At King Design, we strive to keep up with emerging technology and web design standards. Some online sites and podcasts that are extremely helpful in our journey include:
Recently, we attended the Environment for Human’s RWD Summit; an online conference over three days with talks pertaining to responsive web design and development. Finally getting around to organize my notes and thoughts about it, I figured I’d share some tips and resources that other web developers should read more about and try out in their next project.
CanIUse.com
CanIUse.com is a resource where developers can find out the browser support for CSS properties, HTML elements, SVGs, and Javascript calls. I like to use a lot of “newer” CSS3 properties and find myself constantly referencing this site to make sure our sites look great in every browser.
WebPageSpeedTest.com
WebPageTest.org provides a performance analysis for a single domain name. Dave Rupert suggested to use Dulles, VA for the testing location along with 3 test runs. You can also test your site with different connection speeds if you want.
SVG Sprites
Chris Coyier gave a great talk about SVGs (scalable vector graphics) and how to combine them into sprites. Combining multiple SVGs into one sprite sheet can help with your site’s performance. Last year, he wrote a tutorial on how to do this. To help with this process there’s also a Grunt Plugin called SVG Store that’s extremely helpful. Icomoon can also produce a sprite sheet for you with SVGs you select. If you’re looking to just optimize your SVGs, SVGO is what you’re looking for.
RICG Responsive Images Plugin
The RICG Responsive Images WordPress Plugin lets you easily use img srcset with your images in WordPress. If you’re not familiar with using img srcset and/or the picture element for responsive images, the Filament Group has a great tutorial explaining how to use them with their polyfill.
Article Conversion Tips
Jeff Stevens’ talk was about writing web content and I found some quick tips for article conversions really useful that he had found from research that Outbrain had done.
- Titles with 8 words
- Titles with a hypen, colon and/or end with a question mark
- Articles with thumbnails
- Odd numbered lists
- Users remember the first and last items in a list more then the middle
Add To Your Arsenal
Test out some of these new resources on your next project and help make the web as good as it can be. Are there any resources you love and use frequently? Share it in the comments below.
