Web Development articles

The internet is constantly making headway with speed being the major metric of progress and a key question for most web developers. A previous WebdesignerDepot article How slow is too slow in 2016? highlighted the need to focus on speed, so we decided to present a few features that will help your site make the grade in 2016....

If you use any kind of social media like Facebook or Twitter, you won’t have been able to avoid the merciless onslaught of ads promoting WYSIWYG website development. I’m not talking about those fancy software applications like DreamWeaver, but actually hosted site building applications that offer drag-n-drop website...

This tutorial will help you with the most important thing you probably aren’t doing for your MailChimp newsletter: ensuring its delivery. If your newsletter isn’t being delivered, then no training, or tips, or marketing tactics will matter. Ensuring delivery basically means that you’ve got to prove that you are...

A lot has been said recently about the merits of static sites. But in many situations a dynamic approach is a necessity. Whether a content management system, a customer relationship tool, or online store, they allow end users to maintain complex sites quickly and consistently. And when put together properly, they can rival...

I’m stood in the center of a room, confident my choice to go all static had been a good one. It’s a serene scene—nothing can touch me. There are website owners running around wildly, chasing WordPress security vulnerabilities, while at the same time trying to plug holes, which the dubious free plug-ins they downloaded...

Email predates the Web by around 10 years (depending on who you talk to) and in that time the web has evolved into an dynamic, interactive entity. However, the most exciting thing you’re likely to see in an email these days is a nice animated gif, and we got those in the 90’s. Well now everything is changing, this is the dawn...

Speed is usability. To say it more accurately, website speed is a major part of usability. The most intuitive interface ever created by the mind of man will do you no good if the user is pee’d off by the time it loads. That’s it. The article’s done… Ok, so there’s actually a lot more to it, but that first sentence is about...

With mobile internet usage eclipsing desktop-based web browsing, it’s more important than ever for websites to be built with an emphasis on speedy page loads and fluid reactions to user input. One important technology we use to achieve this is AJAX, short for “Asynchronous JavaScript & XML.” AJAX allows you...

Since the creation of the Internet, average file sizes have been steadily growing. What started out as kilobytes has progressed to megabytes (yes, plural), and our files are only growing still. While this phenomenon isn't disconcerting at first glance, the impact it has on performance and maintainability is awful. Add...

Foundation is one of the two big-name HTML/CSS/JS frameworks for front-end developers. That didn't happen by accident. Today, we're here to tell you all about why you should be using it. Now first, for those who maybe write their own HTML, but have never worked with a framework before, here's an explanation: Frameworks are...

Startups are notorious for bringing an idea from a concept to a finalized product fast. While there’s certainly something to be said for taking our time and doing in depth research at every milestone, sometimes we just need to get an idea up and running as soon as possible. Rapid prototyping in a startup culture slims the typical...

Style guides of yesteryear are typically thought of as design-oriented documents focusing on branding and color usage. But with the advent of insanely large codebases for websites like Facebook or Google’s vast array of products, style guides have since evolved. These days, living style guides contain always up to date...

As you know, there is a lot more to building responsive websites than width. You need sensors that give you feedback to adjust sites based on other factors. The best way to improve our feedback from your user's sensor, or browser, is by using a JavaScript library called Modernizr. In this article I'll explain why, when you...

It's amazing how far we've come in the last 15 years; the web has developed at a rate it took print 150 years or more, to match. What's exciting is that we're still going, still exploring, still innovating. As designer's we're used to designing brochure sites, but increasingly we're designing application interfaces. As technology...