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Care for the Text
24.12.2021
How do you make a great website? Everyone has an answer at the ready: Flashy animations! The latest punk-rock CSS trick! Gradients! Illustrations! Colors to pack a punch! Vite! And, sure, all these things might make a website better. But …
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 …
2021 Roundup of Web Research
23.12.2021
Last year, we kicked out a roundup of published surveys, research, and other findings from around the web. There were some nice nuggets in there, like a general sentiment that the web needs more documentation, Tailwind CSS dun …
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…
Increase Your Reach
22.12.2021
NGL, I was a little overwhelmed when I sat down to write this article. There are so many things that immediately flooded my mind—take out any extra divs; use links for URLs, use buttons for events and actions; use …
Links on Performance V
21.12.2021
Does shadow DOM improve style performance? — Nolan Lawson covers how, because of the inherent encapsulation of the shadow DOM, the styling gets applied a bit faster than it would if those styling rules were relevant to the entire page. But …
Make Joyful Things
21.12.2021
Everything kind of sucks right now. Things—generally—feel bad. Setting aside the broader realities of a global pandemic and rampant social injustices, we’re watching the identity of the web platform, an intrinsically free and open medium of creative expression, co-opted for …
Auto Dark Theme
20.12.2021
There are a number of ways to approach a dark mode for your website, but essentially you get all the styles ready for it and then apply them when the user has indicated they want them, whether by direct …
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 …
Working With Web Feeds: It’s More Than RSS
16.12.2021
Between Google Chrome experimenting with “following” sites, along with a growing frustration of how social media platforms limit a creator’s reach to their fans through algorithmic feeds, there’s been renewed interest in RSS feeds and they’re primed for a …
Maybe there kinda is background-opacity?
15.12.2021
I was reading Jake’s “Cross-fading any two DOM elements is currently impossible” which is a wonderfully nerdy deep dive into how there is no real way to literally cross-fade elements. Yeah, you can animate both of their opacities, but even …
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 …
Faulty logic
14.12.2021
Ain’t this the truth:
It’s like when you’re learning a new language. At some point your brain goes from translating from your mother tongue into the other language, and instead starts thinking in that other language.
I don’t speak …
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 …
CSS-Tricks Chronicle XLI
13.12.2021
Ya know, I used to do one of these posts after making a few podcast appearances I hadn’t had a chance to link up yet, so I could share them. As fate would have it, I haven’t been on many …
File Scaffolding With Hygen
13.12.2021
I read a recent Smashing Magazine post that included a recommendation for Hygen. I just happen to be doing quite a bit of new UI work in a Next.js app and the amount of manual folder/file scaffolding I was …