Instead of presenting drafts and finished layouts to your customer on site, the internet is becoming an increasingly more popular method. While layouts used to be sent via email, there are plenty of tools now, which ease presentation, receiving feedback, and collaboration in general. Apart from pure graphic layouts and mockups, there are also services that take screenshots of websites or allow the user to comment on live sites. Today, we’ll show you four different collaboration tools that help you reach the communicative goal in a variety of ways.
“Live Capture” by InVision: Taking Screenshots via Extension
The first of our four collaboration tools, “Live Capture,” developed by the prototyping platform InVision, provides an extension for Chrome, which allows you to easily take screenshots of websites that you can distribute and receive feedback on.
Taking a Screenshot of a Website via Extension
“Live Capture” doesn’t only take a screenshot of a website’s viewport, but the entire page, in the resolution in which it is currently displayed in the browser. Afterward, the screenshot is available in InVision, and you can share it with your team and clients or whoever you want to share it with.
Commenting on a Screenshot
“Live Capture” allows you to generate and send a link. After that, everyone that has access to the link, as well as a free InVision account, can leave comments on the screenshot. They can be placed on any desired spot in the screenshot.
Drawing On the Screenshot Together via “LiveShare.”
Aside from the simple comment feature, there’s also an option called “LiveShare.” Here, multiple users can work, comment, and discuss a draft together at the same time. For example, you can freely draw and add text to the layout.
For Mac users, there’s a “LiveShare” plugin for Photoshop. You can use it to share your Photoshop workspace with other users.
Using InVision, including “Live Capture”, is free for up to three projects. More projects are possible for 13 to 89 Dollars a month.
Diigo: Receiving Feedback for Live Websites
Those that prefer working on “living” websites, should take a look at Diigo. Using the tool, you can leave comments directly on a website, without taking a screenshot first. To do so, a browser extension which is – currently – only available for Chrome has to be installed.
Creating a Screenshot and Comments via Extension
After having installed the extension, you can create a comment in any spot on any given website. Choose a spot where you want the comment to be available as a note. Alternatively, you can mark text on a website and leave a comment on that.
As it should be, you have the option to invite other users. This way, you can allow access to projects for groups that you can add as many members to as you want. All members of a group can comment, view other’s comments, and respond to them.
Freely Placing Comments on the Website and Marking Them in Different Colors
Of course, these comments are not public, but only visible to the before defined team members. Ordinary visitors don’t see them.
Commenting on a live website does not only have advantages, however. The placement of the comments is fixed. On responsive websites, a site’s elements move depending on the resolution. As the comments stay in the same spot, they are only in the right spot, when they are displayed in a particular resolution.
Besides the free plan, there are also multiple paid plans between 7 and 59 Dollar a year. The paid plans forgo ads, and come with additional features, like searching through the placed comments.
Marqueed: Extensive Sharing and Commenting of Layouts
Marqueed is not only specialized on websites, but also allows sharing and commenting of graphic layouts. Here, you upload mockups in standard file formats. Among others, PDF, as well as Photoshop files are supported. After uploading, they are transformed into “simple” graphics. Multi-page documents are supported for PDF files. Here, the single pages are displayed as individual graphics.
Uploading Layouts in Common Formats or Creating a Screenshot via URL
You can also use Marqueed to comment on websites. Just enter a URL, and the service automatically takes a screenshot of that site. You can then treat it like any other uploaded file. The tool also allows you to use files from your Dropbox.
Creating Comments
However, Marqueed only runs in two browsers – Chrome and Safari. You can not use the service elsewhere.
Bounce: Uploading and Commenting Without Registration
The service Bounce works in a way very similar to Marqueed. This tool also allows you to upload graphics and to take screenshots of websites. While commenting, you don’t pick a particular spot but mark a rectangular area which you can add a comment to.
Taking a Screenshot of any Desired Website
Within the area, you can add text, but also rectangles, circles, and arrows.
In contrast to the other collaboration tools introduced in this article, Bounce works without registration. Without signup, you can upload files, and take screenshots. Share a layout with others via a generated link. Every participant can just enter a name used as identification.
Defining Comment Areas and Filling Them With Text and Graphic Elements
Using Bounce is free.
Collaboration Tools: Conclusion
All introduced collaboration tools have their advantages and disadvantages. Some only work with an extension or only in certain browsers. Others focus on automatically created screenshots, or on uploading layouts.
Differences aside, all collaboration tools have one thing in common: They ease the presentation, commenting, and discussion of drafts in teams or groups.
My first experience in the design world came through an internship at a small motion graphics studio called Motion Theory. I was fresh out of school and had never worked with so many talented people before. It was intense, difficult and nerve-wracking.
And I loved it. It made me a better designer. And the lessons I learned there have served me well throughout my years as a freelancer. Because my experience was so rewarding, I’ve developed the habit of scrutinizing internship programs at every new studio I visit. I’ll share my insights below, as well as insights from some of the world’s best design firms so you can think about the application process from both sides.
The navigation of a website is meant to be clicked. It doesn’t need to blend in or be hard to find. It’s important that it stands out from the rest of the elements on the page, but yet still matches the overall style of the design. Here is a showcase of websites that achieve this in a very stylish way. These navs look amazing, have serious click appeal, and are guaranteed to inspire you.
Clicking on the images will take you to each site.
There are so many projects on the market that we literary don’t have enough time to read the info. To get more time and win as many projects as we can, we have to carefully select tools that work better than anything. We tested and compared many tools and services and we concluded that these 14 work awesome.
BeThemeis one of the greatest WordPress themes, that you can use to create different kinds of websites, for electric, veterinarian, loan agency, charity agency, sitter, moving company, barber, health magazine, book writer, plumber, art agency, interior design company and many others. You have many predefined demos that can be imported super easily with a 1-click installation and you can choose whether you want to make a business site, a blog, a portfolio, or just something creative and entertaining.
However, what is new about this theme? The “Wraps” section gives you a freedom to create more advanced and astonishing content, you spend less time on finding the items you need thanks to the search tool or tabs, you are given a fast and light interface, because it has improved performance and speed, by reducing transferred and saved data and, at last but not least, it has a fresh clean look thanks to the new layout, graphics and light colors. You have unlimited slides that you can set up (image/images, video/videos, flying objects, text, buttons, links, backgrounds and whatever you can imagine) and you can customize the website elements, all using a really powerful admin panel.
ShrinkTheWeb.com is certainly a website you’ll wish you found earlier. It is a service for taking automated screenshots for your website, or any other website for that matter. You can test its speed just by going to their homepage and testing any URL: you’ll get six default sizes screenshots (with the largest being about 320 by 240 pixels). But by making a paid account, you can get pro features for only $9.95/month a feature. You may choose code integration with all kinds of plugins, from WordPress to Drupal or with server-side programming languages: PHP or Ruby on Rails. Other characteristics provided are turning URL to PDF and insight pages analysis, to check the appearance of every page on your site. Or would you like to add your signature as a placeholder on the image? Now you can-on ShrinkTheWeb.
One of the features provided by Flyzoois the group chat which allows you to use avatars, emoticons, moderation, image or video with preview, file sharing, friendships and much more. The main purpose of this feature is to engage the audience in group chats. The most important features of group chats are the sound notifications, the possibility of enabling or disabling file sharing, updating the users’ profiles and uploading avatars, emojis, the possibility of starting private conversations with other users, moving/ resizing and minimizing windows, adding multiple Group Chats to your website (WOW & PRO Plans) and the last but not least, pop out windows which make you enjoy group chat conversations in external browser windows. The group chats can be private or public. They require guests to change the name before joining the room and not only allow access on specific roles, but also allow guests to read, but require login to post. All these features are made in order to give you the best experience in communicating with others, so you should check it out!
If you are looking for icons, you should have come across Iconfinder, the largest marketplace for icon designers. You can buy their work by picking from almost 900 000 icons. And now you can ask for your original icons with their custom design service. You are linked to one of the best designers on the platform, each one picked by hand, and you submit your project. You then receive about five quotes for your brief (that can contain specifics, like ‘it should be Material’) with prices varying from $70 to $130 per icon. You then choose the offer and wait for the job to get done. If you don’t receive them on time, or they are not in an acceptable quality, Iconfinder guarantees your money back. Check it out now!
Simbla is a great website maker platform, which gives you the possibility to use an easy-to-navigate interface in order to build your site a lot more easier. It is affordable to everyone and there is no need for you to install it, as you can get instant access to your site only by signing in. After that, you can build beautiful websites, where you can customize your template according to your vision.
The Builder from Themify.me helps you design any layout you want, by using the drag & drop interface, which makes it possible to create beautiful pages for your websites in no time and with no coding experience needed! It has many features, one of the being the possibility to add extendable add-ons, such as image pro (beautify images with image filters, color/image overlay, and animation effects), slider pro (make stunning sliders with transition and animation effects) or infinite background (infinite scrolling background image horizontally or vertically).
OptinMonster is the most powerful customer acquisition that converts your visitors into subscribers! You can choose from multiple form types such as lightbox popups, floating bars, slide-ins or sidebar forms that you can customize with point-and-click simplicity. Moreover, you have the possibility of A/B testing, to help you eliminate the guess work and make data-driven decisions on what works best.
Anyone can benefit from using actiTIME! Thanks to intuitive workflow, you can start using the software right away without special training. As a regular user, you will be able to log time in a simple, friendly looking timesheet and get insight into personal productivity. As a team manager, you will have a convenient tool for allocating staff resources and estimating project timeframes. Finally, the accounting managers will find it helpful for managing payrolls and invoices. Using actiTIME will make your life a lot easier to organize, so give it a try!
Pidocois an online prototyping tool which supports a wide range of design activities. Designing prototypes is as simple as playing with building blocks, mostly because you can use the drag & drop function. There’s no need for programming to get interactive prototypes. You can use it as soon as you sign up for an account. We recommend you to give it a try because you will not regret it!
If you are looking for a dedicated team of web developers and designers that can offer you an amazing experience with your next site, you might want to choose Xfive. Having pleased clients from eBay, Twitter and Microsoft to any regular guy with an idea, you can be sure they will offer anything possible. If you are not sure what you search for, just send them your project and they will answer you with a quote and some amazing ideas.
Fast, simple, totally secure websites are a dream, but with the help of Bowtie.io, that is now achievable. An agency-focused platform, BowTie integrates user management, admin controls and Stripe payments into static sites without a database, lowering your website’s load time compared to a traditional CMS. That is time saved for your visitors and clients, and maintenance saved for you.
ThemeZaa is another tool you can use to design and develop quality themes and plugins for your awesome website, especially by using their great H-Code Theme. It is a creative, clean, fully responsive and multipurpose multi page and onepage WordPress and WooCommerce theme, that provides you with a powerful admin panel, quality of the design, shortcodes, various header options and many others.
After making a strong research, we found that 48hourslogois one of the top logo contest websites on the Internet. What is awesome is that you can easily create a logo design contest online and you can have your new business logo created by dozens of logo designers from around the world. It works awesome ! You should try it too !
Some of the ingredients of creating beautiful designs are the icons, which add a lot of magic to the appearance of your website. On Squik Ink, you can find 2000 handcrafted, consistent and pixel-perfect icons ready to use for your project, whether it is related to music, holidays, clothes, entertainment and many other domains. The best thing is that all icons are vectorial, so you can easily make them any size you want!
Try once any of these tools and you will see how easily you can work with them. Stop researching because these work better than anything. It’s tested.
Pinterest, the popular social network, has recently revamped the design of its iOS app. The new version claims to be extra fast and extra clean, and focuses more on functionality and usability.
With so many people using our app, it’s more important than ever to make sure it works great for everyone—no matter where you live, what language you speak or how old your phone is.
The new iOS Pinterest app comes with a modern and cleaner UI for pins. Plus, it is not available in 31 languages, loads up to three times faster as compared to the older versions of the app.
These changes have laid the groundwork for future improvements, too. Now that we’ve rebuilt things in a smarter way, engineers and designers here at Pinterest will be able to develop features faster than ever before.
The new version of the Pinterest app is currently only available for iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads, though the Android versions are not too far behind either, and currently under development.
What do you think of the new design of the Pinterest app for iOS devices? Share your views in the comments below!
Keeping your users engaged over a company website is more of a technical job that could easily be performed with excellently designed website navigation menu. Providing an ideal navigation to the users is like paving their way towards the right direction. Such menus over a website act like the signs on the road that help anonymous users get going towards the right path. Thus, navigation in web designing counts as the most important web element that cannot go wrong.
A proper website navigation is so much important that it plays a major role in the success of the website among a number of other factors. Ideal navigation can decide upon the website conversion rate and the overall business success. Thus, while choosing companies to build websites having exceptional navigation, you cannot go wrong with the choices.
This write-up is going to showcase some of the web design and development firms that have websites with extraordinary navigation. All these entities have big names as their clientele who obviously come for getting outstanding websites that are easy to be navigated by the users. Here comes the list.
No-refresh
No-refresh through its navigation design describes perfectly what is called hassle-free navigation. The website has been thus designed to offer users a perfect navigation experience while exploring the web pages. The navigation structure has been brilliantly summed up with a number of engaging elements for users to surprise them with a number of aspects. The fonts over the web page make its overall appearance a superb one. The caption for the images, on the other hand, describes the services perfectly in a nutshell.
Acko.Net
Acko has amazingly simple navigation menu. The layout is simple and makes it very easy for the visitors to understand the design. The grid base menu that this company utilizes over its website helps users to go on the specific page as required. A 3D base video that sits on the top makes it more engaging for the visitors. The homepage of the website has a link with a caption “Steven Witten” that leads to the ‘about us’ section of the website.
Sparx IT Solutions
Sparx IT Solutions is a web design and development company that has got an engaging website with an easy navigation. The company’s website is designed to help users switch easily from a page to another. The navigation menu has been crafted with a solid structure to ensure visitors have a good time while browsing through different web pages. An easy to navigate menu has thus contributed to the success of Sparx IT Solutions professional website in the web arena.
CSSChopper
CSSChopper is again a leader in the web design and development world with an outstandingly crafted navigation menu for the users. The amazing navigation menu makes it much easier for users to explore web pages with utmost ease. The menu has been designed in such a manner that users could easily understand the same and browse through the design without facing any difficulty. CSSChopper has specifically given importance to the design of sub-menus so that users could easily land to specific web pages with just a click.
inkyROBO
inkyROBO through its artistically designed website has focused on bottom of screen navigation where options are given to let the users browse the website as needed. A simple but engaging menu thus helps users go to specific pages. With a sleek web navigation, the website generates greater conversion rates that also boost the readership. This simple but interesting navigation menu has remained a factor in providing the success to the website design.
AppsChopper
AppsChopper presents another great example of an excellently designed navigation menu. The standard navigation design of the website seamlessly takes visitors from a web section to another with easy switching in the menu. The layout of the website exhibits the content while the users scroll down the menu from a section to another. In simpler words, AppsChopper’s website represents a brilliantly crafted navigation option that makes it much easier for users to land on specific content on specific pages.
BetterGraph
BetterGraph has a simple navigation but structured brilliantly over the website. The content outstandingly shines with a brilliant menu and also in the sub menus. It is written and showcased in a manner so that users can grasp it easily. The entire menu thus makes it a pleasant experience for the visitors to browse through different pages and go to the specific web page. An easy to understand menu thus helps BetterGraph add more visitors to the website.
HTMLPanda
HTMLPanda has the simplest navigation layout. This ensures that even a new visitor can easily go through different pages. Menus, sub-menus, and the content on the websites have been designed perfectly to allow a perfect navigation experience to the users coming to browse the website. The font style, on the other hand, contributes more to make the website more appealing as well as user-centric. All these factors collectively have contributed to an exceptional navigation over HTMLPanda’s official website.
PHPDevelopmentServices
PHPDevelopmentServices has a nicely crafted website having an exceptional navigation. As the company majorly deals in PHP development services, it has vividly showcased the benefits of hiring their expert with an engaging layout. The navigational pattern takes users to the specific pages in a hassle-free manner and helps them experience the brilliance of an outstandingly crafted menu. The menu style is clean and keeps the visitors engaged while browsing through different sections.
Wrap up
Navigation menu counts as an integral part of web development element. Thus, the responsibility of designing this element lies with them. Moreover, the exceptional ideas of each of these websites could help you design an attractive layout for your website. Thus, choose any one as your favorite to get the one exactly for you.
The following is a guest post by David Clark. David is the creator of a thing called Stylelint, a tool for keeping your CSS in shape. He does a great intro as to why you might need it himself, so take it away David…
You write CSS. Probably a lot of CSS. And you make mistakes. Probably a lot of mistakes. Somebody needs to stop you from making mistakes in your CSS.
Sometimes your mistake is a real bug. Sometimes it’s just sloppy, inconsistent, or unclear coding style. Some of them may seem trivial at first (depending on your temperament), but they become patently important as the codebase grows and ages, as more people stick their hands in it and do ugly things. Things you thought unimaginable.
You try to control yourself. Your colleagues pitch in, too, correcting you when you stray. But both you and your colleagues are mistake-makers, so will naturally, inevitably fail, at least in part. And later on you or some other sorry sap will face the consequences of those mistakes that slipped into your CSS.
Neither you nor your colleagues like talking about the mistakes you’ve made. It’s awkward. Sometimes it’s discouraging and divisive. Certain conventions that definitely help the codebase, like consistent formatting, may seem pedantic and tedious when enforced manually. Or else they bring out the pushy and pigheaded elements in people you usually like.
Additionally, you’d much rather be corrected right away than wait for a code review just so someone can point out that you duplicated a declaration and should clean up your spacing. Instant feedback would help you internalize conventions and spend a little less time floundering when your CSS doesn’t work.
What you really need is a mistake-preventing machine
You need a dependable mistake-preventing machine that understands CSS and understands you: your intentions, preferences, ideals, and weaknesses.
Such a machine would have its limitations. All things do. But its limitations would differ from those of you and your human colleagues. Whatever mistakes it can prevent it will prevent consistently, tirelessly. Meanwhile, you and your colleagues can work on improving the machine, expanding its powers and diminishing its limitations. If it is open-sourced, other contributors from around the world can join the effort — other fallible CSS authors equally invested in preventing their own mistakes.
CSS authors need linters just like everyone else
We call these mistake-preventing programs “linters.” JavaScript has several good ones. ESLint, in particular, has been working wonders, showing us all just how helpful a good linter can be. But in the realm of CSS we have not been so fortunate. We’ve had very limited options: the Ruby-based, preprocessor-specific scss-lint and the older CSS Lint.
But that was before the advent of PostCSS. Among other things, PostCSS provides the means to build more interoperable CSS tools. It can parse any CSS*-like* syntax into an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) for plugins to analyze and manipulate. And with custom parsers, PostCSS can handle even non-standard, technically “invalid” patterns (like //-comments).
The conditions are ripe for a mighty new stylesheet linter — powered by PostCSS and inspired by the best features of scss-lint and ESLint.
I’ve been working with a few collaborators on this project, and I’m writing now to introduce you to the tool we’ve developed: stylelint.
Some things you can do with stylelint
What follows is an attempt to summarize stylelint’s features, which include over a hundred rules and thorough extensibility.
If at any point you find yourself growing impatient (“OK, OK: I’m convinced that stylelint works wonders. No more summary necessary.”) just skip to the next section, where I’ll anticipate some questions and offer some tips.
#1) Catch errors
Some stylelint rules aim to catch obvious errors, usually typos or oversights made when you were rushed, distracted, or bleary-eyed. For example, you can disallow empty blocks, invalid hex values, duplicate selectors, unknown animation names, and mistaken linear-gradient syntax.
Other rules do their best to catch more subtle errors.
There’s a rule that warns when you’ve used a shorthand property (like margin) that will override one of its longhand counterparts (like margin-top), which you’ve probably done inadvertently. And there’s a rule to warn you about the confusing situation when Rule A comes before Rule B but in fact overrides Rule B, because Rule A’s selector has a higher specificity (e.g. Rule A is .foo.bar {...} and Rule B is .foo {...}). That’s a tricky one.
Another rule uses the PostCSS plugin doiuse to check whether your styles will work for the browsers that you intend to support. And yet another uses css-colorguard to complain about colors so similar that you probably intended them to be identical. (Notice that? It’s one of the major advantages of stylelint being built on top of PostCSS: with very little effort, stylelint can introduce rules that use other analytical PostCSS plugins.)
#2) Enforce best practices
If you use a systematic methodology in your stylesheets or have a styleguide for your code, you should be able to decisively outlaw certain patterns. stylelint provides the means to do so.
Above all, you need to control your selectors. Ruthlessly. With stylelint, you can disallow selectors that exceed a certain specificity, or put a cap on nesting depth. You can forbid categories of selectors (e.g. no id selectors) and provide regular expressions to enforce naming conventions for the rest.
You can block the use of !important, or browser hacks that don’t apply to browsers you support. If you use Autoprefixer (which you probably should), you can disallow the use of vendor prefixes in your source stylesheets.
If you want to get really serious — investing some extra time in configuration to ensure absolute consistency — you can enforce the order of properties in your rules, and provide blacklists and whitelists for properties, values, functions, and units.
#3) Enforce code style conventions
stylelint has a host of rules that automatically enforce code style conventions, so you and your teammates don’t have to. We’ve tried to make these rules extremely comprehensive and extremely flexible.
These rules are mostly about whitespace, but also target other details like quotation marks, letter case, leading zeros on fractional numbers, the use of keywords vs. spelling out values, and so on.
The dream is that you and your teammates can establish a formatting convention once (e.g. “Let’s always have a single space after a declaration’s colon!”), codify that into stylelint’s configuration, and then never talk about it again. Leave enforcement to the machine empire.
#4) Customize and extend everything
Nicholas Zakas, the creator of ESLint (and also CSS Lint), has written that the key to ESLint’s success is its extensibility. stylelint tries to follow ESLint’s lead and provide CSS authors with a linter that is as extensible as possible.
You can write and publish your own rules as plugins. There are a bunch available already; and we’re eager to see what else people come up with.
Configurations are extendable and therefore shareable. As with plugins, we learned the value of this feature from ESLint. Check out what’s published already, which includes configs from WordPress and SUITCSS.
If you don’t like stylelint’s built-in reporters you can craft your own, even tailor one to your organization. You can also customize the warning messages that rules deliver.
Using stylelint’s API, you can create plugins for text editors and task runners that integrate stylelint into every aspect of your workflow.
And if you can think of any other ways that you’d like to extend stylelint, let us know!
Answers to anticipated questions
There are probably a few questions swimming around in the murky waters of your mind. Here are answers to the most common ones we’re asked:
Can I use stylelint with SCSS? Or Less?
Yes, you can use stylelint with SCSS! And Less support just arrived! Since PostCSS allows custom parsers, stylelint has no trouble supporting various non-standard syntaxes — anything that you can write a PostCSS parser for.
Right now there are PostCSS parsers — and therefore stylelint support — for SCSS, Less, and the new SugarSS. If you want another custom syntax supported now, help out by working on the PostCSS parser!
Of course, certain rules might stumble on certain aspects of your non-standard syntax (e.g. confuse Sass #{$interpolation} for id selectors). Because stylelint tries to cover the fractured landscape of our stylesheets — where some people use standard CSS, some an extension language like SCSS, some weird custom properties, etc. — there will always be holes to fill. But we’ve been addressing these bugs as we find them; and in the meantime any rule can be turned off completely or disabled on a stylesheet-by-stylesheet or line-by-line basis.
Can I use stylelint with future CSS syntax?
Yes! Same answer as above, really: stylelint can understand everything that PostCSS understands, which definitely includes whatever future CSS syntax you are enabling (probably via PostCSS plugins). In fact, some of stylelint’s rules specifically target future CSS like range features and custom properties.
A stylelint configuration can be huge. Where should I start?
We recommend building your configuration in one of three ways:
Extend a published configuration. We maintain stylelint-config-standard to provide a solid baseline for most users. And plenty of other configurations have already been published.
Start from scratch and add one rule at a time. No rules are turned on by default, so by adding each rule yourself you will know exactly what is being enforced, and will gain an understanding of each rule as you add and configure it.
Thankfully, you should not have to write huge stylelint configurations over and over again. Create one tailored to your tastes and use it everywhere you can.
What’s the easiest way to run stylelint?
The simplest, best way for most people to run stylelint is through its CLI.
If you’d prefer a gulp plugin, give gulp-stylelint a shot. For webpack, there are a couple of possibilities. We hope these plugins will inspire people to develop stylelint plugins for other task runners, like Grunt. (Easy open source opportunity if you’re looking for one!)
You can also run stylelint as a PostCSS plugin, including it in any PostCSS runner’s chain of plugins. This means that you can use stylelint anywhere you can use PostCSS — which covers pretty much every compilation tool out there!
Also, there are already stylelint text editor plugins for Atom, Sublime Text, and VS Code — providing the fastest possible feedback as you work. For those and more, check out the Complementary Tools list on stylelint’s website.
Here’s what you can expect to see in the command line:
Example of stylelint output on the command line.
And here’s what it looks like in Atom:
Example of stylelint output in Atom.
Will stylelint fix my mistakes?
No, but another project called stylefmt aims to do just that. It takes a stylelint configuration — the very same one that you use for linting — and fixes whatever mistakes it can. We’re hoping that, with community contributions, stylefmt will grow until it can auto-fix as many stylelint rule violations as can possibly be auto-fixed. Help them out!
You could also use other tools like CSScomb or perfectionist in tandem with stylelint, auto-fixing what you can and auto-enforcing the rest.
Supplement discipline with linting
There’s an extraordinary amount of discipline in good CSS. That’s why we spend so much time talking about methodologies like SMACSS, ACSS, BEM, SUITCSS, ITCSS, and so on. We all know that it’s very easy to write CSS very badly, so in our own work we need to establish an intelligent strategy and doggedly stick to it if we’re going to write stylesheets that won’t make us cringe next week.
stylelint’s ambitious goal is to supplement our discipline with automatic enforcement — to provide a core set of rules and a pluggable framework that CSS authors can use to enforce their own strategies.
Give it a try and let us know how to works for you. And if you have ideas for improvement, pitch in! Contribute rules, enhancements, tests, bug fixes, documentation, new ideas, or just feedback. There’s work to be done for developers of all levels.
More and more of our experience online is personalized. Search engines, news outlets and social media sites have become quite smart at giving us what we want. Perhaps Ali, one of the hundreds of people I’ve interviewed about our emotional attachment to technology, put it best: “Netflix’s recommendations have become so right for me that even though I know it’s an algorithm, it feels like a friend.”
Personalization algorithms can shape what you discover, where you focus attention, and even who you interact with online. When these algorithms work well, they can feel like a friend. At the same time, personalization doesn’t feel all that personal. There can be an uncomfortable disconnect when we see an ad that doesn’t match our expectations.
If there’s anything I’ve learned working for a tech company, it’s that in order to build a website—a really amazing, beautiful and high-functioning website—a multitude of different talents and elements have to come together and work in harmony. Sometimes it can feel like working on the Tower of Babel: one person is sifting through a palette of hex codes, the guys across the room are rattling off an alphabet soup of different coding acronyms, and the account manager is next to me on the phone explaining how to use a content management system to a customer, all while I’m trying to write this article in plain English.
All of those elements need a way to come together without anything getting lost in the cacophony, and there’s a relatively new concept that has really helped us work better as a team: designers, developers, testers…everyone.
The components of Atomic Design were derived from designer Brad Frost‘s fascination with chemistry; atoms being the smallest unit, bonding into molecules, which in turn form more complex organisms, eventually creating all matter in the universe.
So, if we’re in the International Space Station, looking down at the entire project as a whole, here’s the completed homepage art for a recent project we applied Atomic Design to, Route 93 Pizza Mill:
Route 93 Pizza’s homepage consists of all of our elements as a unified, functional website. Now, if we place the site under a microscope, we can see its granular components:
Atoms: Below are the atoms for Route 93 Pizza Mill’s website. The atoms are the basic building blocks, such as tags, form labels, buttons, color palette and fonts. Although not very useful on their own, atoms are your preliminary reference point — the beginnings of your creation.
Molecules: molecules are where atoms are put to work—where the completed website design starts to feel tangible. In the molecules for Route 93, you can see the color palette, fonts and iconography come together into form fields, image overlays and buttons. They are, as Frost puts it, your tool to “do one thing and do it well.”
Organisms: by the time we arrive at organisms, we can create the entire footer for Route 93. It combines all of the aforementioned components into a workable, aesthetic website.
The Interface Inventory: now that we’ve got all of the ingredients, we need a tangible menu on which to arrange them into something digestible; a document that contains all of the above elements as a readable, usable resource—an interface inventory.
While some organizations call this a Pattern Library or Style Guide and use Interface Inventory specifically to refer to an audit they’ve done on an existing website, we use the term Interface Inventory for our own projects (as well as audits of other sites) as part of a continual evaluation process.
Because the workflow of Atomic Design somewhat mimics a chicken-or-egg-type dilemma, the interface inventory usually takes form somewhat organically after the creation of the home page and one other page of the website, but not too long after that. As these two initial pages take shape, the designer ensures the elements on both are consistent. For all pages thereafter, they then have the ability to draw from the inventory. This produces a canonical source for how visual styles should be applied throughout the project, a literal common language, in plain English, of hex codes, button styles, padding widths, etc. to which developers—and the entire team—can refer to.
By designing an Interface Inventory with the Atomic Design process, we can start with primitive modules and assemble them into completed elements. This process improves efficiency, communication among team members, and produces a more beautiful website overall.
What Atomic Design does for us
Atomic Design both helps us to discover solid “truths” about the project’s design we are working on, as well as creating a common vocabulary between its artistic and technical aspects. It encourages a more robust system overall that improves UX and provides a methodology so designers can adhere to the component-based guidelines of the developers while maintaining creativity.
Naturally, developers code from the ground up whereas the approach of an artist usually begins in a more nebulous form, which then solidifies into a functional webpage after some molding. Atomic Design encourages—and requires—designers to work from the ground up as well, to make all of the interface’s components consistent and purposeful at the lowest possible level.
The establishment of this common language, represented by the Interface Inventory, ensures designers and developers are not inventing new solutions to problems that have already been solved. For example, if a new contact form is added to a project, the styles needed to create that form already exist and can easily be employed to build the page, deeming it unnecessary for the designer to put forth additional effort. It doesn’t necessarily take work away from the designer, but instead makes it easier for developers to quickly build solutions rather than requiring the designer to mock up every page—or organism—first. The designer’s role is then shifted to something more like art direction after the pages have been built. These tangible “truths” also eliminate the need to use the designer as a referee. Questions such as, “is this design choice intentional?” or, “which color should we use on this particular element?” as well as last minute changes or additions to a page are answered by the Interface Inventory.
The common language carries on into quality assurance as well. When testing a webpage for both content and functionality, I pull the Interface Inventory up in my screen as a guide. Although foremost a designer tool and secondly a developer tool, it allows everyone on the team to participate with confidence in conversations about design and consistency as we make sure our sites are impeccable and ready to hand over to the client.
Conclusion
In order to ensure the proper execution of a project, especially some of the larger ones we often find ourselves tackling, communication is key; if you’re shouting an array of different ideas across the room at each other, nothing feasible will ever come of it. Atomic Design helps to act as a translator for these different departments and the “languages” that go with them to maintain consistency in design. It establishes a modular resource for the team, allowing for coherency and results in efficient turnaround, fewer mistakes and a more polished finished product.
Salon Booking is one of these WordPress plugins that you either need desperately or not at all. If you run any kind of business that depends on your clients making appointments, it is likely that Salon Booking can do wonders to you. Instead of making people call you to reserve your time slots or tables or other time-related resources you can simply let them book autonomously via the front-end of your WordPress website. It’s as easy as it sounds.
Salon Booking: What You Need to Know
To be more precise on the use case and to get straight whether you should read on or not, we should make clear that Salon Booking has been developed specifically with the needs of Barbers, Hairdressers, Beauty Centers and Spas in mind. You can surely run other time-related businesses with it as well, but the best fit are those as mentioned above.
Another thing you need to know before you invest more time into reading this article is that Salon Booking is not free. There is a free version available from the WordPress directory, but this version is limited to a total of 30 bookings. You can still try out all the features but after having made 30 bookings, the plugin will cease working.
The Pro version comes at different prices. For a version with full functionality on one site with free support and all updates for a year from purchase, you will have to shell out 69 dollars. The same license but for five sites costs 149 dollars and the free forever Pro version including unlimited sites and updates throughout the lifetime of the plugin plus endless free support sets you back 229 dollars. I’d recommend the latter should Salon Booking really fit your needs. Let’s find out if it does.
Salon Booking: Take the Adrenaline Rush Out of the Booking Process
What Salon Booking offers is simple and complex at the same time. It allows your customers to book your service without you or any other human being interacting with them. Should they come up with the need of booking a haircut in the middle of the night they could just open your website and book an appointment for the next date possible. This is comfortable and takes the frustration out of the game. How often have you tried to make an appointment by phone during busy business hours?
“I didn’t get your name. Kowalski? No, sorry, Koslovski? Okay. When do you want to come? Next Thursday? Ah sorry, you said this Tuesday? Yes, sure. You can be served by Harry. Ah, what? You said Mary?”
Adrenaline levels rise to the max and next time you might unconsciously tend to avoid such a call as a potential client. As a business owner, this scenario should trouble you. Offering people a comfortable, calm and reliable way of booking your services is crucial, and you should put all effort into achieving such an experience.
With the possibility of register once, book many, return bookings become even easier to do. Undoubtedly your clients will like a tool such as Salon Booking.
To show you how easy this actually is, let’s go through a demo booking process step by step:
Salon Booking Step 1: Choose a date and time
Salon Booking Step 2: Choose the services needed
Salon Booking Step 3: Choose the assistant wanted
Salon Booking Step 4: Confirm your data
Salon Booking Step 5: Confirm your booking
Salon Booking: Fill Your Order Books Almost Automatically
Running a Barber’s Shop is not only about giving the people the right treatment once they sat down in your chair. Getting them into it is as vital a task as is the perfect execution of your craft. Having employees stop shaving to accept bookings over the phone is in many ways inappreciable. Your employee wastes time, the client right on the stool now feels set back. Even if this takes only a few minutes per booking, the time consumption can quickly add up to an hour or more of unproductive time each day. Thus, it’s in your vital interest as a shop owner to reduce these avoidable time thieves to an absolute minimum.
Salon Booking can do just that. You’ve seen it as I led you through the booking process earlier on in this article. From the perspective of a shop owner, it’s important to know that the above-shown process can easily be customized to fit your needs and organizational structure. You set booking rules, products, that can be booked, the assistants doing the work in the end. It is even possible to have the bookings synchronized with your Google Calendar to have them with you wherever you go.
What you did not see in the process shown above is that Salon Booking is even able to integrate payment methods. This is important should you work with some kind of cash before you wash system.
Salon Booking does not only work for the front-end. It has numerous back-end reports for shop owners as well as a management system for client orders. Clients can change or cancel bookings, and they are entitled to provide feedback for the services received.
Salon Booking: Clients can manage their bookings
Customer relationship is another important feature of Salon Booking. Shop owners can set up an SMS provider to notify clients of upcoming bookings. All client data is safely collected in a database, a dream for any shop owner that is otherwise not in the position to know his clients’ addresses and thus has to rely on them to return voluntarily. With Salon Booking, you can start mailings or simply call your customers and remind them that they haven’t been visiting you for far too long.
Salon Booking: Sell Time Slots? Get This Plugin!
All in all, I can do nothing but recommend you this plugin. It will bring structure to your business you haven’t even thought about having before. Even if it might not completely help to get you off the phone, Salon Booking is an additional booking channel without any reason to refuse. Not even the price is an obstacle.
Does your website run on WordPress anyway? Install Salon Booking’s free trial. In any other case, install WordPress first 😉
