetic.
Magnet is a sans-serif with heaps of character. There is a condensed headline variation that’s perfect for display purposes, but the real standout feature is the quirky ear on the lowercase g.
Bowdon is a warm serif in the Bodoni tradition. The contrast between serif and stroke creates a sense of luxury. It’s available in three weights: regular, narrow, and wide.
Euclid Mono is an attempt to design a monospaced font that doesn’t fit the traditional mold. The extended shapes create a dance-like composition with plenty of movement.
Fave Set is a collection of marker pen scripts that are always handy to have in your toolbox. There are ten fonts included in total, with condensed and extra casual styles adding to the number.
Saison is a wonderfully energetic outline font. It only works as a display option, but it’s perfect for editorial work or even branding.
Hernandez Niu is a slab serif that takes lots of character from its exaggerated ink traps in weightier sizes.
Gomme Sans is a typeface with 12 weights. The extended style creates a modern feel, and it’s suitable for display or short to medium amounts of text.
Dobb is an Arabic typeface designed to offer a playful and expressive option for pairing with illustrations. It has a graphic novel feel in extended text blocks.
Hatch is a slab serif that has drawn inspiration from reverse stress typefaces of the nineteenth century. It has some quirky details that make it distinctly modern and a beautiful italic.
Sculpin is a sans serif with sharp strokes and corners, inspired by the sharp edges of tools like chisels. It comes in five weights with matching italics, and there is a variable font available.
The post 20 Best New Fonts, June 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Inclusive design is often mistaken for accessibility, or even used as an interchangeable term, which is a good indication that most designers don’t know what it means.
Accessibility is a process that seeks to mitigate issues in a design that is not sufficiently universal; inclusive design increases the universality of the design. In real-world terms, an accessible building may replace its front steps with a ramp; an inclusive building is constructed at the same level as the sidewalk.
Accessibility is concerned with objective, measurable improvements. It’s a UI concern. Inclusive design is subjective, more difficult to measure, and is a UX concern. By designing inclusively, we extend our designs to the widest possible user group and contribute to a better society. Here are three ways to get started.
When designing, it’s normal to assume that we are normal. After all, we are the center of our experience of the world. Everything from our preferences to our empathy stems from our individual place in time and space.
When we use the term “edge case,” what we’re referring to is a minority experience, a way of using our design that is uncommon or distinct from our own expectations.
But what would happen if we treat ourselves as the edge case? What if all of the experiences that we deem to be minority experiences are actually the core, common user experience of our design?
If we start from the position that we are the one out-of-step with the design, that most people will not think or act as we do, then we’re eliminating thousands of biased decisions about how our design should be.
It has always surprised me that in Europe’s dark ages — ranging from the decline of the Roman empire to the Proto-Renaissance — it didn’t occur to anyone to draw from life. Artists drew things the way they thought they should look, which is why so many Byzantine icons of the infant Jesus look like a middle-aged blonde man that has been shrunk.
It’s important to draw from real life as much as possible. That means abandoning personas — which are by definition under-representative and frequently loaded with bias — and engaging with actual users. Most of all, it means taking a step back and opening your eyes.
Inclusive design cannot be a part of your practice; it’s an all-encompassing attitude. Your design practice must be inclusive. At least, it should aspire to be…
As human beings, we are biased—all of us. The reason for that is that bias — be it racism, misogyny, nationalism, homophobia, or anything else — is cultural. And we all exist within society. We’re all bombarded with information that reinforces those biases every day.
Accept that you have biases and that your biases will pull your design work away from the inclusive solution you aspire to. But equally, accept that by acknowledging your biases you’re limiting the influence they have over your decision-making.
It’s divisive and abusive to partition users into groups, especially when the act of doing so perpetuates bias.
One of the most encouraging developments of the last decade has been the introduction of the answer “prefer not to say” in response to personal questions about race, gender, status, and so forth. But if “prefer not to say” is a valid option, in other words if you don’t actually need to know, then why ask at all?
Occam’s Razor is an often misquoted idea that (to paraphrase) states that when making a decision, the one with the least assumptions is the correct choice.
The problem is that Occam’s Razor implies that there is a ‘correct’ decision. But in fact, inclusive design benefits most from a flexible UI and a high tolerance for deviation.
If you can identify the assumptions in a design decision sufficiently to count them, then you’re best served by testing, not comparing, those assumptions.
There is no such thing as a “natural normal,” but there is “perceived normal.” Much of our behavior is governed by the experiences we’ve had since we were very young. Despite existing somewhere on a scale of ability and preference, most of us have inched towards what we have been told is a “normal” range all our lives.
However, it is a physiological fact that every characteristic exists somewhere on a spectrum. There are no black and whites; it’s all grey.
When we design a site or app, we tend to silo certain characteristics into one. Someone who is visually impaired is treated to the same ‘solution’ as someone who is blind, even though visual impairment can range from screen reflections on a sunny day to someone who was born without optic nerves.
There are people who have lost their sight through degeneration or accident and will be able to make visual connections based on remembered visuals. Other people have never seen anything and their conscious mental process isn’t figurative at all.
To accommodate the full gamut of possible interactions with our design, we need to design to a scale, not with absolute values. This means thinking less about set colors and sizes and more in terms of contrast and scale.
Few areas are more indicative of a spectrum of experiences than color.
Color is instantly problematic for designers because quite apart from color blindness, color has deeply personal associations.
Over the last couple of decades, it’s been repeatedly proven that it is contrast, not hue, that increases engagement. Green does not always mean go; red does not always mean stop.
Color involves so many biases and assumptions that it’s simply better to work with contrast than select the ‘right’ hue.
In the first draft of this article, I wrote that increasing the scale of your typography was always good.
My rationale was that some users will benefit from larger type, and zero users will be hindered by it. But that’s not true. Larger type means fewer lines per viewport, which means more scrolling; not a problem for some users, but potentially an issue for those with motor control issues.
That was one of my biases right there.
Good design is self-aware in origin and unselfconscious in execution.
Inclusive design isn’t about enabling access for everyone; it’s about designing for a user experience that is welcoming and respectful. Every one of your users should feel not just enabled but validated.
Inclusive design isn’t a series of items on a checklist; it’s an ideal, like harmony or beauty, that we may struggle to achieve but that we should strive for nonetheless.
Image via Pexels.
The post 3 Ways to Design More Inclusively first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
This week, a significant portion of the Web fell over when on Tuesday, sites powered by Fastly were impacted by a massive outage that affected around 85% of the network.
The near-total collapse — which was quickly identified and remedied — took out sites including GitHub, Stack Overflow, PayPal, Shopify, Stripe, Reddit, Amazon, and CNN. Furthermore, it was all but impossible to express rage on Twitter because the server that handles the social network’s emojis was also affected.
This outage was broad and severe, and we’re truly sorry for the impact to our customers and everyone who relies on them.
– Nick Rockwell, Senior VP of Engineering and Infrastructure, Fastly Inc.
The incident occurred at around 10:00 UST (06:00 EST) and prompted mass “Error 503” messages. It was identified by Fastly in less than a minute and patched within an hour.
Initial analysis indicates that the whole episode was triggered by a single customer updating their settings (in a perfectly valid way) — you know those nightmares you have about clicking the wrong button and deleting the whole Web? Yeah, imagine being that person. The precise combination of settings triggered a bug in an update that had been missed in Fastly’s QA and had been sitting in production code since May 12th.
If you’ve ever visited a serious server center, you’ll know the kind of security they employ in defense of potential criminal attacks. The only center I’ve visited in person was inside a nuclear-proof bunker, involved multiple security checks, and I wasn’t even allowed into the really secure part. But it turns out, all the terrorists need to do to crash the global economy is open a CDN account and update their settings.
Fastly actually reacted far faster than previous CDN mass-outages by its competitors — one possible reason its share price soared this week. But it is still trapped in a cycle of competition in which fast and cheap are easily compared, and good is somewhat abstract…until it’s not.
Most of us feel like seasoned hands at the Web when the truth is we’re very early adopters. It will be a century or more before the Web is truly integrated into society. Still, we are building the foundations now, and future generations need those foundations to be robust. We need less focus on clawing back a few pennies, less focus on delivering sites 3 nanoseconds before a user opens their browser, and a greater focus on resilience.
Like everyone, I love eye-peelingly fast sites, and I’m more than happy to get a good deal, but personally, I don’t feel either of those things is worth waking up to an Error 503 on a site I’m responsible for.
Image via Unsplash.
The post Poll: Fast CDN, Cheap CDN, Good CDN, Pick Any One… first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
HTML is one of the foundational building blocks of the Web. But just as web design best practices and techniques change over time, so does the code we use. As HTML evolves, some of its older markup has been deprecated while other parts have been repurposed.
Does that create more problems for us, though? Would we be better off starting over so we can make sure we’re all working from the same language rather than trying to edit out the bits we don’t want or need?
Let’s take a look at what happens when we amend the rules of HTML over time and how it impacts the Web:
Whether certain features have become outdated and need to go, or browsers have stopped supporting certain tags altogether, deprecated code eventually becomes a problem.
You’ll find a long list of deprecated HTML on the HTML.com website:
For many of these, HTML tags and attributes have been replaced by more efficient CSS styling. There are also examples of HTML deprecation because the features have become outdated (like frames).
Yet, there are still websites out there that contain deprecated HTML.
In some cases, the HTML sits silently on the other side of the website. If there’s enough of this errant code hanging around, though, those extra characters and directives could slow down your server’s processing time and render pages more slowly than usual.
In other cases, the HTML breaks features on the front-end of a website. Take, for instance, this warning from Mozilla regarding the <nobr> tag:
Using deprecated code can create inconsistent and poor experiences on the front-end. And when all browsers finally get on board and decide not to support an HTML tag anymore, all visitors will be left with a broken UI.
So, while it’s great that HTML5 has deprecated legacy HTML that’s no longer useful or necessary, that’s not to stop everyone from using it or leaving it behind on older websites.
As I mentioned, a lot of deprecated HTML has been phased out and replaced by CSS styling. And that’s a good thing.
Let me give you a simple example of this…
My favorite book is <i>The Stand</i> by Stephen King. The first time I read it, I didn’t sleep for <i>three days</i>. Thankfully, when I revisit it every year, I have fewer nightmares and can more greatly appreciate the storytelling aspect of it.
In the above paragraph, I’ve used the <i> tag to italicize several words.
In the early days of HTML,<i> stood for “italics” (the way<b> stood for “bold”). With HTML5, however,<i> will still render as italics, but its semantic meaning isn’t as broad. It’s been repurposed to indicate a stylistic change, which is important for things like book and film names, foreign words, and so on. To express emphasis, we use the <em> tag instead.
Keeping the legacy <i> and <b> tags can lead to issues, though.
In the statement above, I’ve italicized the name of the book (The Stand) as well as the number of sleepless nights I had (three days) with<i>. Whether the designer decides today, tomorrow or ten months down the road that they want to change the way literary or cinematic references are styled, my choice of HTML will stand in their way.
Because all of my italic text is indicated by <i>, styles can’t universally be applied to specific content (like book references). Instead, the designer would have to go through and clean up my code so that it looks like this:
My favorite book is <i>The Stand</i> by Stephen King. The first time I read it, I didn’t sleep for <em>three days</em>. Thankfully, when I inevitably revisit it every year, I have fewer nightmares and can more greatly appreciate the storytelling aspect of it.
This would then allow the semantically italicized content to remain intact while the designer or developer adjusts the styles of the book title here and across the site. (Though, really, the first italicized phrase should be surrounded by <cite> as it would be more semantically accurate.)
While it’s great that we’ve created guidelines for using legacy HTML today, keeping old code around can confuse writers, designers, and others who are familiar with the previous way of formatting content. By resetting HTML, throwing out old styles, and creating one language we use consistently across the web, we won’t create more work for ourselves later on.
Another big reason why repurposed and deprecated HTML is a problem is because of accessibility.
For starters, when you leave deprecated and unsupported code behind, it’s likely to cause issues for screen readers, search engines, and browsers that use HTML for clues about the content.
Header tags (e.g.<h1>, <h2>, <h3>), for instance, aren’t just used to visibly break up large chunks of text. Header tags and, more specifically their hierarchy, present important information about the relationship between subjects on a page — and this is the kind of thing that screen readers and search engines pick up on.
That’s why we need to be very careful about the code we leave behind the scenes, even if readers on the front end can’t visibly see it. Let’s look at an example of how this can affect accessibility:
Is there an <i>à la carte</i> menu or is it just <i>prix fixe</i> tonight?
If a screen reader were to read over this sentence, the French phrases would be said with the same emphasis as any other italicized words on the page.
This is why HTML5 encourages semantic coding instead of purely stylistic.
The proper way to write HTML in the line above would be:
Is there an <i lang="fr">à la carte</i> menu or is it just <i lang="fr">prix fixe</i> tonight?
There are two reasons to do this:
Semantic coding is essential for designers that work on multilingual websites.
As the World Wide Web Consortium explains, languages like Japanese don’t use italicization or bolding for emphasis — at least not the way English speakers do.
So, to properly translate a page from English, a Japanese designer would need to remove the italics or bolding and add surrounding brackets to the words. However, if everything is coded with <i> and <b>, or there’s a mix of <i> and <em> and<b> and <strong>, it’s going to be really difficult to Find-and-Replace the correct HTML with ease.
So, if accessibility or internationalization are concerns for you at all, getting clear on the HTML you write with is going to be really important.
The fact of the matter is, it requires a lot of work to have the rules of HTML rewritten. So while it would be great to reset HTML, I don’t know that it’s all that practical.
All we can really do is stay abreast of what’s happening with the language, edit out legacy code from our websites the second it becomes deprecated, and always use tags and attributes that are supported. By playing around with deprecated or repurposed code, we only put the website visitors’ experience in jeopardy, so it’s best to take the time to clear out the old any chance we get.
If we can all get on the same page about this, problematic legacy HTML will eventually disappear from our websites and memories.
Featured image via Unsplash.
The post Is It Time to Reset HTML? first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
Want to know which of the top blogging platforms you should consider using this year?
Blogging is still one of the best ways to draw attention to your brand, generate thought leadership, and build your credibility. Research suggests that US internet users spend 3x more of their browsing time on blogs than on email. Additionally, people view about 20 billion blog pages on average each month.
So, how do you join the blogging revolution? You’ll need the right platform.
Essentially, a blogging platform is a CMS (Content Management System) which supports blog creation. Many come with additional tools like SEO support and integrations with email marketing too. There are tons of great blogging platforms out there, which means knowing where to start searching can be tough. To help you, we’ve put together this list of the leading blogging platforms.
Before we sort through our list of the leading blogging platforms, let’s start with a quick overview of what the best blogging solutions typically include. Notably, depending on what you’re going to be using your blog for, you may have other features to prioritize besides those listed here. These features will act as a starting point for your comparisons:
Uploading, publishing, and sharing your blog shouldn’t be a headache.
There are many website builders out there that seem to have blogging tacked on as an “extra” rather than having it built into the foundations of the software. This often leads to a clunky backend experience when you’re building your site.
If you’re a new blogger or don’t want to spend time messing around with HTML and coding, make sure that your blogging environment is easy to use. The simpler it is to distribute your content, the more likely you’ll stick to your blogging strategy.
Many of the top blogging platforms come with a fee to think about. Even if you use an open-source platform for blogging, you still need to consider domain names, hosting, and security costs. Finding the right balance between spend and return on investment is crucial.
Remember, just because a blogging platform is cheap doesn’t mean it’s good value. Similarly, expensive software may not be the best for your business. Ideally, you want something that’s going to deliver a good blogging experience, combined with plenty of opportunities to grow your readership for the lowest possible price.
If you want to get the best return on investment, focus on the kind of monetization options you can access with each platform. Medium, for instance, has a partner program that allows you to earn money on the posts that customers read. Platforms like Wix, WordPress, and Squarespace can all offer earning opportunities too. You can use them to place certain content behind a paywall, create subscriptions, and sell products or services.
Most blogging platforms will come with at least some tools to help you build your online presence. Wix and WordPress integrate with Google marketing, so you can purchase PPC campaigns and track your organic content through an SEO dashboard.
The majority of CMS tools equipped with blogging capabilities also come with integrations for your email marketing service. This ensures you can create automated campaigns that inform your audience whenever a new blog post goes live.
One of the best things about WordPress is how many plugins you can access to boost your readership levels. Access to extra tools like SEO solutions, landing form creators, and pop-ups can all boost your chances of converting and capturing leads.
If you’re keen to save money on your blogging platform, you might be tempted to start with a free version of a popular service. This is fine when you’re just testing the waters. However, you will need to spend extra if you want to remove the ads that other website builders put on your site. For instance, Wix’s free version will place ads on your pages and show the Wix identity in your footer.
To build your own brand identity, you’re going to need to replace that CMS branding with your own. Look for a blogging service where you can buy your own domain name, customize your themes, and add your own colors, images, and logos into the mix.
While tools like Medium won’t run ads on your campaigns, they also don’t allow you to customize your site to showcase your brand personality. It’s much easier to build a memorable identity when you can control what your site looks like.
This ties in a little with the “ease of use” factor above. Before you invest in any blogging platform, think about how much work it’s going to require. A hosted blogging platform is pretty easy to manage because you don’t have to worry about security and uptime yourself.
Products like Wix and Squarespace will give you access to SSL certificates, patch security issues on your behalf, and handle other complicated site maintenance issues. WordPress and other open-source solutions require you to take more of a hands-on approach. You’ll need to manage your own web hosting and check the security of your site regularly.
This feature is often overlooked in some guides to the best blogging platforms, but it’s also growing increasingly more important in today’s digital age. If you want your website to work for years to come, you need to make sure it’s flexible. This could mean that you look for something that allows you to upload different kinds of content, like written blogs and connecting podcasts.
It could also mean investing in a service that has a lot of integrations and add-on options available. Plugins are fantastic for extending the functionality of your blog without having to move your entire site to another location.
The right plugins can even allow you to transform your blog into a store if you decide to start selling your services or products later.
Now we’ve covered what to look for in a blogging platform, we can begin to explore some of the top platforms on the market today. We’ve chosen these platforms for their ease of use, flexibility, performance, customization options, and value.
The best-known and most popular blogging platform in the world, WordPress is the go-to choice for most bloggers and website creators. Currently, there are around 64 million websites actively using WordPress as their chosen CMS. Usage stats also show that around 400 million people visit WordPress websites every month.
WordPress powers most of the internet as one of the most flexible and easy-to-use platforms around. The biggest decision most users need to make is between WordPress.com and WordPress.org.
You can create a blog for free at WordPress.com, and the company will host your site for you. However, you have to use a subdomain (rather than your own domain) with the free version. You’ll also lose control of your ads with the free package until you upgrade to a premium plan.
A personal plan on WordPress.com starts at about $4 per month, and it removes all ads from your site. The more functionality you need, the more you’ll need to upgrade. WordPress.com is very easy to use and requires minimal initial setup, but it’s not very scalable. There are no custom themes, and you don’t technically “own” your blog this way.
WordPress.org is a different story. With WordPress.org, you’re accessing an open-source blogging platform that allows you to build your site from scratch. You do need to purchase your own domain name and hosting with this service, but the software is free to use.
WordPress.org is a lot more appealing to most bloggers because it’s so customizable. Features include:
Pricing: WordPress.org is different from most blogging platforms because the foundation technology is free. You just pay for the a-la-carte options, like plugins, hosting, and domain name subscriptions. This means you can choose how expensive your site is going to be.
Pros:
Cons:
Squarespace is one of the more popular website design and blogging tools for people with a creative streak. Unlike WordPress.org, Squarespace gives you everything you need to build your own website straight out of the box. This includes hosting, the option to purchase your own domain name, and access to a range of beautiful templates.
Squarespace stands out for its focus on small business owners. You can choose from a range of stunning designs and customize them however you choose with a convenient drag-and-drop builder. There’s also a fantastic customer service experience available from Squarespace, with a team that’s ready to help you with anything you need.
Like many other hosted blogging platforms, you start on Squarespace by choosing the templates you like and customizing from there. There are some limitations in what you can do here, particularly if you have a lot of coding knowledge, making Squarespace less appealing to growing companies or larger brands. On the plus side, you do get features like:
Pricing: Compared to some of the other leading blogging solutions on the market, Squarespace is also quite affordable. The personal package at $12 per month will power a website with a stunning blog. You can also upgrade to the Business version for $18 per month, or if you decide to start selling your own products through your blog, you can transition to “Basic Commerce” at $26 per month.
Pros:
Cons:
Medium is a different kind of blogging platform to many of the options mentioned here. This isn’t a tool you can use to build your own websites, like Wix or Squarespace. Instead, it’s a community you join with a monthly membership fee.
Medium comes with a built-in audience, so you can immediately start speaking to customers and generating results from your content. As mentioned above, there’s also a Partner Program, which is free to join. The Partner Program allows you to earn money if people are reading your blogs regularly.
For companies or individuals who just want to generate brand awareness but don’t want to invest in an entire blog-ready website yet, Medium can be a powerful choice. You can easily share posts and view what other people are posting. The biggest downside is that you can’t build an entire community and earn a fortune through your website with Medium.
Medium is more like a social networking site, where you can begin to develop thought leadership than a true space to carve out your piece of the online world. But it does feature things like:
Pricing: You don’t have to be a paid member of Medium to sign up for the partner program and start publishing blogs. This does make it a pretty good way to enhance your existing blogging strategy if you’re trying to generate more attention online.
Pros:
Cons:
LinkedIn is among the most popular platforms for professionals in the world. It’s the go-to place for people in search of reliable ways to develop their professional network. Currently, there are around 756 million members on LinkedIn. When they’re not searching for connections with their peers or chatting about work opportunities, they’re checking out the content on the platform.
If you’re keen to develop your position as a thought leader but prefer social media accounts to full websites, LinkedIn is the perfect choice. The more you publish on LinkedIn, the more you’ll attract new people who might want to work with you, invest in your company, or just work as part of your team.
LinkedIn is a great place to generate attention if you’re in the B2B marketplace because most professionals already have their own account. You can also earn social proof by getting people to “endorse” your work. Some of the features of LinkedIn for bloggers include:
Pricing: It’s free to access a basic membership with LinkedIn, but you will be limited on some of the features you can unlock. For instance, you can only send messages to people already in your network, and you’ll have limited analytics. LinkedIn Premium gives you slightly more functionality, with Business accounts starting at around $29.95 per month.
Pros:
Cons:
Easily one of the most popular website building solutions for beginners, Wix can help you build both a blog and a fully-featured website. You can even design your own store with Wix and start selling products whenever you choose.
Wix is a straightforward site builder which you can use to build a site in a matter of minutes. There are hundreds of website themes to choose from, and you can also add as many customizations as you choose with the convenient drag-and-drop editor. The blog manager section of the CMS is also simple and intuitive, with SEO and analytics built in already.
Wix aims to make jumping into blogging as quick and painless as possible. Elements like comments, social tools, hashtags, and subscriber forms are already available, and you can add further plugins if you choose. There’s also the option to include sharing buttons for social media accounts like Twitter, Facebook, and more. Features of Wix include:
Pricing:
The most basic features of the Wix website builder are free to use. With a free Wix account, you’ll get a subdomain where you can’t choose the name of your own website, unfortunately. However, you can add a custom domain for only $4.50 per month. If you want a full premium plan with Wix, costs start at $8.50 per month and extend to $24.50 per month.
Pros:
Cons:
Lesser known than some of the options we’ve discussed so far but still brimming with value, Ghost is a minimalist blogging platform that’s all about content creation. Ghost promises a range of ways for you to turn your blogging into a business, with access to customizable templates, newsletter integrations, premium subscriptions, and more.
The dashboard for Ghost is clean and intuitive, with access to simple sections where you can add tags to your posts, create drafts, track published content, and access valuable insights. You’ll have an easy view of important metrics like email open rates and numbers of paid members at a glance. You can also find integrations to make your Ghost experience even better.
Ghost works alongside things like Buffer, Stripe, Twitter, Slack, MailChimp, and many other tools so you can take your blog to the next level. There’s no need for any coding knowledge, and because everything is written in JavaScript, it’s ultra-fast too. Features include:
Pricing: There’s a 14-day free trial to get you started with Ghost, then subscriptions start at $9 per month when billed annually for up to 1,000 members, 1 staff user, 2k views per month, and an SSL and CDN. The same plan is $15 per month billed monthly. Prices go all the way up to $199 per month billed annually, or $249 per month for 1 million views per month, 35,000 members, 15 staff users, and a 99.99% uptime SLA.
Pros:
Cons:
Whether you’re blogging because you want to build your personal brand or you’re looking for a way to strengthen sales opportunities for your company, you’re going to need the right blogging platform. The options above are just some of the best blogging solutions available right now.
Remember, do your research and explore the free versions available whenever possible, so you can confidently invest in the software that’s best for you.
Featured image via Unsplash.
The post Top Blogging Platforms Worth Considering in 2021 first appeared on Webdesigner Depot.
