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Remember You Are Not the User
23.12.2021
One thing people can do to make their websites better is to remember that you are not representative of all your users. Our life experiences and how we interact with the web are not indicative of how everyone interacts with …
Show, Don’t Tell
23.12.2021
How much time do you spend designing the content presentation for your websites? When you write a new blog post or create a new page, are you thinking about just the words, or how your readers will engage with those …
Personalize it!
23.12.2021
Ensuring accessibility is a clear path to making your website better. When you make your site accessible, you grow your audience, improve the experience for all people using it (not just those with accessibility needs), and you get SEO benefits…
Be Prepared for Failure and Handle it Gracefully
20.12.2021
When I was working at my first “real” job in the field in the mid-2000s, it was hammered in the web dev field to build tiny websites (no more than 100KB per page), only use JavaScript for special effects, and …
Maybe Nothing
17.12.2021
What’s one thing we can do to make our site better? Maybe nothing at all!
Our websites keep getting bigger and bigger! When we have a team with so many exciting ideas and such interesting technology, it can be easy …
Consistent, Fluidly Scaling Type and Spacing
16.12.2021
When Chris first sent me this prompt, I was thinking about writing about progressive enhancement, but that subject is so wide-reaching to be one thing and all too predictable, especially for those already familiar with my writing. Saying that, what …
Remove Trackers
15.12.2021
Earlier this week, I tried out a starter theme for a blog platform. The theme had loads of nice default features: pretty typography, fancy navigation, dark mode widget… and a couple of default trackers I really don’t want just sitting …
Read Your Website
14.12.2021
When’s the last time you read your website? Like out loud in the lobby of a Starbucks on a weekday afternoon, over the phone to your parents, or perhaps even as a bedtime story for your kids.
No worries, this …
Think Without Boxes
14.12.2021
What’s the one thing people can do to make their website better? Now that is a good question. One with many right answers, like improving performance, taking care of accessibility, and upgrading user experience as prime examples. These are all …
Embrace the Platform
13.12.2021
So what is the one thing that people can do is to make their website better? To answer that, let’s take a step back in time …
The year is 1998, and the web is on the rise. In an …
Standardizing Focus Styles With CSS Custom Properties
10.12.2021
Take two minutes right now and visit your current project in a browser. Then, using only the Tab key, you should be able to navigate between interactive elements including buttons, links, and form elements.
If you are sighted, you should…
Help Users Accomplish What They Came For
9.12.2021
From my perspective, the question of what one thing we can do to make a website better is not a technical one. The more I browse the internet, the more I realize that the biggest issue with a lot of …
Learn From Remix
8.12.2021
I’ve built websites that are used by millions of people all over the world. I’ve made more mistakes than I care to count and I’ve had to deal with the repercussions of those mistakes for years thereafter. Through all of …
Test Your Product on a Crappy Laptop
7.12.2021
There is a huge and ever-widening gap between the devices we use to make the web and the devices most people use to consume it. It’s also no secret that the average size of a website is huge, and …
Reduce Your Website’s Environmental Impact With a Carbon Budget
6.12.2021
As I write this, world leaders are gathering in Glasgow for COP26, the international climate change conference, in the attempt to halt (or at least slow down) catastrophic climate change by pledging to end their countries’ dependence on fossil fuels. …
Ain’t No Party Like a Third Party
3.12.2021
I’d like to tell you something not to do to make your website better. Don’t add any third-party scripts to your site.
That may sound extreme, but at one time it would’ve been common sense. On today’s …
Test Your Site With Real Users
2.12.2021
A few years ago, there was this French book publisher. They specialize in technical books and published an author who wrote a book about CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery. The final version, however, a glaring typo on the cover where “HTML5” …
Embrace your code’s transience
2.12.2021
Websites change. Healthy codebases are constantly being updated. Legacy code dies when it eventually goes down with the ship. Recognizing that my code is transient allows me to be more practical about my code and what guides my decision-making as …
Embrace the Unpredictable
1.12.2021
In nature, no two things are ever the same. Life is imperfect, unpredictable, and beautiful. We can walk through the same forest every day and see differently colored leaves. We can look up at the clouds every minute and watch …
Exactly What You Want
1.12.2021
What is one thing people can do to make their website better?
Exactly what you want to build!
Ask yourself:
What drew you to development in the beginning?Is there an experimental API that you’ve been wanting to try out?…