Including high quality blogs and other forms of useful, interesting content is a great way to boost SEO and encourage repeat visits to a website. However, with everyone playing the same game, getting visitors flowing to a new site can still be touch and go?—?even if you do everything right.
Increasingly, targeted advertising on Google and social media helps bring new eyes to every lovingly crafted website, and companies relying purely on SEO struggle. The drawback is that this puts a business’ hard-earned cash straight into the pocket of the Internet giants. That’s why they’re worth billions while small businesses struggle.
There is a way, however, to get free advertising and introduce thousands of new surfers to your site: by guest blogging, you can showcase yourself — and by extension your company — and usually get a backlink to boot. This is not the game it once was, though, and you’ll need serious dedication and guts to succeed.
Is Guest Blogging Still Worth It?
Strangely, given its obvious advantages, guest blogging has gone somewhat out of fashion in recent years. This is because, like everything which works in the SEO game, it has been abused. In response to the increasingly common practice of paying popular sites to host spammy blogs laden with SEO-friendly links to a business’ site, Google decided to crack down.
In a 2014 post entitled ‘the decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO’, Google’s then head of web spam team Matt Cutts announced a major shift in approach to links gathered through such dodgy practices.
Cutts didn’t hold back on his criticism of spam guest blogging. His post started:
Okay, I’m calling it: if you’re using guest blogging as a way to gain links in 2014, you should probably stop. Why? Because over time it’s become a more and more spammy practice, and if you’re doing a lot of guest blogging then you’re hanging out with really bad company.
This now notorious post, and a subsequent warning from Google on content-syndicating practices in 2017, served to dissuade many good bloggers from guesting, while only partly deterring the spammers. Word got out that guest blogging was bad, and could actually hurt your ranking. Soon, the Internet was rife with people declaring the death of the guest post, or asking whether it was still a worthwhile practice.
The answer from experts is a resounding yes: but you have to do it right.
More Than Just SEO
Entrepreneur and online marketing expert Neil Patel says guest blogging remains the absolute best inbound marketing strategy for online businesses. Not only does it offer free advertising, he argues, but also confers authority on the writer which will be lacking if he or she only ever publishes on their own site:
Data from Social Marketing Writing found that “62.96% of people perceive blogs with multiple authors to be more credible. You want authority, qualified traffic, relevant links, motivated leads and sales in your business. Well, guest blogging can give you all of these and so much more.
But he goes on to say: “However, not all guest posts are created equal and they don’t all yield equal results. You have to go about it in the right way and you have to choose your targets carefully.
One of the reasons why some brands fail at guest blogging is because they don’t understand how to effectively produce the right content.”
The only thing about guest blogging that has really changed since Google’s crackdown is that it is no longer really a pure SEO game. For the purposes of ranking, running your own regular, prolific and reasonably high quality blog is now the better option. As for guest blogging, it is better to think of it as free advertising… only more effective.
Writing a guest blog is a chance to showcase yourself to a new audience; and to appear knowledgeable and trustworthy in your area of expertise and business. You therefore need two things: a site with a good readership, and something interesting or knowledgeable to say.
Which Sites to Guest Blog on?
Finding suitable sites to guest-post on will depend on the niche you or your client are targeting. Google’s crackdown on spam links and low-grade content has led to a number of metrics that try to rank a sites’ worthiness, such as Moz’s Domain Authority system. Partly because of this, it is fashionable at the moment to write for huge websites like Forbes or Inc whenever possible, as these boast the highest scores on these scales. However, these sites have become so large that actually getting your article noticed can be a challenge in itself, while the increasing admittance of user-generated content may eventually diminish their worth as trusted authority sites.
remember that a backlink is not just an SEO tool, potential clients may actually follow it!
Perhaps a better bet is to consider industry and trade publications that directly cater to your client base. These publications can often be easy to break into as editors are often short of good copy, and they have the advantage of being quality, human-edited publications that readers trust. Readerships may be smaller, but they are also more likely to be your clients: remember that a backlink is not just an SEO tool, potential clients may actually follow it! To approach these sites a human touch is required and you will want to contact editors personally, with an individually crafted note and even — gulp — a phone call.
Finding things to say on specialist sites can be tricky. Personally, I recommend channeling your opinions True, everyone has an opinion. But on the other hand, yours is unique. If you can pinpoint the issues which are of interest to your client base and provide an insightful angle on them based on your specific knowledge, then you should have a solid pitch to make to relevant websites in your clients’ niche. In fact, good expert comment and opinion is arguably the most high-value content in any publication.
On the other hand, the drawback of relying on opinion is that it tends to have a short shelf life. As with blogging, therefore, it may be a good idea to also write an occasional ‘how to guide’, which aims to be the definitive answer to a practical question or need which you can solve. These long-form guides are worth putting serious effort into writing, as the aim is for them to remain popular and useful for years to come — thus attracting a constant flow of traffic and attention your way.
Bear in mind that it is often best not to mention your own business at all, as this is unpopular with publishers and will cause readers to raise their ‘advertising shields’. Editors understand that you do want some payment in kind, and will usually offer a link next to your byline, or in an author bio. Content yourself with this reward, because you are getting much more besides.
They Call it ‘Thought Leadership’
Offering expert opinion and guidance takes you into the realms of what marketeers call ‘thought leadership’. Don’t let this term put you off, it is actually misleading. All it boils down to is presenting yourself as an expert in an area of interest relevant to your client base.
If that seems like it’s spiraled well beyond guest-blogging, it’s because in the old sense it has. Simply publishing text on obscure sites for the sole purpose of garnering a link is now at best useless, and possibly counterproductive.
But producing quality copy for the purposes of informing readers and showcasing yourself is as useful as ever. The best guest bloggers always understood this, and were effectively practicing thought leadership without having necessarily heard the term. They simply understood that having relevant people know their name was even better than a backlink.
Strategy Shapes, Design Defines, & Technology Advances Our Clients’ Brands says the motto of Eastern Standard design agency of the week. We’ve been closely following their work and today, we want to share it with you all.
Eastern Standard is an agency that specializes in branding and web design. Their goal is to come with a solution to their clients’ needs by bringing a branding studio and web applications developer under the same roof. They meet all the requirements for a truly integrated digital and creative agency.
The team consists of members that are more than a group of designers, developers, or strategies. When they come together, they try to understand the keys to good branding, offering real-world experience in meeting their objectives. They strive to use your resources to the maximum advantage of your business and to accomplish all your set goals. If there’s a design studio out there that can deal with challenging situations, that is Eastern Standard.
The studio never offers services that are under their standards, but “develop award-winning experiences through informed strategies, smart design, and streamlined implementation.” Not only do they polish your brand, but also provide you with amazing digital services, and a marketing partner. They take pride in combining three essential practices (branding, digital design, marketing) that contribute to a better fluency in each discipline. The result? Their clients get a better understanding of all these critical factors and manage to create long lasting brands.
Eastern Standard specializes in:
Brand Strategy & Extension
Research & Usability
Creative & Content Services
Digital Design & Development
Marketing & Promotion
Technical Support & Consulting
There’s no better way of getting to know a design agency better than taking a look at their work. Below, we have listed some of the studio’s most important pieces of work. In no specific order:
Unifying a Diversified Higher Education Experience
The agency we featured today has a lot of experience and a ton of talent. If you own a similar design agency, email us at webdesignledger.blog@gmail.com for a chance to make it on the first page of our blog. Also, visit us daily for more snippets of amazing work.
I enjoy front-end developer thought progression articles like this one by James Nash. Say you have a button which needs to work in “normal” conditions (light backgrounds) and one with reverse-colors for going on dark backgrounds. Do you have a modifier class on the button itself? How about on the container? How can inheritance and the cascade help? How about custom properties?
I think embracing CSS’s cascade can be a great way to encourage consistency and simplicity in UIs. Rather than every new component being a free for all, it trains both designers and developers to think in terms of aligning with and re-using what they already have.
A new Chrome feature dubbed “Blink LazyLoad” is designed to dramatically improve performance by deferring the load of below-the-fold images and third-party s.
The goals of this bold experiment are to improve the overall render speed of content that appears within a user’s viewport (also known as above-the-fold), as well as, reduce network data and memory usage. ?
??? How will it work?
It’s thought that temporarily delaying less important content will drastically improve overall perceived performance.
If this proposal is successful, automatic optimizations will be run during the load phase of a page:
Images and iFrames will be analysed to gauge importance.
If they’re seen to be non-essential, they will be deferred, or not loaded at all:
Deferred items will only be loaded if the user has scrolled to the area nearby.
A blank placeholder image will be used until an image is fetched.
LazyLoad is made up of two different mechanisms: LazyImages and LazyFrames.
Deferred images and iFrames will be loaded when a user has scrolled within a given number of pixels. The number of pixels will vary based on three factors:
Once the browser has established that an image is located below the fold, it will issue a range request to fetch the first few bytes of an image to establish its dimensions. The dimensions will then be used to create a placeholder.
The lazyload attribute will allow authors to specify which elements should or should not be lazy loaded. Here’s an example that indicates that this content is non-essential:
<iframe src="ads.html" lazyload="on"></iframe>
There are three options:
on – Indicates a strong preference to defer fetching until the content can be viewed.
off – Fetch this resource immediately, regardless of view-ability.
auto – Let the browser decide (has the same effect as not using the lazyload attribute at all).
At this point, it is difficult to tell if these page optimizations could cause compatibility issues for existing sites.
Third party iFrames are used for a large number of purposes like ads, analytics or authentication. Delaying or not loading a crucial iFrame (because the user never scrolls that far) could have dramatic unforeseeable effects. Pages that rely on an image or iFrame having been loaded and present when onLoad fires could also face significant issues.
These automatic optimizations could silently and efficiently speed up Chrome’s rendering speed without any notable issues for users. The Google team behind the proposal are carefully measuring the performance characteristics of LazyLoad’s effects through metrics that Chrome records.
? Enabling LazyLoad
At the time of writing, LazyLoad is only available in Chrome Canary, behind two required flags:
chrome://flags/#enable-lazy-image-loading
chrome://flags/#enable-lazy-frame-loading
Flags can be enabled by navigating to chrome://flags in a Chrome browser.
As we embark on welcoming the next billion users to the web, it’s humbling to know that we are only just getting started in understanding the complexity of browsers, connectivity, and user experience.
In this second part, I want to focus more on mobile-specific capabilities. HTML5, for instance, has brought us a lot of really cool features to help users fill in mobile forms and format their data. We will see in detail how HTML5 attributes can help you with that. Then, we will go beyond “classic” form elements and see how to use mobile capabilities such as the camera, geolocation and fingerprint scanners to really take your mobile form experience to the next level on websites and in native applications.
Helping The User Format Content With HTML5
In the first part of this series, we saw some general advice on how to display fields. Now it’s time to go a bit deeper and look at how a few well-crafted lines of HTML5 code can improve your mobile forms.
HTML5 Mobile-Optimized Goodness
HTML5 opens a whole world of possibilities for optimizing forms for mobile and touch devices. A lot of interesting new input types can trigger different keyboards to help users. We can also do some interesting things with capturing media directly in the browser.
Entering Numerical Data
input type= number
The HTML5 attribute restricts an input field to numbers. It has a built-in validation system that rejects anything that is not a number.
In some desktop browsers, this input is presented with little arrows on the right that the user can click to increment the number. On mobile, it opens a keyboard with numbers, which decreases typos and form-validation errors. The input’s look and feel depend on the operating system.
On the left, Android’s keyboard, and on the right, the iOS keyboard with numbers. (Large preview)
The input should allow for decimals and negative numbers (but few keyboards respect that). As explained in the W3C’s specifications, “a simple way of determining whether to use type=number is to consider whether it would make sense for the input control to have a spinbox interface (e.g. with ‘up’ and ‘down’ arrows)”. This means that the input is not supposed to be used for credit cards or area codes.
The pattern And inputmode Attributes
To add some restrictions to your number inputs, you could use the pattern attribute to specify a regular expression against which you want to control values.
You can use this pattern to bring up the big-button numeric keyboard on the iPhone (but not the iPad). This keyboard does not have the minus sign or comma, so users lose the ability to use negative numbers and decimals. Also, they can’t switch back to another keyboard here, so be careful when using this.
Also, note that patterns can be applied to any other type of inputs.
Using only this pattern won’t work on most Android phones. You’ll still need a combination of input type=number and the attribute to make this work.
Android and iOS demo with input type=number, pattern and inputmode. (Large preview)
inputmode
If you only want to trigger the mobile numeric keyboard but don’t want to deal with the type=number and pattern mess, you could use a text input and apply the inputmode=numeric attribute. It would look like this:
If you want users to enter a phone number, you can use the input type=tel. As you can see in the screenshot below, it triggers the same digits on iOS’ keyboard as the pattern attribute described above. Due to the complexity of phone numbers across the world, there is no automatic validation with this input type.
Even if they are technically numerical data, dates deserve their own section. There are a few HTML5 input types for entering dates. The most used is input type=date. It will trigger a date-picker in supported browsers. The appearance of the date-picker depends on the browser and OS. To learn more on how browsers render input type="date", I recommend you read “Making input type=date complicated.”
A date-picker based on input type=date on Android and iOS (Large preview)
There’s also type=week to pick a week, type=time to enter a time (up to the hour and minute), and type=datetime-local to pick a date and a time (using the user’s local time). So many choices!
Example of date-picker with more options on Android (week, date and time, etc.) (Large preview)
input type=date works well for booking interfaces, for example. You might have some needs that require you to build your own date-picker, though (as we’ve already seen in the section on sensible defaults). But input type=date is always a nice option if you need a date-picker and don’t want to bring a whole JavaScript library into the website for the job.
Yet, sometimes not using type=date for dates is better. Let’s take the example of a birth date. If I was born in 1960 (I’m not — this is just an example), it would take me many taps to pick my birth date if I was starting from 2018. On Android, I discovered recently that if I press on the year in the picker, I get a sort of dropdown wheel with all of the years. A bit better, but it still requires a fair amount of scrolling.
“I’m born in 1977 and can confirm the annoyance. The more time it takes to scroll, the older you feel :-(“
So, maybe birth dates are not the best candidate for date-pickers.
With Android’s date-picker, even though you can press and hold the year to get a year-picker, picking a birth date is still tedious. (Large preview)
URL, Email, Tel And Search
Mobile phones hide some other keyboard and input-optimization goodness that enhance the user’s experience when filling in a form. The devil is in the details, as they say.
Using the input type=url field will bring up an optimized keyboard on mobile, with / (the slash key) directly accessible. Depending on the OS, you can also give quick access to commons top-level domains, like the .fr in the screenshot below. If you long-press this button, shortcuts to other top-level domains will appear. This also comes with automatic browser validation that checks that the URL’s format is valid.
input type=url keyboard on Android and iOS (Large preview)
The input type=emailfield brings up an email-optimized keyboard giving quick access to the @ symbol. This input requires the presence of @ somewhere in the field in order to be valid. That’s the only verification it does.
input type=email keyboard on Android and iOS (Large preview)
The input type=search field brings up a search-optimized keyboard. The user can directly launch the search from a button on the keyboard. There’s also a little cross to clear the field and type a new query.
input type=search keyboard on Android and iOS (Large preview)
Range And Color
The last two input types we looked at are not particularly optimized for mobile, but by using them, we can avoid having to load heavy custom JavaScript libraries, which is a good idea for mobile users.
input type=range provides a visual UI slider to input a number. The UI for this control is browser-dependent.
input type=color provides an easy way for the user to enter a color value. In many browser implementations, this comes with a color-picker.
input type=range and input type=color on Android and iOS (Large preview)
HTML Media Capture: Taking And Uploading Pictures And Recording Sound
I remember the time of the iPhone 3, when Apple would not even allow a simple input type=file to be used on a website, for security reasons. Those times are long gone. With the HTML media capture API, it’s now possible to access different sensors of a device. We can capture photos and videos, and we can even record voice directly in the browser.
The accept attribute lets you specify what kind of media to accept in the input: audio, image, video. The user can give the browser direct access to their camera, for example.
The accept attribute is set to image. The browser asks whether I want to access the camera directly or the files on the device. (Large preview)
The capture attribute lets you specify the preferred mode of capture. If you add the capture attribute on top of the accept attribute, you can make the browser open the camera or voice recorder directly.
<input type="file" accept="image/*" capture> // opens the camera>
<input type="file" accept="video/*" capture> // opens the camera in video mode
<input type="file" accept="audio/*" capture> // opens the voice recorder
The mobile browser directly opens the capture mechanism: on the left, the camera, on the right, the video recorder. (Large preview)
HTML5 Autos: Autocorrect, Autocomplete, Autofill, Autocapitalize And Autofocus
HTML5 comes with a slew of automatic attributes. To enhance the mobile experience, you will want to be smart about what can be automated and what can’t. Here are some general rules of thumb:
Disable autocorrect on things for which the dictionary is weak: email addresses, numbers, names, addresses, cities, regions, area codes, credit card numbers.
Disable autocapitalize for email fields and other fields where appropriate (for example, website URLs). Note that type=email does the job for you in recents version of iOS and Android, but disable it anyway for older versions or if type=email is not supported.
You can set the autocapitalize attribute to words to automatically uppercase the first letter of each word the user types. This can be useful for names, places and the like, but, again, be careful with it, and test it.
Use input type=email for email addresses. If you don’t, at least deactivate auto-capitalization. No email address starts with a capital letter. (Large preview)
For input type=tel, set autocomplete="tel".
You could use autofocus to give the focus to a control element when the user loads the page. But just because the user opens the “contact” page, it does not mean they are ready to jump right to the first field of your form. So, again, use it wisely.
In this example, we could use autofocus to take the user directly to the first field once they’ve clicked on the button. (Large preview)
I won’t get into the technical details here, but you should know that HTML5 has a built-in form-validation API for many fields. It’s nice if you don’t want to use a JavaScript library to display inline validation messages. Here are the main things you need to know as a UX designer about HTML5 form validation:
The validation message is a browser control. You can’t style it in CSS, and it’s different for every browser.
You can change the text of the message in JavaScript using setCustomValidity.
HTML native form validation in an Android browser (Large preview)
In “Native Form Validation, Part 1,” Peter-Paul Koch goes into detail on why HTML and CSS form validation doesn’t really make forms better at this time.
Offline Support To Save User Data
A lot of things can go wrong, especially on mobile. Mistakes happen. A user could mistap the back button in the browser and lose all of their data.
If the user comes back to the page, it would be nice to display their data again. The same goes for if the browser crashes or the user closes the tab. You can store the user’s data in local or session storage to ensure nothing gets lost if something goes wrong. Geoffrey Crofte has written a JavaScript library to help you with that.
If the connection is lost as the user is submitting the form, they might also lose the data. To avoid this, you could use a combination of the** HTML5 offline API** and the Service Workers API to:
store the data in the cache,
try to automatically send it again when the connection comes back.
Mobile Device Capabilities Can Take the Experience To The Next Level
In part 1, we stuck to the basic common HTML form elements and attributes for enhancing mobile forms. But mobile devices capabilities now go far beyond displaying HTML, CSS and JavaScript web pages. Those little devices come equipped with a lot of sensors. And we will be able to use many of those in native apps and on the web to make our users’ lives so much easier.
Detecting The User’s Location
In the previous section, I wrote about pre-filling information for places and addresses. That’s a good start. We can go one step further. Instead of asking users to type a location, we can detect it. Meet the geolocation API for the web. There are also native iOS, Android and Windows Phone geolocation APIs.
Citymapper is a website and an app that helps users plan their travels. When the user goes into the first field, they see the “Use current location” option. If they select it, they are asked to allow the browser to access their geolocation data. This is the geolocation API. The browser then autocompletes the location it found and, the user can proceed to the destination field. The native app works pretty much the same way.
Citymapper proposes the user’s current location as the starting point for the journey.
Be Smart When Asking For The User’s Permission
You might have noticed in the previous video that I had to agree to give access to my position to the Citymapper website. In the browser, the user handles permissions website by website, API by API.
You also need to be careful how you ask for permission. The user might refuse access to the geolocation, notification or other API if you ask too soon. They also might refuse if they don’t understand why you need the permission. You get one chance; use it wisely. After that, it will be almost impossible to recover. I’m an Android power user, and even I have to search around for the options in my browser when I want to reset the permissions I’ve given to a website. Imagine the trouble your users will have.
Here is some general advice on asking for permissions on the web:
Don’t be the creepy geolocation or notification stalker: Don’t ask for permission as soon as the user arrives on your website. They might not know about you or your service yet.
Let the user discover your website and service. Then, ask for permission in context. If you want to access their location, ask them only when you need it (Citymapper is a good example).
Explain why you need permission and what you will do with it.
Citymapper asks for access to the user’s location only when it needs it. Clearing permissions after the user refuses it can get really complicated because the user will need to search through their settings for that website. (Large preview)
A big area of improvement for forms is the whole checkout payment experience. Here again, sensors on the device can make this an almost painless experience. The only pain will be the amount of money the user spends.
iOS Credit Card Scanner
In the previous section, I wrote about autodetection of credit cards and autocompletion features based on the user’s previous input. This still means that the user has to type their credit card data at least once.
Apple has taken this to the next level with its credit card scanner. Since iOS 8 in Safari, users can use their camera to scan and autocomplete their credit card information. To perform this magic, you will need to add the autocomplete cc-number attribute and some name to identify this as a credit card field. Apple doesn’t have much official information on it, but some people did some testing and put the results on StackOverflow.
The credit card scanning option appears when Safari detects a field that matches the credit card format. If the user already has a card registered on the phone, they can use the autofill option. (Large preview)
Take Checkout One Step Further With Google Pay API
Google launched something similar: the Google Pay API. When implemented on a website, the API eliminates the need to manually enter payment information. It goes one step further: It can store billing and shipping addresses as well.
The user gets a dialog in Chrome that displays the various payment information they’ve stored. They can choose which one to use and can pay directly through the dialog.
The Google Pay API pop-up triggered on an e-commerce website (Source) (Large preview)
Mobile phones are, in most cases, personal devices that people don’t usually share with others. This opens up some interesting opportunities for authentication.
Magic Link
I use a password manager. I don’t know 99% of my passwords. They are all randomly generated. In order to log into a new Slack workspace, I must:
open my password manager,
enter my master password,
search for the workspace,
copy and paste the password into the Slack app.
It’s a tedious process, but Slack was smart enough to provide a better option.
Many users have they mail synchronized on their phone. Slack understood that. When you add a new Slack workspace in the app, you can either log in using the password or ask for the “magic link” option. If you opt for the latter, Slack sends a magic link to your mailbox. Open the mail, click on the big green button, and — ta-da! — you’re logged in.
Behind the scenes, this magic link contains an authentication token. The Slack app catches this and authenticates you without requiring the password.
When using the magic link option, Slack sends you an email with a link that lets you connect to your slack without having to enter your password. (Large preview)
Fingerprint For Smart Identification
I do almost all of my banking on my mobile device. And when it comes to logging into my bank accounts, there’s a world of difference between my French Societe General bank app and the German N26 app.
With Société Générale, I have a login string and a passphrase. I can ask the app to remember the login string, which is 10 random digits. I’m not able to remember that one; I use a password manager for it. I must still remember and enter the six-digit passphrase on a custom-built keypad. Of course, the numbers’ positions change every time I log in. Security — yeah, I know. Also, I must change this passphrase every three months. The last time I was forced to change the passphrase, I did what most people do: choose almost the same passphrase, because I don’t want to have to remember yet another six-digit number. And of course, I was damn sure I would remember it, so I did not enter it in my password manager. Rookie mistake. Two weeks later, I tried to log in. Of course, I forgot it. I made three failed attempts, and then my account was blocked. Fortunately, I only use this account for savings. In the app, you can ask for a new passcode. It took almost one week for the bank to send me a new six-digit passphrase by paper mail to my home address in Luxembourg. Yeah.
N26, on the other hand, uses my email address as the login string. I can remember that without a password manager. When I want to log in, I put my finger on the start button of my Xperia phone, and that’s it. In the background, my phone scans my fingerprint and authenticates me. If that does not work, I can fall back to a password.
Same device, two apps, two totally different experiences.
Dropbox has another example of fingerprint authentication. (Large preview)
More and more apps on both Android and iOS now offer user the possibility to authenticate with a fingerprint. No more passwords — it’s an interesting and elegant solution.
Of course, people have expressed some security concerns about this. For the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), biometrics is not considered secure enough. It advises combining biometrics with a second factor of authentication.
Fingerprint sensors can also be tricked — yes, like in spy movies. Did you hear about the plane that was forced to land because a woman learned of her husband’s infidelity after using his thumb to unlock his phone while he was sleeping?
Facial Recognition And Face ID
In 2018, Apple launched the iPhone X with the brand new face ID. Users can unlock their iPhone X using their face. Of course, some other Android phones and Windows tablets and computers had proposed this feature earlier. But when Apple launches something, it tends to become “a thing”. For the moment, this technology is mostly used as authentication to unlock phones and computer.
There are some pretty big challenges with facial-recognition technology. First, some algorithms can be fooled by a picture of the person, which is easily hackable. Another bigger concern is diversity. Facial-recognition algorithms tend to have difficulty recognizing people of color. For instance, a black researcher had to wear a white mask to test her own project. The researcher is Joy Buolamwini, and she gave a TED talk about the issue.
Some facial-recognition software is also used by some customs services to speed up border processing. It is used in New Zealand and will be used in Canada.
Most of us have seen enough science fiction to see the potential problems and consequences of systems that use facial recognition at scale. This kind of technology used outside of the private space of unlocking phones can get controversial and scary.
Google: One-Tap Sign-Up
If a user has a Google account, they can benefit from Google’s one-tap sign-up. When visiting a website and prompted to create an account in an inline dialog, the user doesn’t need to enter a password. Google provides a secure token-based password-less account, linked to the user’s Google account. When the user returns, they are automatically signed in. If they store their passwords in the Smart Lock, they get automatically signed in on other devices as well.
Note: This is an interesting password-less solution. Of course, by using it, users are linked to Google, which not everyone will feel comfortable with.
Conclusion
You can do a lot of really cool things when you start using mobile capabilities to help users fill in forms. We need a mobile-first mindset when building forms; otherwise, we’ll get stuck on the desktop capabilities we are familiar with.
Again, be careful with the device’s capabilities: always have a fallback solution in case a sensor fails or the user refuses access. Avoid making those capabilities the only options for those functions (unless you are building a map app that relies on geolocation).
This is the end of a series of two really long articles in which I’ve given you some general UX and usability advice and best practices. In the end, what matter are your form and your users. Some things described here might not even work specifically for your users — who knows? So, whatever you do, don’t take my (or Luke’s) word for it. Test it, with real users, on real devices. Measure it. And test again. Do some user research and usability testing. User experience is not only about best practices and magic recipes that you copy and paste. You need to adapt the recipe to make it work for you.
So, in short: Test it. Test it on real devices. Test it with real users.
While this tends to be the time of year when things start to slow a bit in the design world, there are still trends that are worth paying attention to as you plan future projects. One element that stands out quite distinctly is the use of the color purple in projects.
This trend deserves a mention of its own (see No. 3) but also note the use of the color in examples from other projects in the other featured trends as well.
Here’s what’s trending in design this month:
1. Elaborate Illustrations
There’s just something about an elaborate illustration that draws the eye into a design. There’s a need to see all of the details and understand the intricacy of each line. Whether it’s a “designer thing” or not, illustrations are an interesting way to draw users into a website design.
The more elaborate the illustration, the more custom and unique it can feel as well. This is an effective way to create a one-of-a-kind project. And there are so many different ways to do it.
Growcase uses icon-style illustrations to draw users into the portfolio. Emit Ayouni has a distinct style with each of the creations that makes users want to scroll and explore.
Ester Digital uses a sketch-style illustration and builds on it with subtle animation and additional parts as the user scrolls. Again, the feel here is complete customization – the perfect vibe for a creative agency.
ICO Syndicate also features an illustration with animated elements, but it is right on the homepage. The illustration features clean lines and simple coloring but there is so much to look at. Each little scene is part of a bigger picture that engages. (Try not to watch the purple balls drop and move throughout the drawing.)
2. Distinct Panels
When talking about website projects, do you catch yourself referring to things in “screens?”
This concept is becoming more common and the designs reflect it. More websites feature distinct panels that fit on the screen or come pretty close. These screens help contain and organize bits of content as well as provide a methodology for stacking and reorganizing content on different screen sizes. These panels make it all look seamless to the user.
Adaptable uses a series of panels that alternative between full width and split screen. Note that you get a glimpse of the next set of panels from the current location.
Van Cutsem uses panels to create content hierarchy.
Blindspotting uses panels to highlight different information for an upcoming movie. There’s a mix of full screen panels and smaller stacks as well and content that features still images and video.
3. The Color Purple
Extravagance, regality, creativity, wisdom, dignity, mystery and independence.
These are all words that describe the color purple. People often have a distinct emotional connection to this hue – they either love it or hate it. Because of this, it’s not a widely used color in a lot of design projects.
Designers tend to stay away from colors that some people just don’t like. But there is a certain something to projects that feature purple elements as the examples below show.
With the right messaging and content, using the color purple can be a powerful design tool that helps communicate just the right thing. When using purple — whether as a background, accent or foreground element — make sure to think about how the color communicates in relationship to what the design should say overall. Do the messages match? If so, then purple might be just the right design trend for your projects.
Each of these websites uses the trend exceptionally well:
Colorz uses a purple circle to help users “peek” into the background. The element is really just a focal point to draw users into the messaging.
Crescosa features a split screen with a purple side that contains an oversized navigation element. (There’s also a cool floating purple rock or gem in the center of the screen to help draw attention across the design.) Again, the color is used to create a focal point and help users understand how to interact with the design.
Verity features a deep purple background with animated lights. The image looks like the night sky (a common use for purple imagery and backgrounds). What works about purple and this design is the connection between imagery, color and copy. The headline “The magic is real” mirrors the emotional connection you would expect from purple. It’s a perfect fit.
Conclusion
The websites featured above are a great examples of how many design trends work with each other. Many of the most successful trends aren’t wide-scale use of elements or design techniques but subtle strokes. Click through the examples and you’ll see quite quickly how many of these design feature multiple trends without being overwhelming or “too trendy.”
What trends are you loving (or hating) right now? I’d love to see some of the websites that you are fascinated with. Drop me a link on Twitter; I’d love to hear from you.
Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.
The Case for Slow Design
Why We Redesigned Our Website … Again
Ode to Gray
Introducing Ghost 2.0
WordPress is at a Crossroads
How to Grow as a Junior UI Designer
Things I (honestly) Don’t Want to See in your Portfolio
2018 Digital Marketing Trends
Picular
How to Design for the Modern Web
Defining a Successful Web Project
UX Design Should Evolve to HX Design
Design Notes
Heroic Vandal Massively Improves Facebook’s Bus Shelter Adverts
Heard at Work
Via Negativa
Starting a Side Project: The Story of Color Hunt
Snapchat’s Long-Awaited Redesign is Much Smoother
This Font is the Comic Sans of the 1970s
Design is not Science, Art or Engineering
Font Shaming – Which Fonts do the Top 737 ProductHunt Startups Use?
The Secret Behind all Great Copywriting
A Guide to Combining Fonts
WeTransfer Wants to Rule the Business of Creativity
Famous Brand Logos Redesigned in Retro 1980’s Style by FuturePunk
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
Every week we feature a set of comics created exclusively for WDD.
The content revolves around web design, blogging and funny situations that we encounter in our daily lives as designers.
These great cartoons are created by Jerry King, an award-winning cartoonist who’s one of the most published, prolific and versatile cartoonists in the world today.
So for a few moments, take a break from your daily routine, have a laugh and enjoy these funny cartoons.
Feel free to leave your comments and suggestions below as well as any related stories of your own…
Shackled designer
Pop up mob
A bottle for every occasion
Can you relate to these situations? Please share your funny stories and comments below…
This is a follow up to my previous post looking into clip paths. Last time around, we dug into the fundamentals of clipping and how to get started. We looked at some ideas to exemplify what we can do with clipping. We’re going to take things a step further in this post and look at different examples, discuss alternative techniques, and consider how to approach our work to be cross-browser compatible.
One of the biggest drawbacks of CSS clipping, at the time of writing, is browser support. Not having 100% browser coverage means different experiences for viewers in different browsers. We, as developers, can’t control what browsers support — browser vendors are the ones who implement the spec and different vendors will have different agendas.
One thing we can do to overcome inconsistencies is use alternative technologies. The feature set of CSS and SVG sometimes overlap. What works in one may work in the other and vice versa. As it happens, the concept of clipping exists in both CSS and SVG. The SVG clipping syntax is quite different, but it works the same. The good thing about SVG clipping compared to CSS is its maturity level. Support is good all the way back to old IE browsers. Most bugs are fixed by now (or at least one hope they are).
This is what the SVG clipping support looks like:
This browser support data is from Caniuse, which has more detail. A number indicates that browser supports the feature at that version and up.
Desktop
Chrome
Opera
Firefox
IE
Edge
Safari
4
9
3
9
12
3.2
Mobile / Tablet
iOS Safari
Opera Mobile
Opera Mini
Android
Android Chrome
Android Firefox
3.2
10
all
4.4
67
60
Clipping as a transition
A neat use case for clipping is transition effects. Take The Silhouette Slideshow demo on CodePen:
A “regular” slideshow cycles though images. Here, to make it a bit more interesting, there’s a clipping effect when switching images. The next image enters the screen through a silhouette of of the previous image. This creates the illusion that the images are connected to one another, even if they are not.
The transitions follow this process:
Identify the focal point (i.e., main subject) of the image
Create a clipping path for that object
Cut the next image with the path
The cut image (silhouette) fades in
Scale the clipping path until it’s bigger than the viewport
Complete the transition to display the next image
Repeat!
Let’s break down the sequence, starting with the first image. We’ll split this up into multiple pens so we can isolate each step.
For this image, we then want to create a mask of the focal point — in this case, the person’s silhouette. If you’re unsure how to go about creating a clip, check out my previous article for more details because, generally speaking, making cuts in CSS and SVG is fundamentally the same:
Import an image into the SVG editor
Draw a path around the object
Convert the path to the syntax for SVG clip path. This is what goes in the SVG’s block.
Paste the SVG markup into the HTML
If you’re handy with the editor, you can do most of the above in the editor. Most editors have good support for masks and clip paths. I like to have more control over the markup, so I usually do at least some of the work by hand. I find there’s a balance between working with an SVG editor vs. working with markup. For example, I like to organize the code, rename the classes and clean up any cruft the editor may have dropped in there.
Mozilla Developer Network does a fine job of documenting SVG clip paths. Here’s a stripped-down version of the markup used by the original demo to give you an idea of how a clip path fits in:
Let’s use a colored rectangle as a placeholder for the next image in the slideshow. This helps to clearly visualize the shape that part that’s cut out and will give a clearer idea of the shape and its movement.
Now that we have the silhouette, let’s have a look at the actual transition. In essence, we’re looking at two parts of the transition that work together to create the effect:
First, the mask fades into view.
After a brief delay (200ms), the clip path scales up in size.
Note the translate value in the upscaling rule. It’s there to make sure the mask stays in the focal point as things scale up. This is the CSS for those transitions:
Repeating the above procedure for each image is how we get multiple slides.
The last thing we need is logic to cycle through the images. This is a matter of bookkeeping, determining which is the current image and which is the next, so on and so forth:
Note that this examples is not supported by Firefox at the time of writing because is lacks support for scaling clip paths. I hope this is something that will be addressed in the near future.
Clipping to emerge foreground objects into the background
Another interesting use for clipping is for revealing and hiding effects. We can create parts of the view where objects are either partly or completely hidden making for a fun way to make background images interact with foreground content. For instance, we could have objects disappear behind elements in the background image, say a building or a mountain. It becomes even more interesting when we pair that idea up with animation or scrolling effects.
This example uses a clipping path to create an effect where text submerges into the photo — specifically, floating behind mountains as a user scrolls down the page. To make it even more interesting, the text moves with a parallax effect. In other words, the different layers move at different speeds to enhance the perspective.
We start with a simple div and define a background image for it in the CSS:
The key part in the photo is the line that separates the foreground layer from the layers in the background of the photo. Basically, we want to split the photo into two parts — a perfect use-case for clipping!
Let’s follow the same process we’ve covered before and cut elements out by following a line. In your photo editor, create a clipping path between those two layers. The way I did it was to draw a path following the line in the photo. To close off the path, I connected the line with the top corners.
Here’s visual highlighting the background layers in blue:
Any SVG content drawn below the blue area will be partly or completely hidden. This creates an illusion that content disappears behind the hill. For example, here’s a circle that’s drawn on top of the blue background when part of it overlaps with the foreground layer:
Looks kind of like the moon poking out of the mountain top!
All that’s left to recreate my original demo is to change the circle to text and move it when the user scrolls. One way to do that is through a scroll event listener:
Don’t pay too much attention to the + 5 used when calculating the distance. It’s only there as a sloppy way to offset the element. The important part is where things are divided by 10, which creates the parallax effect. Scrolling a certain amount will proportionally move the element and the clip path. Template literals convert the calculated value to a string which is used for the transform property value as an offset to the SVG nodes.
Combining clipping and masking
Clipping and masking are two interesting concepts. One lets you cut out pieces of content whereas the other let’s you do the opposite. Both techniques are useful by themselves but there is no reason why we can’t combine their powers!
When combining clipping and masking, you can split up objects to create different visual effects on different parts. For example:
I created this effect using both clipping and masking on a logo. The text, split into two parts, blends with the background image, which is a beautiful monochromatic image of the New York’s Statue of Liberty. I use different colors and opacities on different parts of the text to make it stand out. This creates an interesting visual effect where the text blends in with the background when it overlaps with the statue — a splash of color to an otherwise grey image. There is, besides clipping and masking, a parallax effect here as well. The text moves in a different speed relative to the image when the user hovers or moves (touch) over the image.
To illustrate the behavior, here is what we get when the masked part is stripped out:
<p data-height="500" data-theme-id="1" data-slug-hash="djvyyj" data-default-tab="result" data-user="ainalem" data-pen-title="parallax logo blend
This is actually a neat feature in itself because the text appears to flow behind the statue. That’s a good use of clipping. But, we’re going to mix in some creative masking to let the text blend into the statue.
Here’s the same demo, but with the mask applied and the clip disabled:
<p data-height="500" data-theme-id="1" data-slug-hash="KBWKpz" data-default-tab="result" data-user="ainalem" data-pen-title="parallax logo blend
Notice how masking combines the text with the statue and uses the statue as the visual bounds for the text. Clipping allows us to display the full text while maintaining that blending. Again, the final result:
Clipping is a fun way to create interactions and visual effects. It can enhance slide-shows or make objects stand out of images, among other things. Both SVG and CSS provide the ability to apply clip paths and masks to elements, though with different syntaxes. We can pretty much cut any web content nowadays. It is only your imagination that sets the limit.
If you happen to create anything cool with the things we covered here, please share them with me in the comments!
Our recent survey of design and development firms revealed a tantalizing statistic: Freelancers who use value-based pricing were more likely to report annual income over $50,000 per year than freelancers who weren’t. Could it raise revenues for your practice?
Value-based pricing is charging a percentage of the additional revenue your project will generate for the client, rather than charging a fixed hourly rate. Here’s an excellent summary of how value-based pricing works and some hypothetical examples. But we’re going to show what value-based pricing has done for real-world web design and dev businesses.
Our WordPress Design and Development Pricing, Structure, and Services Survey was completed by 90 freelance web developers/designers. By cross-referencing reported revenue with those freelancers who use value-based pricing, we can show how value-based pricing worked in 2017.
Solo practitioners were far more likely to break the $50,000/year barrier if they used value-based pricing. The majority of firms who didn’t use value-based pricing generated less than $50,000/year.
Looking at all firms, not just solo freelancers, smaller firms were much more likely to use value-based pricing. For now, value-based pricing appears to be a grassroots movement.
So, what’s going on here? As someone who works with WordPress designers and developers on a daily basis, I’m hearing a few different reasons why value-based pricing is succeeding.
A Price That Tracks to ROI is Simply Higher
For most small businesses, a website is their front window. It’s where potential clients go to assess a business either before reaching out or upon first contact.
An attractive, fast, responsive website is critical for all businesses. And for businesses that drive conversions online, the performance of their website is the difference between growth and bankruptcy.
Just because you can get a website built for $100 doesn’t mean you should.
Just because you can get a website built for $100 doesn’t mean you should. Web designers and developers who demonstrate the value of a well-designed site are successfully making their pitch to receive a percentage of that value.
Higher-Quality Referrals
In the pay-per-hour world, web designers and developers are service providers. They’re hired to execute the customer’s vision.
If you come across a plug-in or design tweak that could improve conversions, you’re disincentivized from adding it, or even suggesting it, because the customer may feel they’re being overbilled. You’re judged on your level of service—how fast you complete the project, how responsive you are to the client’s changes, and how close you get to what they envisioned.
Solo practitioners were far more likely to break the $50,000/year barrier if they used value-based pricing
If you please a client like this, they will refer you—to customers with exactly the same expectations.
With value-based pricing, your fee is integrated into your customer’s business model. The goal isn’t spending the correct amount of time, it’s doing the project right and building their business. If you please a client like this, they will refer you—to customers interested in growth and innovation.
If your referrals come from clients who value cost certainty, yeah, you’re only going to make so much. But if referrals come from clients who value growth, you can grow your business alongside them.
No “Efficiency Penalty”
You’re a per-hour freelancer who just figured out a faster way to do a core task. In any other business, this would be cause for celebration. But in your world, you’ve cost yourself money.
If you’re incentivized to work more efficiently, you will.
For designers and developers who use value-based pricing, it’s the opposite. That time savings can go to additional marketing efforts, additional training to make future efficiency breakthroughs possible, or taking on new clients.
Why are value-pricing freelancers making more? It may simply be that their effective billing rate is higher. And it also could be a function of motivation. If you’re incentivized to work more efficiently, you will. If you aren’t incentivized to work more efficiently, you won’t. And, worst of all, you’ll find yourself falling behind those who are.
Flat-rate pricing is disappearing, industry by industry. One of the longest holdouts, movie theaters, are finally starting to embrace a value-based model. Among WordPress design and development firms, it’s mostly small firms who are using value-based pricing. But what happens when the big firms realize they could make more money that way?
