20 years ago, Wikipedia was started with the ambitious aim of creating a free encyclopedia for the whole world. Looking back 20 years, the world was a very different place: the Dot Com Bust had just passed; the average US house price was just $136k; Jack Bauer was only 24 hours into saving the world; President Obama was several years away from the US Senate; Destiny’s Child were topping the charts; the appalling events of 9/11, and...
In this article, we’ll learn how to turn our static designs into a live, code-based prototype with real fields, forms, maps, and animations, and in turn, transform this prototype into React code — all integrated into one tool. The promise of seamless design to code translation goes back to the early WYSIWYG page builders. Despite the admirable goal, their biggest flaw (among many) was the horrible code that they generated. Skepticism remains to this day and whenever this...
About The Author Drew is a Staff Engineer specialising in Frontend at Snyk, as well as being a co-founder of Notist and the small content management system Perch. Prior to this, … More about Drew ↬[1][2][3][4] In this episode, we’re talking about Web Performance. What does the performance landscape look like in 2021? Drew McLellan talks to expert Harry Roberts to find out. In this episode, we’re talking about Web Performance. What does the performance landscape look like in...
How to stay creative, focused, and organized when working remotely? We’ve collected some useful tools and resources that we use daily at Smashing. We aren’t affiliated in any way with any of the tool makers featured here. We simply love what they do. Remote work brings along entirely different challenges than working from an office. Maybe your internet connection is rather slow? Maybe it’s too quiet around you to focus? Or too loud for a virtual client...
Here we are into a brand new year, and although we’re far from out of the woods yet, there is a feeling of renewed hope on many fronts. In this first collection of the year, we have a mix of retrospectives, brand new ventures, and business as usual. There is an eclectic mix of styles on offer, from glossy and slick to minimalist and brutalist, but all confident and looking to a better world in the year...
Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers. The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News[1] site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the...
About The Author Becca is a UX Researcher with a PhD in Human Factors Psychology. She runs the UX consulting company Kennason. She lives in Albany, New York with her husband, … More about Becca ↬[1] For hungry freelancers, it can be hard to turn work away. But in the long run, saying no to a project that’s a bad fit will make you a better freelancer. This article will help freelancers and consultants think critically about when...
About The Author Vitaly Friedman loves beautiful content and doesn’t like to give in easily. When he is not writing or speaking at a conference, he’s most probably running … More about Vitaly ↬[1] In this article, we’ll take a close look at some of the changes we made on this very site — running on JAMStack with React — to optimize the web performance and improve the Core Web Vitals metrics. With some of the mistakes we’ve...
It’s never been easier to set up an ecommerce store and start selling. There are a dizzying array of ecommerce solutions available in 2021, and most are feature-rich and competitively priced. Ecommerce sites are notoriously difficult to migrate from platform to platform, so more often than not, you’ll be committed to your chosen solution for years. The key when choosing an ecommerce solution to maximize your return on investment, is to consider not just what your business...
If you already have a good idea of what you want a new website to look like, the next step would be to decide on the tools you’ll need to put into play to turn that vision into a reality. Tools enable you to present its content in ways that will engage and captivate its audience and gain their trust. Tools that will make your website perform flawlessly in all respects. That is why choosing the right WordPress theme...