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 19, 2014 in Learn
Exploring the JavaScript Device APIs
Photograph by Jeremy Keith (adactio) The mobile revolution has completely changed how people access the web. It’s only natural then that the web should evolve to better suit the plethora of devices on which it’s now accessed. When the web…
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 15, 2014 in Learn
Using localForage for Offline Data Storage
(Photo by Erich Ferdinand/Flickr) An important step on the path toward robust, offline web applications is the ability to store data in the user’s browser. Technologies like IndexedDB and localStorage have provided this functionality to web developers, but they are not…
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…
February 26, 2014 in Learn
Uploading Files with AJAX
The introduction of AJAX marked a huge leap forward in the history of the web. The ability to communicate with a web server without reloading the page has revolutionised how web applications are built. The primary technology that enables AJAX…
February 26, 2014 in Learn
How to Make a Website
We have just released a brand new project that teaches you how to make a website! This project focuses on building a portfolio website from the very beginning. If you’ve never built a website before and you have no coding…
February 24, 2014 in Learn
Things I Wish I Knew Before I Started Making Websites
I first started making websites when I was 11 years old. My dad showed me how to drag out tables in Microsoft FrontPage and I was hooked (which is now a very outdated technique). It was amazing to me that…
February 21, 2014 in Learn
Registering Protocol Handlers for Your Web Applications
Protocol handlers allow you to inform the browser that your web app is capable of handling links and URLs with certain schemes. Using the registerProtocolHandler method you are able to register your web app as a handler for schemes like…
February 6, 2014 in Learn
Optimizing Mobile Web Apps for iOS
When I was looking through the analytics data for a product I recently launched I was taken aback by just how much mobile traffic the web app was getting. After seeking some feedback from users it became clear that people…
February 4, 2014 in Learn
Getting Started with the Speech Synthesis API
With the introduction of products like Siri and Google Now, speech technology has really taken off in the past few years. Various organisations have been working on speech recognition and synthesis for decades, but it seems like only recently that…