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 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…
January 31, 2014 in Learn
How to use the Meter & Progress Elements
The development of HTML5 has introduced a series of new elements that can be used to create common UI components like date pickers and autocomplete dropdowns. Two of these new elements are <progress> and <meter>. In this post you’re going…
January 22, 2014 in Learn
The Best Chrome Extensions for Web Professionals
It’s no secret that web designers and developers love the Google Chrome web browser and Chrome Extensions. The strength of the Chrome Developer Tools make it an excellent choice for web design and development work. The Chrome DevTools provide lots of…
January 16, 2014 in Learn
Accepting Voice Input in HTML5 Forms
The way that we interact with computers has changed dramatically over the past decade. Touch-screen devices and laptop trackpads have enabled a much more intuitive form of interaction than is achievable using a traditional mouse. These changes haven’t been limited…
January 6, 2014 in Learn
Automating Web Performance Best Practices with mod_pagespeed
Web performance is a brilliant, but sometimes complex world. Concatenating and minifying files, optimizing images, setting up caching, these are all tasks that can lead to great performance wins. We know that this stuff is good for performance but actually…
January 3, 2014 in Learn
Improving Your Development Workflow with Yeoman
With so many great tools available to front-end web developers these days it can sometimes be difficult to understand how they all fit together. Deciding on a workflow that you’re happy with is often a very personal endeavour, but getting…
December 31, 2013 in Learn
How to Keep Up with the Web Industry
It can feel impossible to stay up to date with the latest news and information in the web industry. It seems like every week there are new front-end frameworks, new JavaScript projects, new must-have apps, and so much more. How…
December 30, 2013 in Learn
Getting Started with Bower
There are now more libraries and frameworks available for front-end development than ever before. It’s not uncommon to have five or more of these libraries involved in a single project. But keeping track of all these libraries and making sure…
December 23, 2013 in Learn
Building Multi-Touch Web Applications
With mobile web browsing now accounting for 15% of all global internet traffic building web applications targeted at mobile has become more important than ever. Building for mobile is very different to creating web applications targeted at the desktop environment….