May 12, 2014 in Learn
3 Quick Tips for Less Repetition in Stylesheets
When you hear the word “Sass,” what comes to mind? For a lot of people it’s the most popular CSS precompiler to date. Sass takes vanilla CSS and adds variables, nesting, functions, math and more to your stylesheets. With Sass,…
May 12, 2014 in Learn
The Beginner’s Guide to Grids with Zurb Foundation 5
(Flickr photo by Hey Paul) Most modern websites use a grid to visually organize content into columns and rows, and nearly every front-end framework includes a robust grid system. If you’re totally new to front-end frameworks, I also recommend the…
April 23, 2014 in Learn
An Introduction to Perceived Performance
(Illustration by Mat Helme, Treehouse) Perceived Performance Is a Measure of How Quick a User Thinks Your Site Is, and That’s Often More Important Than Its True Speed Performance is important. It can mean the difference between making a sale,…
April 14, 2014 in Learn
The Beginner’s Guide to Ratchet: a Mobile Web App Framework
Ratchet is a front-end framework for building mobile web apps in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Ratchet 2.0 was recently released, so it’s a good time to start learning how to build Ratchet apps. If you just want to see Ratchet in…
April 10, 2014 in Learn
How to Create Smoother Animations and Transitions in the Browser
In order to achieve smooth transitions and animations, a browser needs to avoid doing extra work on its main thread, the part that’s in charge of handling tasks like JavaScript, style calculations, layout, painting and compositing (more on these later)….
April 3, 2014 in Learn
How to Evaluate Front-End Code for Inefficiencies
There’s more to writing good front-end code than knowing every HTML tag, CSS selector, or the latest front-end features and techniques. And as I mentioned in a recent blog post, writing good code takes a lot of patience and practice….
March 27, 2014 in Learn
How Data URIs Speed Improve Website Speed
As our websites grow more complex, web performance is becoming an increasingly important topic. There are many different strategies that you can employ to improve the performance of your websites. These include optimising images, combining multiple CSS files, or setting…
March 21, 2014 in Learn
An Introduction to HTML Imports
HTML imports is an exciting technology that promises to change how we build websites. Imports allow you to include HTML documents within other HTML documents. This has a number of benefits, including the ability to create a bundle of HTML,…
March 18, 2014 in Community
‘It Is Never Too Late’: How a Teacher and an Artist Switched to Web Careers in Midstream
The “breaking moment” in Jon Liu’s teaching career came at 7 o’clock in the morning. An hour before his students arrived for classes, he sat in his car, stared at the school where he taught and wondered: What if I…
March 14, 2014 in Learn
Should I Use WordPress to Create a Website?
(Photo by William Hook/Flickr) You can create powerful, polished sites with WordPress without learning a lot of coding. Once you’re comfortable with WordPress, you can do in a week or a weekend what could take you a month or more…
March 12, 2014 in Learn
How to Create an AJAX Contact Form for a Website [Guide]
Conversions don’t always equate to purchases or transactions, they can also appear in the form of newsletter sign-ups and contact forms. Contact forms are one of the most common features on a website. Standard contact forms work just fine, but…
March 11, 2014 in Learn
How to Use the Details and Summary Elements in HTML5
A number of new interactive elements were introduced with HTML5 that provide native implementations of common UI widgets like dialogs and modals. Among these new additions are the <details> and <summary> elements. These elements allow developers to create collapsable UI…