Headline
Cost is a major factor stopping most users in emerging markets from gaining access to the web, but now that smart phones are below $40 it's the data that is becoming the sticking point. Native apps are simply too large to download and install so it's up to us building the web to ensure that what we provide is a lean as possible. If your customers or readers will come from emerging markets, these are the people you should be building a baseline for.
Being secure is important from a security point of view, but having https also allows you to take advantage of http2 and Service Workers as well. Lets Encrypt are on the road to a 100% secure internet and are doing so by giving away free SSL certificates... what are you waiting for!
Articles
Are we still building websites if we're using chat bots to communicate our messaging? My friend
Al believes that bots are the way of the future, and with many company's jumping on the bandwagon it's becoming more difficult to argue with that idea. At the end of the day the websites that we build are there to provide content or services to our users however and whenever they want to use them. In the same way that we syndicate our content through RSS feeds to RSS Readers, or through Googles Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), or the Facebook Instant Articles now open for everyone... the same process of syndicating our content or services into a bot framework interface can be followed. I LOVE the
approach that City Mapper have taken with their GoBot, definitely
check it out.
A few weeks ago we mentioned that the slow moving Safari browser now has a developer version, and this week release 2 is available.
Educating our clients during a web project is almost as important as the delivery of the website itself. They are paying us good money to produce something amazing for them, and if we help them understand more about the web along the way it become a personal growth experience for them as well (and they'll be more likely to get you back for more work). This article looks at some important simple things that we should all be doing.
PPK takes a look at how the x descriptor in responsive images works when zooming. I think the results are expected.
A wonderful article from FT again about why performance matters and how they tested this on their current site. "The speed of the site negatively impacts a user’s session depth, no matter how small the delay."
Being able to setup and control something on the physical web within 10 seconds on a smartphone. This stuff is only just getting started but it will only become more popular and better supported over time.
Tutorials
A short tutorial from Rachel Andrew, although we're still looking at developer edition browsers to see this stuff working (for now)
I didn't know this about using the nth-child or nth-of-type, it's only a 3 minute video but it's certainly something you should be aware.
More on loading fonts from Bram Stein. In this article he covers basic font loading, groups of fonts, loading with a timeout, prioritising your loading and how to optimise for caching.
You use web fonts right? Sure, everybody does these days. Zach Leat looks at modern day techniques on how to improve the performance of these loading on our site.
If you use Wordpress here's part one in a tutorial that will help you strip out the slow moving parts and really speed up your site performance.
These are a set of awesome experiments from Jen Simmons
While this article gets a little slated in the comment section for being overly focussed on being flashy and not enough on good user experience. For me they are a great set of demo's that can show how far we can push the web experience in the browser. Think of it like a Paris/Milan/London fashion show... no one actually wears the crazy stuff they wear but it inspires... and we can all do with some inspiration sometimes... and somethings, just sometimes, you'll get a client like Lady Gaga that will need something like that ;)
A neat little trick to align text center for one line, and to the left for more than one line.
Using google analytics you can see how well your site performs across different devices.
Tools & Resources
Web Page Test is a web page that helps you test your web pages - use it! This is a short video with Google Dev's on how you can get the most out of the tool.
Webflow is now shipping with Flexbox support. They've got some great initial examples to get you going and a fun little game to play if you're feeling playful
Make videos playable inline on Safari on iPhone and iPod touch.
Iframify gathers all the styles needed by the node and all its children by parsing the stylesheets and trying styles against the elements to import everything inside the generated iframe....
include-media is a Sass library for writing CSS media queries in an easy and maintainable way, using a natural and simplistic syntax.
A great responsive example of the Spotify Artist page.
Examples
This week I've taken a closer look at these two sites and what makes them responsively tick behind the scenes.
Trent Walton is one of my favourite writers and designers. Each of his articles are well thought out and they always have an art direction running through them making the content just that much more interesting to read.
This is a lovely site! Very reactive and the use of the transitions between each mantra for each day and sliding across to the story behind the Mantra is just lovely.
