Articles

If your website performance sucks it doesn’t matter how pretty the design is. It is essential that you understand how performance effects the conversion rates of your customers. It is imperative that you are able to identify if your website is slow and what to do about it. If you take away only one thing from this article please make sure it is this: Website performance should be your highes...

A very interesting article by Malte Ubl @cramforce (brought to my attention via the CSS Tricks newsletter) about the current state of optimising images on the web. There’s some really interesting concepts which I wasn’t aware of. Certainly worth a read for most front end developers I imagine. Article link here: https://www.industrialempathy.com/posts/image-optimizations/ ...

I consider myself fortunate to have returned to freelancing with a successful 12 months in what will have been a turbulent year for many. Of course I’ve had my ups and downs but my client base has grown, along with my income, and my skills. And for the most part I have been able to enjoy a flexible balance of my time between work and pleasure. However I know that I can still achieve better v...

There’s a lot of wonderful content out on the web to help frontend devs learn and progress. But sometimes it can be a challenge finding it. So for 2021 i am going to try and share what I believe to be a valuable resource once a week in the hope that someone (even if it’s just one person) may find it valuable. Today I will start with Modern CSS Solutions by @5t3ph who continues to deliv...

Throughout 2020 I’ve aimed to keep up with current events in front end development as much as possible. It’s essential for my work and completely fascinating looking at the innovation happening across the industry. Blogs and newsletter have always been a good staple for this – and will continue to be so. However one of my goals this year was to reduce my screen time. Between codi...

Christmas isn’t far away, but when it arrives hopefully we’ll all be able to have some time off. If we’re fortunate we may even be able to spend it with our family and loved ones after a long year apart. Whilst I expect most of us will want to switch off from work entirely, it could also be a good time to get a bit of reading in too. After all there’s only so many Christmas...

Managing the images on your website is no longer as simple as uploading them with fixed dimensions and considering it a job well done. The web has evolved considerably and so has the way you should approach the implementation of images on your website. We can now make use of responsive image solutions with the img srcset tag, modern file formats like WebP, and content distribution networks (CDN...

I recently came across Tiny helpers via a recommendation from the Front End Happy Hour podcast. In its own words it’s “A collection of free single-purpose online tools for web developers…” and several of which I have found quite useful. If you have some spare time take a look and see if there’s anything that might help you with your next project. ...

Ask someone how they setup their local development tooling and you’ll get a different answer every time. We all have our own ideas and opinions on what suits our needs best and that’s fine. However it can be incredibly difficult as a beginner to know where to start. So I’d like to offer a suggestion for anyone looking to try local WordPress development – that suggestion is ...

Having previously written about the benefits of using the WebP image format, I wanted to follow it up with some additional thoughts on improving page load times further with a technique called lazy loading. In the original gallery example I had 10 images with a combined size over 8MB and a rather appalling 40+ seconds page load on 3G. With WebP and some considered use of the img srcset attribute w...

The WordPress admin provides a rich editing experience with a variety of features and tools at our disposal. However there are times when these features just aren’t required for our websites – so wouldn’t it be nice if we could hide them? Less clutter keeps us focused, so fewer menus and options should make our path to completing our tasks a little more straight forward. Removing...

Chris Coyier has been at it again – he continues to deliver more excellent and thought provoking content around CSS and I wanted to share some of it with you. One idea in particular that has really caught my attention in recent days is his post concerning list marker alignment. It’s accompanied with a great video walk-through, and shows how we can harness Grid and Subgrid, albeit in Fi...