New tools for web design and development: September 2012

 Education, Internet News, Tech News, Web Design  416 Responses »
Oct 032012
 

 

So many good things appeared in September that Mark Penfold couldn’t bear to cut the list down to the traditional 10. Here are 11 top utilities for building on the web

It’s a real mixed bag this month. IDEs, prototyping tools, visual effects, slide shows … there doesn’t seem to be any obvious connection. But the tendency for tools to incorporate some degree of playing-field levelling remains evident.

For example, a mobile framework that enables you to ‘code once’ – and in JavaScript, no less. Prototyping tools with components for multiple platforms, IDEs that facilitate rather than getting in the way of fluid development. An important goal for each of these projects is to iron out some of the web’s wrinkles so you can focus on solving real problems not re-inventing the wheel.

Stand-out performance though, has to go to Microsoft for WebMatrix 2. Not just because it’s a strong piece of kit but because it puts so much of the PC giant’s other output into sharp relief. And yes, IE, that still means you.

MORE: New tools for web design and development: September 2012 | Feature | .net magazine.

 

20 common WordPress mistakes, myths and misgivings

 interface, Internet News, Web Design  953 Responses »
Oct 012012
 

Jesse Friedman, author of the Web Designer’s Guide to WordPress, helps us avoid common WordPress mistakes and takes a look at some myths and misgivings to boot

WordPress has made huge strides in the last year or two to become a full fledged CMS. With these changes comes the need to shed old myths about WordPress. As we move to become a ubiquitous CMS available to the masses, misconceptions and preconceived notions of bugs and flaws from the past can cloud our judgement of the future. Hopefully alleviating our thoughts of following 20 mistakes, myths and misgivings we can all realise the full potential of this CMS and work to make it better.

MORE: 20 common WordPress mistakes, myths and misgivings | Feature | .net magazine.

 

Adobe’s New ‘Edge’ App Suite Doubles Down on HTML

 Tech News, Web Design  393 Responses »
Sep 262012
 

Adobe may be best known among web developers for its much-maligned Flash Player plugin, but in recent years the company has begun shifting its efforts away from Flash to open web tools like HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Now Adobe is launching a new suite of apps for web developers working with the latest web standards.

The new Adobe Edge suite of HTML5 development tools includes Edge Animate 1.0, a tool to create HTML, CSS and JavaScript-based animations, and Edge Inspect (formerly known as Adobe Shadow), a handy tool for testing your sites on multiple devices at once. There’s also Edge Code, a fork of the Brackets code editor that’s now included in Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite.

As part of the announcement at Adobe’s Create the Web conference in San Francisco the company also showed off a demo of the still-in-development Edge Reflow, a new tool for working with responsive design layouts.

MORE: Adobe’s New ‘Edge’ App Suite Doubles Down on HTML | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

 

Google Warns, 6 in 10 Will Leave Your Mobile-Unfriendly Site

 interface, Internet News, Marketing, Web Design  244 Responses »
Sep 262012
 

DudaMobile in February reported that nearly 20% of visits to small business sites led to an immediate call to the business e.g. with click-to-call, with some local businesses skewing much higher e.g., pizzerias at 32%, car services at 27.8%. But businesses have to earn that call with a mobile-friendly site that puts that phone number above the fold and in eyeshot. Google concludes from the new study that non-mobile friendly sites actually damage a company’s reputation: 36% of respondents said they felt like they’ve wasted their time by visiting those sites, and 52% of users said that a bad mobile experience made them less likely to engage with a company.

MORE: Google Warns, 6 in 10 Will Leave Your Mobile-Unfriendly Site – MarketingVOX.

 

How to Scale Embedded Media in Responsive Designs

 interface, Web Design  252 Responses »
Sep 202012
 

Swedish web developer Anders Andersen recently tackled the problem of responsive embeds and came up with a solution that works with both YouTube and Vimeo movies. Andersen’s solution is to wrap any embed code, whether it’s an actual embed tag or an iframe, with an extra div and then scale that div. Naturally you’ll need to strip any fixed dimensions out of the YouTube or other embed code for this to work.

For the full details and the CSS that makes it work, be sure to read Andersen’s whole post.

The core of Andersen’s method lies in the CSS, which uses this handy trick to preserve the intrinsic ratio of the video even as its container element scales down.

Andersen has tested this technique with YouTube, Vimeo and SlideShare embeds, though it may work with others as well.

MORE:  How to Scale Embedded Media in Responsive Designs | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

 

I cannot design or code a responsive website

 interface, Web Design  277 Responses »
Sep 122012
 

Don’t listen to the voices in your head, advises frontend developer Nick Jones. Here he explains how he got stuck creating his personal site and learned to trust his instincts instead

There’s this fallacy of a right way and a wrong way to design and code. If you spend enough time looking for it or reading about it, you’ll end up paralysed. It happened to me. But in early 2012, five years after the launch of the iPhone, I decided it was time to suck it up and create a modern website for myself. What follows are my doubts about making narrowdesign.com.

Responsive?

(INTERNAL DIALOGUE) You know nothing about ‘responsive web design’. You have no business making a responsive site for yourself or anyone else. It’s too new and untested. You aren’t capable of pulling it off. You’re not even a real programmer. In the event that you do pull it off, you’ll immediately wish you hadn’t. Something new will replace it by this time next year. You’ll look stupid for jumping on the bandwagon with every SEO expert and web guru who now drop its name. Remember what happened with microsites?

MORE:  I cannot design or code a responsive website | Opinion | .net magazine.

 

New Tool Eliminates Ugly Craigslist Ads

 Internet News, Web Design  1,171 Responses »
Aug 052012
 

A San Francisco-based team has developed “Beautiful Craigslist Ads,” a free online wizard that makes each post simple and sleek, it says. The classified ad website is notorious for its bare-bones layout and few formatting options.

Users fill in information, such as details about rent, neighborhood and lease term, which the tool then organizes in an optimal way, according to its Kickstarter page.

MORE:  New Tool Eliminates Ugly Craigslist Ads.

 

10 steps to get designs signed off and keep your client happy

 Design, Web Design  318 Responses »
Aug 032012
 

Joey Rabbitt, a web designer and frontend developer currently working for Sony Computer Entertainment Europe, shares some techniques to keep the client sign-off process smooth

I’ve worked as an in-house designer, a freelancer, and in a creative studio. The role of the client can change depending on the job, but the sign-off process is always the same. After you’ve dedicated your time and creative energy to a project, it can be demoralising if the client doesn’t like it in the way that you hoped. On top of a deflated ego, redrafting your work can cost time and money. I’d like to share some of the techniques I’ve learnt to keep the process as efficient as possible.

MORE: 10 steps to get designs signed off and keep your client happy

 

New tools for web design and development: July 2012

 Internet News, Tech News, Web Design  286 Responses »
Aug 032012
 

This month, Mark Penfold’s round-up of the best new tools ranges from cutting-edge experiments to down-to-earth utilities. Give them a try: they’re all free

This month sees a mix of the boundary-pushing and the practical. The two aren’t such strange bedfellows as they might appear, at least when it comes to web development – for the simple reason that just about any attempt to stretch the realms of the possible will cause a few holes to appear in what you’ve got. And that’s where the practicalities come in.

So we’ve got a 3D CSS3 lighting rig and a PNG image cruncher, a media production suite and a cookie cutter for jQuery. You can’t afford to lose sight of the details when you’re trying to make changes to the big picture.

What’s more, many of the dev community’s brightest stars are associated with detail work. Take, for example, the Modernizr project, also updated this month. When it actually comes to building the web, it isn’t content that is king: it’s utility.

MORE:  New tools for web design and development: July 2012 

 

Reborn Digg Starts Over From Scratch

 Internet News, Web Design  204 Responses »
Aug 032012
 

Digg is back. The social news site that coulda been a contender — or actually was a contender for a while — has risen from the ashes of its recent sale to Betaworks.

The current version is not, however, the Digg of old.

Not only has the site been completely rewritten from the ground up, but it’s far from complete. In fact, as the announcement notes, the site was rewritten in a mere six weeks. That’s impressively fast, but it has definitely left some rough edges on the initial release.

Today’s release is best thought of as a work in progress — it’s still buggy and feature incomplete — but it does give a glimpse of Digg’s future. This time around Digg is more visually focused — think one part Pinterest, one part Flipboard.

MORE:  Reborn Digg Starts Over From Scratch | Webmonkey | Wired.com.

 

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