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How to put in writing a wonderful Studies Essay

March 15th, 2016 No comments

How to put in writing a wonderful Studies Essay

Establishing a huge Composition of your Essay

When the published research related to one’s own dissertation, is completed, you must go through the details it’s likely you have collected as well deal with this item realize substantive option. As well as to checking the data, incidents, and beliefs that report with your area. You could go up to comprehend a new pros and cons importantly other side while in the issue. Traditionally, a new essayist proceeds to cause a variety of things to consider which will weigh up your current is worth regarding shore from your subject definitely laid out. As a rule, very own dissertation is certainly contains further down properties:

  • An subjective (maybe conclusions) of an leading features located in the best report,
  • Your result combined with give an account to the ability you might have gained coupled with deciphering together with the statistics for these person who reads, and
  • Your analysis of the assumptions that had been released, their play acted debate that you’ve established, your natural contradictions explained through your materials, and then the proof you’ll have got.

my custom writing essay

Since it is your hope to attain a precise collection of site reader, you really need to adapt every different element some essay or dissertation to achieve all of the anticipation and demands of that viewer’s you have selected. It is going to customize the classifications a person give to these types of, usually the syntax have, as well details yourself include in composition. And, a person’s viewpoint is vital listed here, by natural means care to analyze why some choices was that this bear which they did by having an topic and tell you your trusty step to these people. Those who are publishing per literary groundwork, avoid your remorseful you’ve any other when building your individual proceedings the total amount is likely to show that work like all your thesis whole-heartedly. Relatively, endure your current affirm due to raving about extra fictional helps among the same period.

Making Your Essay Greater Effective

Be confident a person will completely grasp which a person’s starting points experienced trying to say because the ideas many tried to be, this is because it is actually impossible you’ll be able to uphold your incredible thesis if you do it. Make sure to include a plain overview of almost everything have read so to create often the recommendations for the assessment. Instance, for everybody who is assessing the meaning behind Shakespeare’ise “Hamlet,” you must write about some of the individuals, the exact specifying, along with the story. The actual paper also need to add these kinds significant organizations:

  • In some of the intro, it is important to pick up a reader’ersus significance, point to your present suggestions, put in a no an absolute necessity training personal details, while stating your prized dissertation (and that is an absolute dubious component) last vague durations.
  • In the bodies cells with your paper, it is important to incorporate specified great examples that can ensure the you earn backed by paragraphs, upgrades, side by side somparisons, points, with prices out of the supplies. Can always, each varieties anyone deliver is to be well-analyzed to guide currently the assertion you create.
  • In the bottom, it is important to speak one’s own dissertation immediately in the interests of motivation and as a consequence go over the main points you have made inside the body regarding your composition.
  • To sustain a readers’ desire for the people, consider and have a thought-provoking point could possibly leave the him thinking within your thinking even after they’ve got setup your primary report supply.
  • The post How to put in writing a wonderful Studies Essay appeared first on Visual Swirl Design Resources.

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How to be able to any good Analytic Essay

March 15th, 2016 No comments

How to be able to any good Analytic Essay

Establishing a major Formatting within your Essay

When the data relating to an individuals thesis, is complete, yourrrll want to think about the intel you might have collected as well as a react to this item it’s also possible to thoughtful procedure used. This can be accomplished through studying evidence, statements, and in addition suppositions that report into a make any difference. Definitely beging learning decipher the exact pros and cons of all of opposition perimeters inside factor. In many cases, some essayist goes on to create a variety of exam questions in a position to newly constructed and older some sort of is worth of any team on this element clearly stated. Normally, a person’s composition will likely comprised of the foregoing elements:

  • An summary (potentially ) to your large subject material built into you’re essay or dissertation,
  • Your response to and thus airport terminal the words may possibly obtained and also handling through the hard drive regarding target audience, and
  • Your research logic which might be done, a new acted choice you could have come across, the entire built in contradictions introduced by your places, and in addition the details you have stored.

writing essay services

Since it’s your be sure to limit an actual kindof site reader, you should have transform every single and every section those essay to get to know unquestionably the hope and wishes using the target audience you have decided. This kind of customize meanings the person contribute towards each of them, our own sentence structure buy, the information and facts your use in an essay or dissertation. Then others, your main perception is key next, by natural means would love to chat the reason your favorite people delivered a person’s terrain these was able to do through the use of challenge and after that list the actual be managed by people. If you wish to crafting articles a meaningful fictional examine, do not use a good apologetic angle when deciding on your present circumstances because will probably signify the job consider an thesis whole-heartedly. Rather than, reinforce the best reclaim courtesy of – writing about all the literary gets results of the very grow older.

Making Our Article Good deal more Effective

Be certain yourself be aware of the activities a person’s vendors were saying effectively as the guidelines he or she aimed to construct, this is because it will likely be improbable that you could help support some thesis when you don’t accomplish. Make time to supply simplified review of whatever have read to be able determine the entire criteria from the conversations. To illustrate, should ml 1410 printer’s madness with Shakespeare’south “Hamlet,” make sure you above generally numbers, a person’s establishing, together with the display. Your current essay or dissertation also needs to add all these most essential organizations:

  • In most of the advantages, it is best to pick up currently the reader’ersus interest fee, tell us your entire people, build a a small amount of critical origin marketing information, and state an individual’s thesis (that may be the actual questionable complication) back great term.
  • In your own body of our essay, you’ll have to afford detailed experiences which experts state validate the actual you are earning determined sentiments, classifications, comparisons, outlines, then prices originating from a citations. Further, regarding pictures they create are well-analyzed to complement an disagreement you are.
  • In the bottom, you want to observe a new thesis even so in the interests of place emphasis together with sum up the small print you made within the body from your report.
  • To help keep your readers’ passion for the people, make sure you involve a thought-provoking interrogation that would walk out these folks thinking throughout your notions following they may have set up your new report separated.
  • The post How to be able to any good Analytic Essay appeared first on Visual Swirl Design Resources.

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7 Ways to Improve Average Order Value of Your Ecommerce Store

March 15th, 2016 No comments
upsell

If you’re an ecommerce entrepreneur, your ultimate goal will be to make more sales and thus more revenue.

In fact, with all the available technologies building an ecommerce store is no longer a tedious task. If you’re on WordPress, all you need to do is to install a plugin like WooCommerce and choose a WordPress theme that fits your business goals.

That said, there are a lot of different ways to generate more revenue from your ecommerce store. Some of them are…

  • Optimize your website for better conversion
  • Entice customers to return more often (customer retention)
  • Persuade your customers to spend more when they do purchase (Increasing average order value)

In this post, let me focus on the third point, increasing the average order value of your ecommerce store.

1. Upsell

Upselling- we have all seen it many times.

Do you remember the last time you ordered a hamburger from a restaurant, the waiter asked you in an attempt to sell more food, “Would you like fries with that?” Yes, that’s a popular example of upselling!

In simple terms, upselling is a common sales technique a seller induces to make a sale more profitable by selling add-ons or more expensive items.

How could you use the upselling tactics to make more sales from your ecommerce store?

Let’s look at the example of Fiverr.com and how they use the upselling tactics to sell more gigs.

Fiverr is a marketplace to for buying and selling small services with the price starting from $5. When you buy a $5 gig from Fiverr, in order to encourage you to spend more, you’ll be provided with an option to purchase extra gigs as an add-on.

Below are a few lessons you can learn from the Fiverr example to increase average order value.

  • Offer add-on sales: Encourage customers to buy a closely related product as an add-on while they do shop. For instance, if you’re selling a laptop you can entice your customers to buy 2 years additional warranty as well.
  • Sell more by default: Customers are so lazy that they even hesitate to buy add-on services along with their original purchase. By default, if you automatically add the upselling products to the cart, chances are they’d end up buying it as well. In fact, if they don’t actually need the add-on products they can always remove them from the cart before completing the order.

2. Cross-sell

Suggesting related products to your customers is one of the best ways to cross-sell from your store. Now the question is what products should you choose as “related products” while cross-selling? Below are a few ideas…

  • Display popular products from the same category if a customer is on a specific product page.
  • Display products based on the purchase history and preferences of each customer.
  • Show “what customers also bought” section.

So while cross-selling, the general rule of thumb is to suggest products that are relevant to the page the user is currently is.

3. Product bundles

Product bundling is a tactic of selling a group of products as a package deal in discounted price.
Best of all, selling in bundles can help you sell more products in a single transaction, yet it is one of the most underutilized selling tactics.

Here are a couple of reasons why offering product bundles can be a great idea…

  • Since the bundles offer discounts, customers often see bundled products as a deal
  • Since it provides a cost saving to customers, bundled products increase the perceived value, so it influences in the purchasing decision of a customer as well.

Men’s socks ecommerce company, Nic Harry is a perfect example of selling bundled products as a deal. They sell limited edition designer accessories as style packs.

4. Free shipping threshold

These days everyone expects free shipping as almost every major retailer offer it. However, providing free shipping might not be a good idea especially when customers purchase a low-priced product.

In such cases, you may entice your customers to purchase more products from your store, so they can avoid paying the shipping cost. Make sure you highlight the shipping threshold right from the product page in order to avoid making your buyer disappointed at the final stage of the buying cycle and to reduce the shopping cart abandonment rate.

According to a comScore study, 58 percent of US online shoppers have added items to their shopping carts to qualify for free shipping, which clearly denotes that making a free shipping threshold can be helpful to increase the average order value.

5. Loyalty rewards program

Loyalty rewards programs are yet another under-utilized way of increasing average order value as well as increasing customer loyalty to your brand.

Let’s take a look at an example of a highly successful customer loyalty programs.

loyalty

Shoemakers Van-Dal rewards their customers 1 point for every £1 spent. In addition, they also offer bonus 40 and 80 points for spending over £100 and £150 respectively on every single transaction, which can undoubtedly help to increase the average order value.

6. Optimize checkout page

Hostgator’s checkout page is a perfect example of optimizing the checkout page for increasing the average order value.

Have a look at the screenshot of Hostgator’s default checkout page below.

hostgator-checkout

In this checkout page, you can see that Hostgator is trying to increase the AOV by 2 ways.

  1. By default, they added hosting addons to the order.
  2. As the default option, they chose the longest billing cycle (36 months)

Although Hostgator is not in the ecommerce business, the idea of optimizing the checkout page for improving the order value is totally applicable to any ecommerce business.

Optimizing your checkout page will probably look like an easy strategy to raise average order value. However, make sure your strategy doesn’t scare your end customers. One way to do this is by A/B testing with different versions of your checkout pages.

7. Offer discount on a minimum spend threshold

One of the easiest ways to increase average order value is by offering discounts on a minimum spend threshold. This can be a nice strategy especially when you have dead stock that needs to be cleared.

For example, if you’re looking to clear all of your dead stocks, rather than offering a flat discount, keep a minimum purchase threshold, which will entice your customers to spend more.

Which tactic is your favorite when it comes to improving the AOV? Share your thoughts with us in the comments section.

Read More at 7 Ways to Improve Average Order Value of Your Ecommerce Store

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

How to build your portfolio with freelance projects

March 15th, 2016 No comments

When I first learned to code, and started looking for freelance web design projects, I felt like I was in a Catch-22. My portfolio was totally empty; but I couldn’t fill it with impressive projects without any clients. It’s a tough spot to be in in an industry where your work is much more important than your skillset. You don’t land big clients by listing your coding chops on a resume. You get those high-paying jobs by showing them what you can do. In other words, clients want to see proof of what you can create for them before they give you a check.

But after working with freelance clients as a beginner, and coaching hundreds of students through the process of getting their first clients, I can tell you that building an impressive portfolio as a beginner is totally possible.

Should I do free projects to stock my portfolio?

Now, it’s easy to do a few projects “on the house” for your friends or family, or even for a more traditional client. But I’m willing to bet you didn’t learn to code just so you could give back to the community. You probably wanted to make some money off those highly in-demand skills too. Even though it might be scary to ask for money the first few times, I’ve found — and talked to many freelancers who agree — that charging for your projects even as a beginner ensures that:

  • your client will take your work and your time commitment seriously;
  • you will take the project more seriously.

Think about it: if you get a set of free concert tickets, how upset would you be if you missed the event? Or if you were late? Now what if you paid $50 bucks? Might be some encouragement to get off the couch and put on real pants, huh? The same holds true with freelance jobs. When there’s money at stake, it makes everyone take the deal more seriously, from sticking to deadlines, to getting feedback on your designs. And believe me, as a beginner, you already spend tons of time just figuring things out. You don’t want to waste more of it going back and forth with a client who isn’t taking the project seriously.

Besides, you have skills that other people need to make their businesses run, and that’s worth some money, even if you’re just starting out.

How to find your first freelance clients

So where do you find those initial paying clients when your portfolio is [imagine the sound of crickets chirping here]?

Start with your local community

Your local community is a great place to start, especially if you’re already plugged in. Does your favorite coffee shop have a website from the 90s? Do you find yourself searching for the takeout menu of your favorite Indian place; but it’s nowhere to be found? Or have you noticed a local boutique that could benefit from an online shop? Even if a stranger would be nervous about hiring you, someone who knows and trusts you will be more willing to give you a chance to show what you can do.

Join an online group

But you don’t have to give up on your personal network if you live in the middle of nowhere. I got all of my early freelance gigs through my Skillcrush network. After I took a career blueprint, I joined an alumni community board where I could ask questions and keep up with my classmates. I found my first gigs listed there! Find an online community that resonates with you, and stay engaged. It’s easier to get jobs from a small pool of people in a community than in a more public setting.

Don’t forget about job boards

That said, you can find freelance projects on job boards. How novel! In a world where I got my last job offer via Gchat, it’s easy to forget about more established resources like job boards. Look at boards that feature a lot of temporary projects (I really like Idealist!) or cater specifically to freelancers, like Freelancer. Following a few best practices can really up your success rate with job boards as well.

Get referrals from previous clients

As soon as you get that very first client, you’ve locked onto the lifeline. Here’s what I mean. One of the reasons it’s tough starting out is because it’s much easier to get clients from word-of-mouth than from a cold email. It makes sense. Clients would rather go with someone a friend recommends than take a chance on a freelancer who might not pan out. Make sure to ask your very first clients to tell their friends about you, feel free to ask them for testimonials (you can even help them with the testimonial, if they don’t know what to say), and see if you can credit yourself on the project.

Specialize in an area you’re already an expert in

You might be a beginner in web design, but I bet you have some expertise in another field, especially if you’re transitioning out of an industry and into tech. For example, I started coding after I had just finished graduate school in English, so I had lots of experience with literary and publishing communities. Largely because of that, I started out doing freelance projects for authors and speakers in that space. We had common ground and those clients trusted me to understand their needs and problems. Here’s another example: Jen Kehl was a blogger who took a course on WordPress so she could fix her own blog without asking for (or waiting for) help from someone else. With her new skills, she was able to build a freelance business helping other bloggers like her with common problems like migrating sites, setting up SEO, and customizing WordPress themes. No matter what field you’re coming from, chances are some people in that industry could benefit from your new web design skills. And because you have a history and you understand how to help them, they’re much more likely to trust you, even if you’re a beginner at web design.

Starter projects

I’ve talked to so many beginners who think that they can’t put anything in their resumes except for entire websites coded from scratch; and that is so not the case! Your web design portfolio can include everything from simple concepts to complete polished websites, and everything in between.

Customize a theme

A great first project to add to your portfolio is a simple customized theme or template for a CMS or platform like Squarespace or WordPress.com. It’s good for you because it’s much simpler than building a site from scratch. Most likely you’ll just need HTML and CSS to update colors and fonts or modify layouts. Plus, you’ll get practice working with a client. While you can’t make tons of money off projects like these, they are a great stepping stone and will give you something you can add to your portfolio. Just make sure to explain exactly what you tweaked when you showcase the work on your site.

Create an email template

Another great project to add to your portfolio is a custom HTML email template using MailChimp or another email marketing service. Email marketing is a basic need in many businesses these days, and you’ll likely be able to create a custom template using just HTML and CSS. Like customizing themes, these templates might not pay as well as larger projects, but you can definitely feature them in your portfolio.

Build a simple website

Remember that local community you planned to tap into? An excellent first project is to build a super simple site using basic HTML and CSS (and maybe a few jQuery plugins) for a local business. As long as the clients don’t need to be able to update the site themselves, a custom static site should be just fine for them. One-page resume sites are a great place to start.

Next-level projects

Starter projects can be a great way to start adding substance to your portfolio, but eventually, you’re going to want to start showcasing some more complex work, so you can raise your rates and build up your reputation as a web designer. Luckily, you don’t have to go from that 1-page website to a 100-page e-commerce site. There are plenty of next-level projects in between those extremes.

Build a custom WordPress site

When you’re ready to take your projects to the next level and start getting hired for more complex (and higher-paying projects), look to WordPress. Not only does WordPress make it possible for you to build a robust site with lots of functionality even when you’re just starting out, it’s also something that clients want. Think about it: would you rather have a website you can’t update without asking for help and paying a designer, or a website you can add your daily specials to, or use as a blog to promote your business? Rather than building a theme completely from scratch, use a starter theme like Underscores, Hatch, or Bones that gives you the bones (!) to go from. Once you have a few custom WordPress sites on your portfolio, you’ll be able to get more momentum in terms of the rates you charge and the demand for your work.

Update an out-of-date site

In the aftermath of Google’s “mobilegeddon”, lots of companies and professionals have realized that their old-fashioned, static websites need a serious update. If a site is old enough, you’ll probably want to start over, but some clients will want to work with you to make an existing site responsive. These kinds of projects can be really tough, especially depending on how organized the code was to begin with; but they can help you build out your portfolio while you’re working on your mobile design skills. Another option is to take a static HTML and CSS site and make it interactive by adding some JavaScript or jQuery functionality, like smooth scroll, a Twitter feed, or an image slider.

Why you should start before your portfolio is ready

Now, if you’re looking at a completely empty portfolio, the thought of adding all these projects can be intimidating. But here’s the thing: You don’t have to wait ‘til your portfolio is stocked with impressive work (or until you really feel like a web designer) to start booking clients. In fact, you’ll notice that plenty of these projects depend on you working your way up from those first simple projects to more complex websites. Even if you just started learning to code, it’s better to start going after the clients you want now than to wait till you feel like you’re ready. Before you know it, you’ll be looking at an impressive portfolio with your name on it!

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Creating an SVG Icon System with React

March 15th, 2016 No comments
tag. You could, but then every icon would be an individual request and you wouldn’t have access change parts of the SVG, such as the fill color.

Using allows us to keep the path data and basic appearance of our icons defined in one place so that they could be updated once and change everywhere, while still giving us the benefit of updating them on the fly.

Joni Trythall has a great article about use and SVG icons, and Chris Coyier wrote another awesome article here on CSS-Tricks as well.

Here’s a small example if you’d like to see what the markup looks like:

See the Pen bc5441283414ae5085f3c19e2fd3f7f2 by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

Why bother with SVG Icons?

Some of you at this point might be wondering why we would use an SVG icon system rather than an icon font to begin with. We have our own comparison on that subject. Plus there are a ton of people writing and speaking about this right now

Here are some of the more compelling reasons, in my mind:

  • Icon fonts are hard to make accessible. SVG has the ability to add title and ARIA tags, which provide a huge boon to accessibility, particularly in cases when the icon is alone and a single source of informative navigation. Think: blind people, dyslexic people, the elderly (You will be elderly too someday, hopefully, so if you’re not the kind of dev to care about this subset, do it for the karma! But seriously, care for the elderly.)
  • Icon fonts aren’t as crisp on some displays. You can avoid this by doing some fancy font-smoothing in CSS, but here’s one caveat I’ve noticed: it’s difficult to override without turning font-smoothing off entirely. SVGs are more crisp in general, drawing is what they’re built for.
  • Icon fonts fail a good amount of the time. Most developers I know have run into scenarios with missing glyph X in a box, there are a lot of ways that icon fonts can fail where SVGs do not. Be it CORS problems or Opera mini, it’s a headache.
  • Icon fonts are difficult to position. They’re an image that you’re positioning with font styles. ‘Nuff said. You can’t animate pieces of them without hacky stacking. SVGs offer a navigable DOM to animate parts of an icon, or colorize sections. Not everyone would want to do this, but it sure is nice to have the option.

If you’re like me and updating an enormous codebase, where in order to move over from an icon font to SVG you’d have to update literally hundreds of instances of markup, I get it. I do. It might not be worth the time in that instance. But if you’re rewriting your views and updating them with React, it’s worth revisiting an opportunity here.

Tl;dr: You don’t need in React

After Michael patiently listened to me explain how we use and had me show him an example icon system, his solution was simple: it’s not really necessary.

Consider this: the only reason we were defining icons to then reuse them (usually as s in ) was so that we didn’t have to repeat ourselves and could just update the SVG paths in one spot. But React already allows for that. We simply create the component:

// Icon
const IconUmbrella = React.createClass({
 render() {
   return (
     <svg className="umbrella" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 32 32" aria-labelledby="title">
	<title>Umbrella Icon</title>
        <path d="M27 14h5c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2v0zM27 14c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2v0 14c0 1.112-0.895 2-2 2-1.112 0-2-0.896-2-2.001v-1.494c0-0.291 0.224-0.505 0.5-0.505 0.268 0 0.5 0.226 0.5 0.505v1.505c0 0.547 0.444 0.991 1 0.991 0.552 0 1-0.451 1-0.991v-14.009c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-5.415 6.671-9.825 15-9.995v-1.506c0-0.283 0.224-0.499 0.5-0.499 0.268 0 0.5 0.224 0.5 0.499v1.506c8.329 0.17 15 4.58 15 9.995h-5z"/>
      </svg>
   )
 }
});

// which makes this reusable component for other views
<IconUmbrella />

See the Pen SVG Icon in React by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

And we can use it again and again, but unlike the older way, we don’t have an additional HTTP request.

Two SVG-ish things you might notice from the above example. One, I don’t have this kind of output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- Generated by IcoMoon.io -->
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">

Or even this on the SVG tag itself:

<svg version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" …

That’s because I’ve made certain to optimize my SVGs with SVGOMG or SVGO before adding the markup everywhere. I strongly suggest you do as well, as you can reduce the size of your SVG by a respectable amount. I usually see percentages around 30% but can go as high as 60% or more.

Another thing you may notice is I’m adding a title and ARIA tag. This is going to help screen readers speak the icon for people who are using assistive technologies.

 <svg className="umbrella" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 32 32" aria-labelledby="title">
  <title>Umbrella Icon</title>

The best part, perhaps

Here’s a really cool part of this whole thing: aside from not needing additional HTTP requests, I can also completely update the shape of the SVG in the future without any need for markup changes, since the component is self-contained. Even better than that, I don’t need to load the entire icon font (or SVG sprite) on every page. With all of the icons componentized, I can use something like webpack to “opt-in” to whatever icons I need for a given view. With the weight of fonts, and particularly heavy icon font glyphs, that’s a huge possibility for a performance boon.

All of that, plus: we can mutate parts of the icon on the fly with color or animation in a very simple way with SVG and props.

Mutating it on the fly

One thing here you might have noticed is we’re not yet adjusting it on the fly, which is part of the reason we’re using SVG in the first place, right? We can declare some default props on the icon and then change them, like so:

// App
const App = React.createClass({
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <IconOffice />
        <IconOffice />
      </div>
    )
  }
});

// Icon
const IconOffice = React.createClass({
  getDefaultProps() {
    return {
      width: '100px',
      height: '200px'
    };
  },
 render() {
   return (
     <svg className="office" width={this.props.width} height={this.props.height} xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 188.5 188.5" aria-labelledby="title">
        <title>Office Icon</title>
        ...
      </svg>
   )
 }
});
 
ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.querySelector("#main"));

See the Pen SVG Icon in React with default props by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

Let’s take it a step further, and change out some of the appearance based on the instance. We can use props for this, and declare some default props.

I love SVG because we now have a navigable DOM, so below let’s change the color of multiple shapes on the fly with fill. Keep in mind that if you’re used to dealing with icon fonts, you’re no longer changing the color with color, but rather with fill instead. You can check the second example below to see this in action, the books have changed their color. I also love the ability to animate these pieces on the fly, below we’ve wrapped it in a div to animate it very easily with CSS (you may need to hit rerun to see the animation play):

See the Pen SVG Icon in React with default props and animation by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

// App
const App = React.createClass({
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <div className="switcher">
          <IconOffice />
        </div>
        <IconOffice bookfill="orange" bookside="#39B39B" bookfront="#76CEBD" />
        <IconOffice />
      </div>
    )
  }
});

// Icon
const IconOffice = React.createClass({
  getDefaultProps() {
    return {
      width: '100px',
      height: '200px',
      bookfill: '#f77b55',
      bookside: '#353f49',
      bookfront: '#474f59'
    };
  },
 render() {
   return (
     <svg className="office" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width={this.props.width} height={this.props.height} viewBox="0 0 188.5 188.5" aria-labelledby="title">
        <title>Office Icon</title>
        <g className="cls-2">
          <circle id="background" className="cls-3" cx="94.2" cy="94.2" r="94.2"/>
          <path className="cls-4" d="M50.3 69.8h10.4v72.51H50.3z"/>
          <path fill={this.props.bookside} d="M50.3 77.5h10.4v57.18H50.3z"/>
          <path fill={this.props.bookfront} d="M60.7 77.5h38.9v57.19H60.7z"/>
          <path className="cls-7" d="M60.7 69.8h38.9v7.66H60.7z"/>
          <path className="cls-5" d="M60.7 134.7h38.9v7.66H60.7z"/>
          ...
      </svg>
   )
 }
});
 
ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.querySelector("#main"));
.switcher .office {
  #bulb { animation: switch 3s 4 ease both; }
  #background { animation: fillChange 3s 4 ease both; }
}

@keyframes switch {
  50% {
    opacity: 1;
  }
}

@keyframes fillChange {
  50% {
    fill: #FFDB79;
  }
}

One of my awesome coworkers at Trulia, Mattia Toso, also recommended a really nice, much more clean way of declaring all of these props. We can reduce repetition of the the this.props here by declaring const for all our uses, and then just simply apply the variable instead:

render() {
   const { height, width, bookfill, bookside, bookfront } = this.props;
   return (
     <svg className="office" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width={width} height={height} viewBox="0 0 188.5 188.5" aria-labelledby="title">
        <title>Office Icon</title>
        <g className="cls-2">
          <circle id="background" className="cls-3" cx="94.2" cy="94.2" r="94.2"/>
          <path className="cls-4" d="M50.3 69.8h10.4v72.51H50.3z"/>
          <path fill={bookside} d="M50.3 77.5h10.4v57.18H50.3z"/>
          <path fill={bookfront} d="M60.7 77.5h38.9v57.19H60.7z"/>

We can also make this even more awesome by declaring propTypes on the props we are using. PropTypes are super helpful because they are like living docs for the props we are reusing.

propTypes: {
  width: string,
  height: string,
  bookfill: string,
  bookside: string,
  bookfront: string
},

That way if we use them improperly, like in the example below, we will get a console error that won’t stop our code from running, but alerts other people we might be collaborating with (or ourselves) that we’re using props incorrectly. Here, I’m using a number instead of a string for my props.

<IconOffice bookfill={200} bookside="#39B39B" bookfront="#76CEBD" />

And I get the following error:

I recently went to Michael Jackson and Ryan Florence’s ReactJS Training. I was really excited to attend, partially because I had so many questions about SVG and React. There are a lot of bits about working with React and SVG, and especially manipulating it, that aren’t quite supported yet. One of the major gaps for me was the element, as most SVG icon systems are built with .

I asked Michael if he thought better support might be coming for some of these features, but he showed me a much better way of working with it, circumventing this method entirely. We’ll go over this technique so that you can get started writing scalable SVG Icon Systems in React, as well as some tricks I’d propose could work nicely, too.

Note: It’s worth saying that use support was recently improved, but I’ve noticed it’s spotty at best and there are other routing and XML issues. We’ll show you another, cleaner way here.

What is ?

For those not familiar how SVG icon systems are typically built, it works a little like this. The element clones a copy of any other SVG shape element with the ID you reference in the xlink:href attribute, and still manipulate it without reiterating all of the path data. You may wonder why one wouldn’t just use an SVG as an tag. You could, but then every icon would be an individual request and you wouldn’t have access change parts of the SVG, such as the fill color.

Using allows us to keep the path data and basic appearance of our icons defined in one place so that they could be updated once and change everywhere, while still giving us the benefit of updating them on the fly.

Joni Trythall has a great article about use and SVG icons, and Chris Coyier wrote another awesome article here on CSS-Tricks as well.

Here’s a small example if you’d like to see what the markup looks like:

See the Pen bc5441283414ae5085f3c19e2fd3f7f2 by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

Why bother with SVG Icons?

Some of you at this point might be wondering why we would use an SVG icon system rather than an icon font to begin with. We have our own comparison on that subject. Plus there are a ton of people writing and speaking about this right now

Here are some of the more compelling reasons, in my mind:

  • Icon fonts are hard to make accessible. SVG has the ability to add title and ARIA tags, which provide a huge boon to accessibility, particularly in cases when the icon is alone and a single source of informative navigation. Think: blind people, dyslexic people, the elderly (You will be elderly too someday, hopefully, so if you’re not the kind of dev to care about this subset, do it for the karma! But seriously, care for the elderly.)
  • Icon fonts aren’t as crisp on some displays. You can avoid this by doing some fancy font-smoothing in CSS, but here’s one caveat I’ve noticed: it’s difficult to override without turning font-smoothing off entirely. SVGs are more crisp in general, drawing is what they’re built for.
  • Icon fonts fail a good amount of the time. Most developers I know have run into scenarios with missing glyph X in a box, there are a lot of ways that icon fonts can fail where SVGs do not. Be it CORS problems or Opera mini, it’s a headache.
  • Icon fonts are difficult to position. They’re an image that you’re positioning with font styles. ‘Nuff said. You can’t animate pieces of them without hacky stacking. SVGs offer a navigable DOM to animate parts of an icon, or colorize sections. Not everyone would want to do this, but it sure is nice to have the option.

If you’re like me and updating an enormous codebase, where in order to move over from an icon font to SVG you’d have to update literally hundreds of instances of markup, I get it. I do. It might not be worth the time in that instance. But if you’re rewriting your views and updating them with React, it’s worth revisiting an opportunity here.

Tl;dr: You don’t need in React

After Michael patiently listened to me explain how we use and had me show him an example icon system, his solution was simple: it’s not really necessary.

Consider this: the only reason we were defining icons to then reuse them (usually as s in ) was so that we didn’t have to repeat ourselves and could just update the SVG paths in one spot. But React already allows for that. We simply create the component:

// Icon
const IconUmbrella = React.createClass({
 render() {
   return (
     <svg className="umbrella" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 32 32" aria-labelledby="title">
	<title>Umbrella Icon</title>
        <path d="M27 14h5c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2v0zM27 14c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2v0 14c0 1.112-0.895 2-2 2-1.112 0-2-0.896-2-2.001v-1.494c0-0.291 0.224-0.505 0.5-0.505 0.268 0 0.5 0.226 0.5 0.505v1.505c0 0.547 0.444 0.991 1 0.991 0.552 0 1-0.451 1-0.991v-14.009c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-5.415 6.671-9.825 15-9.995v-1.506c0-0.283 0.224-0.499 0.5-0.499 0.268 0 0.5 0.224 0.5 0.499v1.506c8.329 0.17 15 4.58 15 9.995h-5z"/>
      </svg>
   )
 }
});

// which makes this reusable component for other views
<IconUmbrella />

See the Pen SVG Icon in React by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

And we can use it again and again, but unlike the older way, we don’t have an additional HTTP request.

Two SVG-ish things you might notice from the above example. One, I don’t have this kind of output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- Generated by IcoMoon.io -->
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN" "http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">

Or even this on the SVG tag itself:

<svg version="1.1" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" …

That’s because I’ve made certain to optimize my SVGs with SVGOMG or SVGO before adding the markup everywhere. I strongly suggest you do as well, as you can reduce the size of your SVG by a respectable amount. I usually see percentages around 30% but can go as high as 60% or more.

Another thing you may notice is I’m adding a title and ARIA tag. This is going to help screen readers speak the icon for people who are using assistive technologies.

 <svg className="umbrella" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 32 32" aria-labelledby="title">
  <title>Umbrella Icon</title>

The best part, perhaps

Here’s a really cool part of this whole thing: aside from not needing additional HTTP requests, I can also completely update the shape of the SVG in the future without any need for markup changes, since the component is self-contained. Even better than that, I don’t need to load the entire icon font (or SVG sprite) on every page. With all of the icons componentized, I can use something like webpack to “opt-in” to whatever icons I need for a given view. With the weight of fonts, and particularly heavy icon font glyphs, that’s a huge possibility for a performance boon.

All of that, plus: we can mutate parts of the icon on the fly with color or animation in a very simple way with SVG and props.

Mutating it on the fly

One thing here you might have noticed is we’re not yet adjusting it on the fly, which is part of the reason we’re using SVG in the first place, right? We can declare some default props on the icon and then change them, like so:

// App
const App = React.createClass({
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <IconOffice />
        <IconOffice width="200" height="200"/>
      </div>
    )
  }
});

// Icon
const IconOffice = React.createClass({
  getDefaultProps() {
    return {
      width: '100px',
      height: '200px'
    };
  },
 render() {
   return (
     <svg className="office" width={this.props.width} height={this.props.height} xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" viewBox="0 0 188.5 188.5" aria-labelledby="title">
        <title>Office Icon</title>
        ...
      </svg>
   )
 }
});
 
ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.querySelector("#main"));

See the Pen SVG Icon in React with default props by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

Let’s take it a step further, and change out some of the appearance based on the instance. We can use props for this, and declare some default props.

I love SVG because we now have a navigable DOM, so below let’s change the color of multiple shapes on the fly with fill. Keep in mind that if you’re used to dealing with icon fonts, you’re no longer changing the color with color, but rather with fill instead. You can check the second example below to see this in action, the books have changed their color. I also love the ability to animate these pieces on the fly, below we’ve wrapped it in a div to animate it very easily with CSS (you may need to hit rerun to see the animation play):

See the Pen SVG Icon in React with default props and animation by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

// App
const App = React.createClass({
  render() {
    return (
      <div>
        <div className="switcher">
          <IconOffice />
        </div>
        <IconOffice bookfill="orange" bookside="#39B39B" bookfront="#76CEBD" />
        <IconOffice width="200" height="200" />
      </div>
    )
  }
});

// Icon
const IconOffice = React.createClass({
  getDefaultProps() {
    return {
      width: '100px',
      height: '200px',
      bookfill: '#f77b55',
      bookside: '#353f49',
      bookfront: '#474f59'
    };
  },
 render() {
   return (
     <svg className="office" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width={this.props.width} height={this.props.height} viewBox="0 0 188.5 188.5" aria-labelledby="title">
        <title>Office Icon</title>
        <g className="cls-2">
          <circle id="background" className="cls-3" cx="94.2" cy="94.2" r="94.2"/>
          <path className="cls-4" d="M50.3 69.8h10.4v72.51H50.3z"/>
          <path fill={this.props.bookside} d="M50.3 77.5h10.4v57.18H50.3z"/>
          <path fill={this.props.bookfront} d="M60.7 77.5h38.9v57.19H60.7z"/>
          <path className="cls-7" d="M60.7 69.8h38.9v7.66H60.7z"/>
          <path className="cls-5" d="M60.7 134.7h38.9v7.66H60.7z"/>
          ...
      </svg>
   )
 }
});
 
ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.querySelector("#main"));
.switcher .office {
  #bulb { animation: switch 3s 4 ease both; }
  #background { animation: fillChange 3s 4 ease both; }
}

@keyframes switch {
  50% {
    opacity: 1;
  }
}

@keyframes fillChange {
  50% {
    fill: #FFDB79;
  }
}

One of my awesome coworkers at Trulia, Mattia Toso, also recommended a really nice, much more clean way of declaring all of these props. We can reduce repetition of the the this.props here by declaring const for all our uses, and then just simply apply the variable instead:

render() {
   const { height, width, bookfill, bookside, bookfront } = this.props;
   return (
     <svg className="office" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width={width} height={height} viewBox="0 0 188.5 188.5" aria-labelledby="title">
        <title>Office Icon</title>
        <g className="cls-2">
          <circle id="background" className="cls-3" cx="94.2" cy="94.2" r="94.2"/>
          <path className="cls-4" d="M50.3 69.8h10.4v72.51H50.3z"/>
          <path fill={bookside} d="M50.3 77.5h10.4v57.18H50.3z"/>
          <path fill={bookfront} d="M60.7 77.5h38.9v57.19H60.7z"/>

We can also make this even more awesome by declaring propTypes on the props we are using. PropTypes are super helpful because they are like living docs for the props we are reusing.

propTypes: {
  width: string,
  height: string,
  bookfill: string,
  bookside: string,
  bookfront: string
},

That way if we use them improperly, like in the example below, we will get a console error that won’t stop our code from running, but alerts other people we might be collaborating with (or ourselves) that we’re using props incorrectly. Here, I’m using a number instead of a string for my props.

<IconOffice bookfill={200} bookside="#39B39B" bookfront="#76CEBD" />

And I get the following error:

See the Pen SVG Icon in React with spread with error by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

Even more slender with React 0.14+

In newer versions of React, we can reduce some of this cruft and simplify our code even more, but only if it’s a very “dumb” component, e.g. it doesn’t take lifecycle methods. Icons are a pretty good use case for this, since we’re mostly just rendering, so let’s try it out. We can be rid of React.createClass and write our components as simple functions. This is pretty sweet if you’ve been using JavaScript for a long time but are less familiar with React itself- it reads like the functions we’re all used to. Let’s clean up our props even further and reuse the umbrella icon just as we would on a website.

// App
function App() {
  return (
    <div>
      <Header />
      <IconUmbrella />
      <IconUmbrella umbrellafill="#333" />
      <IconUmbrella umbrellafill="#ccc" />
    </div>
  )
}
 
// Header
function Header() {
 return (
   <h3>Hello, world!</h3>
 )
}

// Icon
function IconUmbrella(props) {
  const umbrellafill = props.umbrellafill || 'orangered'
  
  return (
    <svg className="umbrella" xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="32" height="32" viewBox="0 0 32 32" aria-labelledby="title">
      <title>Umbrella</title>
      <path fill={umbrellafill} d="M27 14h5c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2v0zM27 14c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2v0 14c0 1.112-0.895 2-2 2-1.112 0-2-0.896-2-2.001v-1.494c0-0.291 0.224-0.505 0.5-0.505 0.268 0 0.5 0.226 0.5 0.505v1.505c0 0.547 0.444 0.991 1 0.991 0.552 0 1-0.451 1-0.991v-14.009c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-1.105-1.119-2-2.5-2s-2.5 0.895-2.5 2c0-5.415 6.671-9.825 15-9.995v-1.506c0-0.283 0.224-0.499 0.5-0.499 0.268 0 0.5 0.224 0.5 0.499v1.506c8.329 0.17 15 4.58 15 9.995h-5z"/>
    </svg>
  )
}
 
ReactDOM.render(<App />, document.querySelector("#main"));

See the Pen SVG Icon in React by Sarah Drasner (@sdras) on CodePen.

SVG icon systems are beautifully simple and easily extendable in React, have less HTTP requests, and are easy to maintain in the future, due to the fact that we can completely update the output in the future without any repetitive markup changes. We can increase performance by opting into exactly what we need. We can change them on the fly with props for color and even add CSS animation. All of this, and we can also make them accessible for screen readers, which makes React and SVG icon systems a really nice way to add icons to views on the web.


Creating an SVG Icon System with React is a post from CSS-Tricks

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

Managing Mobile Performance Optimization

March 15th, 2016 No comments

You can’t underestimate the importance of consistent, high-quality web design across devices of all shapes and sizes. Responsive web design is the way forward — but it’s often linked to performance issues. This is critical when 64% of smartphone users unforgivingly expect websites to load in under four seconds, yet average page weights continue to rise.

Managing Mobile Performance Optimization

The best designs balance aesthetics and performance by working with mobile in mind from the start. From setting strict performance budgets to implementing client- and server-side optimization techniques, I’ll share the current mobile performance optimization processes we use at Cyber-Duck.

The post Managing Mobile Performance Optimization appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Categories: Others Tags:

Stripe: Why Your Business and Nonprofit Should be Using it

March 15th, 2016 No comments

In today’s society, online payment systems are a vital part of your business. No matter what kind of organization you run, big, small, nonprofit, startup, side projects, etc. The topic of online payments can be a touchy one. Consumers, as well as business owners, are looking for comfortable, secure, affordable, and efficient online card processing systems. With many options available, it can be difficult choosing which system best fits your needs. Below we have highlighted three reasons as to why your business or organization should be using Stripe.

First things first, Stripe is an online payment system that helps all types of business owners and organizations expand their e-commerce directly on their website interface. Stripe was started by two individuals looking to simplify the way online payment works. They were tired of the tedious setup and checkout processes, making it difficult for both the developer (or organization) and the consumer.

Therefore, they took matters into their own hands and created a system that allows the use of credit card purchases directly from your businesses and/or organizations website- no redirects, no lengthy checkout process, just happy customers making payments on your businesses/ organizations branded page. Read why your organization/ business should be using Stripe.

#1 Cost

The pricing behind Stripe is simple, 2.9% + 30 cents for all successful transactions. No monthly or annual fees and no fixed costs. Everything relating to the cost is transparent -no additional fees for recurring payments, subscriptions, or failed transactions. For your convenience, Stripe accepts all major international credit cards for free. However, there is a currency conversion rate of 2% which is applied automatically.

Stripe The best way to accept payments online or in your apps.png

#2: User experience and satisfaction

When deciding on which online payment platform to use, it is important to take into account its user experience and satisfaction. Is it easy to use, attractive, and/or appropriate? Does it meet your users needs? Stripe does just that; it provides an effortless online money transaction system both for the business/ organization as well as the customers themselves.

For businesses/organizations:

  1. An effortless and straightforward setup making it easy to get your account up and running in no time.
  2. Offers a clean, precise, and minimalistic website design.
  3. Connects with the other apps you already use, so you don’t have to. (Lyft, Shopify, Donately, Xero, among many others)
  4. A comprehensible and clear interface with graphs and charts for real-time analytics.
  5. A seamless checkout process on your company’s/organization’s website, leading to increased conversions or sales
  6. A straightforward control panel, proper documentation, and powerful API.
  7. As a nonprofit, this is an excellent way to increase donations on your website. Check out Charity:water’s page to see how they are using Stripe.

Stripe The best way to accept payments online or in your apps.png

For the user:

  1. The user gets what they paid for.
  2. Provides a piece of cake checkout process, streamlined with minimal steps to ease your way through the experience.
  3. Extremely user-friendly including one-on-one support, how-to guides, and online chats for all your uncertainties.
  4. Allows users to save credit card information for future purchases (making it easier for one-time customers to become regulars).
  5. The user makes the payment directly on your webpage; it is that simple.

#3: Security

Security is most likely your company’s primary concern, especially when dealing with online money transactions. Without a doubt the best feature Stripe has to offer is that it creates a secure platform so you don’t have to.

This is done through Stripe.js. Stripe. js is a javascript that allows you to integrate your customized payment forms. It handles all validation and errors and securely transmits credit card data to the Stripe server. This means all payment information never actually touches your servers.

Stripe The best way to accept payments online or in your apps.png

Why is this important? First and foremost, this prevents hackers from accessing your company’s and/or customer’s credit card data. If there is anything holding a customer back from a purchase, it’s their hesitation to input confidential credit card information. By using a secure money transaction system, clients are more at ease with purchasing on your site. Which in return, can lead to more continuous buying.

In conclusion, implementing Stripe in your business or nonprofit’s website is straightforward, trouble-free, and will ultimately take away the stresses of accepting payment transactions through online channels. It takes just a few minutes– get started today!

About the Author

Stripe: Why Your Business and Nonprofit Should be Using itBecca Bloch is the communications & partnership manager at Elevation Web, a full- service nonprofit website design design agency. As a lifelong volunteer for nonprofits, Becca has taken her passion to the next level, assisting nonprofit organizations in developing an online presence in order to influence greater change within their community. When she isn’t working, Becca enjoys snapping photos, Netflix movie marathons, and catching up on her favorite blogs.

(dpe)

Categories: Others Tags:

The Lodge is Now Free

March 15th, 2016 No comments

No strings. Enjoy.

Oh, also, I redesigned the site a little.

Minor notes:

  • Most stuff is the same. It’s the same fonts, just using Source Sans Pro more and the type is in general a bit larger. Same organization. Same site sections.
  • It’s on a brand new server over at Media Temple. It’s a custom build running PHP 7 with OPCache, MariaDB, nginx-only, SSD hard drives. The site hasn’t felt this fast in years, particularly the logged-in, uncached, back-end, database-y stuff. Perhaps most cool: it’s HTTP/2 now!
  • Every mid-article header has a unique ID now. Hover over them to reveal a # link. This way you can link to parts of any article.
  • Andrew Norcross helped me with a bunch of stuff. High five, Andrew. We’re still working on some stuff, like getting responsive images working across the entire site and the CDN working again. That’s a default feature of WordPress now, only it doesn’t work for me because of the custom markup I’ve long-used for images. We’ll get it though. Speaking of Andrew, we’re also using his Can I Use… shortcode plugin, so I can drop in browser support tables where needed that will stay up to date automatically.
  • The stripy background stuff is LukyVJ’s mixin.

There’s a forum thread discussing the design if you care participate in that. There’s even a new feature in the forums: if you created a thread, you can mark people’s responses as “good answers” if you want to.


The Lodge is Now Free is a post from CSS-Tricks

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

The Lodge is Now Free

March 15th, 2016 No comments

No strings. Enjoy.

Oh, also, I redesigned the site a little.

Minor notes:

  • Most stuff is the same. It’s the same fonts, just using Source Sans Pro more and the type is in general a bit larger. Same organization. Same site sections.
  • It’s on a brand new server over at Media Temple. It’s a custom build running PHP 7 with OPCache, MariaDB, nginx-only, SSD hard drives. The site hasn’t felt this fast in years, particularly the logged-in, uncached, back-end, database-y stuff. Perhaps most cool: it’s HTTP/2 now!
  • Every mid-article header has a unique ID now. Hover over them to reveal a # link. This way you can link to parts of any article.
  • Andrew Norcross helped me with a bunch of stuff. High five, Andrew. We’re still working on some stuff, like getting responsive images working across the entire site and the CDN working again. That’s a default feature of WordPress now, only it doesn’t work for me because of the custom markup I’ve long-used for images. We’ll get it though. Speaking of Andrew, we’re also using his Can I Use… shortcode plugin, so I can drop in browser support tables where needed that will stay up to date automatically.
  • The stripy background stuff is LukyVJ’s mixin.

There’s a forum thread discussing the design if you care participate in that. There’s even a new feature in the forums: if you created a thread, you can mark people’s responses as “good answers” if you want to.


The Lodge is Now Free is a post from CSS-Tricks

Categories: Designing, Others Tags:

Meet Adobe XD: “Experience Design” Tool

March 14th, 2016 No comments
adobe-xd

Last year in October, Adobe told the world that it was planning to release a multipurpose tool meant for prototyping and UX design. Named initially as Project Comet, this was dubbed as Adobe’s most ambitious project in recent times.

The work has progressed since then, and today, Adobe announced the preview release of Adobe Experience Design CC, or Adobe XD for short.

To quote the official blog post:

Great experiences are hard to quantify, but we all know when we are having them. And today, the bar has never been higher in terms of what we all expect from our mobile and web experiences.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Adobe Experience Design CC (Preview). Adobe XD is an early release of our much-anticipated UX design and prototyping solution for the design community to deliver amazing mobile apps and web sites. Initially demo’ed as “Project Comet” at Adobe MAX in October 2015, we are releasing this Preview to invite the full design community to join the thousands of existing pre-release customers to share their feedback, ensuring that designers give critical input into the evolving product features.

adobe-xd

Adobe XD preview is open to anyone with a valid Adobe ID, as a free download. For members with an active Creative Cloud subscription, the commercial version of Adobe Experience Design will be available later this year.

Adobe XD is expected to receive stiff competition from existing players in the niche, especially Sketch. That said, for now, you can learn more about it on this page.

What do you think of Adobe Experience Design? Share your views in the comments below!

Read More at Meet Adobe XD: “Experience Design” Tool

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