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How to Leverage Social Media to Become a Social Recruiting Expert

February 10th, 2020 No comments

Social media has dramatically changed our lives in the past ten years. No wonder it’s also evolving the ways of approaching and recruiting potential candidates.

Although many of us consider ourselves social media experts for personal use but using it for hiring the right candidates may be a bit more complicated.

Attracting and getting the candidate that is ideal for your job is not so easy. Job websites and job fairs are excellent, but the key to effective recruitment always lies in leveraging social media and becoming a top recruiter.

A survey in 2017 found that 70% of companies are now using social media for screening potential candidates. Another research that has found that about 95% of recruiters get the help of social media to post their job openings. 59% of job seekers say that they have chosen their current workplaces due to inspiring from their strong social media presence.

As the use of social media continues to skyrocket, more companies like Apply Up are spotting the fact that they can approach the best candidates faster and with low cost by leveraging the social networks effectively.

Social networks are a great way to provide the recruiters a competitive edge to locate and engage the talented candidates that are a perfect match for your company. It can ultimately help you in finding an elevating the top talent for your company.

But leveraging the social networks effectively means much more than to post a few hashtags or telling the people that you have positions available.

This blog is a complete guide to let you started as a recruiter in getting the competent candidates, recognizing your company brand, lowering the costs of finding the best resource, and meeting the company goals.

What is Social Recruiting?

The term social recruiting means using social media networks to find the potential candidates with the top talent required education, accomplishments, and other skills that are the requirements of your job opening.

Where to Start

It is essential to understand how to leverage social networks to become a top recruiter. Although it may seem a bit scary with all tools available, these tools and sites are just a part of the equation. Before starting anything else, you have to invest some time in thinking about your company’s goals to meet them. Once you have gone thinking about your company goals, now it’s time to follow the next steps, and launch social recruiting.

Establish a Plan

While thinking about your company goals you must have known the foundation of your company. Now it’s the time to establish a plan on which tools you have to use, how much time you have to spend on social media, and how to keep updated the content of your company.

Build A Strong Online Presence

Nowadays, job seekers demand more than just getting salaries. They want a better place and environment to work with the right culture, ethics, and corporate values. Besides engaging with the right candidates, use social networks to showcase the brand of your company, and build your reputation online. Once you get connected with a pool of talent, you will be able to hire the candidate who is the best match for your company.

Connect with Employees

Leveraging social media helps you to get connected with the job seekers and finding the best one, but involving the current employees to share your job posts, the latest company news, and content on social media is also a great way to get the wide pool of talent. Moreover, there are also some emerging recruitment agencies such as Apply Up, which is empowering the associations to find the best possible candidate for their company. Also, get aware of what people review about your company, determine how candidates perceive your brand and continue monitoring your brand image to work on the issues that require to be resolved.

How to Use Social Media Platforms?

Here are some valuable tips for recruiting on:

Facebook

Leading the game of social media, Facebook is the most powerful tool for recruitment. Reach the right candidates, by using Facebook ads, and make a separate career page for employees and candidates where they can see the job openings and company’s culture, etc. Besides this, you can also take the help of live streaming to announce the new job openings and connecting with potential candidates.

LinkedIn

It’s the best social media platform for professionals to find and get connected with the top talent. To use this effectively, you must make sure that your company profile is updated. In addition to it, explore LinkedIn groups to find the best candidates with expertise and skills in any specific domain. You can also approach the best candidates by using the targeted ads and posting your jobs directly.

Twitter

Use the right hashtags to help the candidates find your job posting and also ask your followers to tweet about the job opening as well. There are a lot of tools available online to help you choose the hashtags. But don’t forget to post other content as well, not just job openings.

Instagram

Yes, the popular social network for sharing the photos may also help to get connected with the quality job seeker. For example, posting the snaps of your team, and the workplace can help you to promote the culture of the company visually. All you need is to invite the candidates by using a call to action. Explore here the picture stream of the potential candidates on Instagram to know more about them and become a recruiter expert.

Start Recruiting with Social Media

Social media networks offer a very powerful platform for the recruiters to get the right pool of candidates, that might not be able to approach otherwise. The fact cannot be denied that social media networks are evolving continuously. Social recruiting indeed is the best strategy that a recruiter must use to find the candidate who is a perfect fit for their company. But it’s not a complete solution if your other recruiting programs are not aligned with your social media marketing strategy.

Once you learn to use these strategies, establish a plan and start winning the potential candidates, you will notice a dramatic improvement in your recruitment ways. If you still need any consultancy regarding recruitment, you can also visit Apply up, which is among the top recruitment agencies for providing valuable resources for your company.

Hopefully, this blog will give you enough guidance to become a top recruiter. Good luck to you for all your social recruiting activities for this year and beyond.

Categories: Others Tags:

How to Leverage Social Media to Become a Social Recruiting Expert

February 10th, 2020 No comments

Social media has dramatically changed our lives in the past ten years. No wonder it’s also evolving the ways of approaching and recruiting potential candidates.

Although many of us consider ourselves social media experts for personal use but using it for hiring the right candidates may be a bit more complicated.

Attracting and getting the candidate that is ideal for your job is not so easy. Job websites and job fairs are excellent, but the key to effective recruitment always lies in leveraging social media and becoming a top recruiter.

A survey in 2017 found that 70% of companies are now using social media for screening potential candidates. Another research that has found that about 95% of recruiters get the help of social media to post their job openings. 59% of job seekers say that they have chosen their current workplaces due to inspiring from their strong social media presence.

As the use of social media continues to skyrocket, more companies like Apply Up are spotting the fact that they can approach the best candidates faster and with low cost by leveraging the social networks effectively.

Social networks are a great way to provide the recruiters a competitive edge to locate and engage the talented candidates that are a perfect match for your company. It can ultimately help you in finding an elevating the top talent for your company.

But leveraging the social networks effectively means much more than to post a few hashtags or telling the people that you have positions available.

This blog is a complete guide to let you started as a recruiter in getting the competent candidates, recognizing your company brand, lowering the costs of finding the best resource, and meeting the company goals.

What is Social Recruiting?

The term social recruiting means using social media networks to find the potential candidates with the top talent required education, accomplishments, and other skills that are the requirements of your job opening.

Where to Start

It is essential to understand how to leverage social networks to become a top recruiter. Although it may seem a bit scary with all tools available, these tools and sites are just a part of the equation. Before starting anything else, you have to invest some time in thinking about your company’s goals to meet them. Once you have gone thinking about your company goals, now it’s time to follow the next steps, and launch social recruiting.

Establish a Plan

While thinking about your company goals you must have known the foundation of your company. Now it’s the time to establish a plan on which tools you have to use, how much time you have to spend on social media, and how to keep updated the content of your company.

Build A Strong Online Presence

Nowadays, job seekers demand more than just getting salaries. They want a better place and environment to work with the right culture, ethics, and corporate values. Besides engaging with the right candidates, use social networks to showcase the brand of your company, and build your reputation online. Once you get connected with a pool of talent, you will be able to hire the candidate who is the best match for your company.

Connect with Employees

Leveraging social media helps you to get connected with the job seekers and finding the best one, but involving the current employees to share your job posts, the latest company news, and content on social media is also a great way to get the wide pool of talent. Moreover, there are also some emerging recruitment agencies such as Apply Up, which is empowering the associations to find the best possible candidate for their company. Also, get aware of what people review about your company, determine how candidates perceive your brand and continue monitoring your brand image to work on the issues that require to be resolved.

How to Use Social Media Platforms?

Here are some valuable tips for recruiting on:

Facebook

Leading the game of social media, Facebook is the most powerful tool for recruitment. Reach the right candidates, by using Facebook ads, and make a separate career page for employees and candidates where they can see the job openings and company’s culture, etc. Besides this, you can also take the help of live streaming to announce the new job openings and connecting with potential candidates.

LinkedIn

It’s the best social media platform for professionals to find and get connected with the top talent. To use this effectively, you must make sure that your company profile is updated. In addition to it, explore LinkedIn groups to find the best candidates with expertise and skills in any specific domain. You can also approach the best candidates by using the targeted ads and posting your jobs directly.

Twitter

Use the right hashtags to help the candidates find your job posting and also ask your followers to tweet about the job opening as well. There are a lot of tools available online to help you choose the hashtags. But don’t forget to post other content as well, not just job openings.

Instagram

Yes, the popular social network for sharing the photos may also help to get connected with the quality job seeker. For example, posting the snaps of your team, and the workplace can help you to promote the culture of the company visually. All you need is to invite the candidates by using a call to action. Explore here the picture stream of the potential candidates on Instagram to know more about them and become a recruiter expert.

Start Recruiting with Social Media

Social media networks offer a very powerful platform for the recruiters to get the right pool of candidates, that might not be able to approach otherwise. The fact cannot be denied that social media networks are evolving continuously. Social recruiting indeed is the best strategy that a recruiter must use to find the candidate who is a perfect fit for their company. But it’s not a complete solution if your other recruiting programs are not aligned with your social media marketing strategy.

Once you learn to use these strategies, establish a plan and start winning the potential candidates, you will notice a dramatic improvement in your recruitment ways. If you still need any consultancy regarding recruitment, you can also visit Apply up, which is among the top recruitment agencies for providing valuable resources for your company.

Hopefully, this blog will give you enough guidance to become a top recruiter. Good luck to you for all your social recruiting activities for this year and beyond.

Categories: Others Tags:

An Interview With Rémi Parmentier: A SmashingConf Austin Speaker

February 10th, 2020 No comments
Smashing Editorial

An Interview With Rémi Parmentier: A SmashingConf Austin Speaker

An Interview With Rémi Parmentier: A SmashingConf Austin Speaker

Rachel Andrew

2020-02-10T13:00:00+00:002020-02-10T16:09:21+00:00

We are so excited to be bringing SmashingConf to a new city this year. We’re bringing you SmashingConf Austin and we have a fantastic line-up of speakers.

Check out this post, where we introduce our new venue of Austin and share an interview with Miriam Suzanne, and last week’s video interview with Zach Leatherman. This time we speak to Rémi Parmentier and find out what he will share with the Austin audience.

Rémi will be talking about HTML email at SmashingConf Austin. See you there?

We’ve invited Rémi back to share more of his knowledge because he was so popular at SmashingConf Freiburg last year, and in the webinar he presented to Smashing members. You can find all of that content, including a full transcript of the webinar in the post “Become An HTML Email Geek With These Videos From Rémi Parmentier”. Also, take a look at some of Rémi’s articles on the subject.

Tickets Are On Sale Now!

If you want to join in the fun, tickets are on sale. Last year, we sold out three of our conferences well before the conference date, and popular workshops also fill up fast. Just saying!

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Exciting New Tools for Designers, February 2020

February 10th, 2020 No comments

Are you starting 2020 off on the right foot? How about keeping up with those resolutions to learn or try something new?

Either way, you’re in luck. This roundup is packed with new tools to help you through projects or learn new tricks to enhance your skillset. Here’s what’s new for designers this month.

Calcolor

Calcolor is a color tool that provides deeper information and meaning for every color in your palette so you can make better color choices. The tool has a contextual description for every HEX color code. You can use it to create and save digital color palettes or find better options for colors before you get too deep into the design.

Invisible Line Editor

Invisible Line Editor is a tool that helps you align text in a specific manner. You can click and drag to center, justify, or right- of left-align text. You can even download text and share. If nothing else, it is fun to play with to see how blocks of text might look in different alignments.

YourStack

YourStack, which is in public beta, is designed to help you share your favorite products with others. It’s a neat concept for reviewing tools and products. Plus, it has a nifty design that’s fun to peruse.

FlowMapp Personas Tool

FlowMapp’s Personas Tool helps you better understand your target audience by building distinct user personas. It’s deep mapping in a premium tool that can help create better design experiences.

Kinetic Slider

Kinetic Slider is a fully customizable WebGL slider based on PixiJS and Gsap. It creates an effect that lets you swipe to navigate between slides, include regular prev or next navigation, use a background or cursor displacement effect or background to titles RGB split effect.

Learn CSS Positioning

Learn CSS Positioning is an interactive article/game/tutorial to help you make the most of how CSS positioning works. Developer Ahmad Shadeed did an excellent job with this tool and presentation. It’s an amazing learning tool that’s actually fun to use.

LambdaTest

LambdaTest is an automated scheduler for screenshot testing. You can set specific time intervals and the tool will take screenshots of the desired URL. Results go to your inbox. It’s a good way to monitor websites.

Remote Stash

Remote Stash is a database of tools for contractors, freelancers, and remote workers to help increase productivity when you don’t work in an office with other people. Tools are sorted into categories to help you find what you need to do better work.

Flow Fields

Flow Fields uses a particle simulation to visualize a field of directional vectors. It uses Perlin Noise to construct a field of random (but related) forces in horizontal and vertical directions (that change over time). Go play around and watch the lines draw themselves.

BinarySearch

BinarySearch, which is still in beta, is a game to help you and your peers create rooms to practice mastering algorithms. Create problems and race to the answers. It’s a fun learning tool for sure.

Snack This

Snack This is a tool to generate text gifs in seconds that you can download and use online or on social media. Type in your words and get a screen of generated options, pick the one you want and download or export.

Shimmery Text

Shimmery Text uses SVG and GSAP to create a cool animated text element with editable controls.

Design Password

Design Password is a practical tool that’s just plain fun. It’s a tiny generator that creates passwords that are easy for designers to remember, with a description and visual cue to match.

No-Code Coffee

No-Code Coffee is a daily email newsletter packed that features a daily tool that is code-free and can help with projects. It’s free and can be a nice source of inspiration.

Monday Hero

Monday Hero is a tool that converts Sketch designs into Swift code so you don’t have to. Use it to create mobile code fast. The tool supports multiple languages, including Swift, Kotlin, Flutter, and React.

Motion

Motion is a free and simple animated SVG editor. It’s a downloadable tool that works on Mac or Windows. It comes with icons that you can edit and adjust to your liking. A premium version is also available.

Screenie

Screenie is a Mac app to manage screenshots. But the best feature is that you can search text inside screengrab images.

Greenhouse Vector Icons

Greenhouse Vector Icons is a set of flat icons in two formats and three versions with a “green” theme. If you are already starting to think about spring, this is the icon set for your projects.

All Design Conferences

All Design Conferences is just what it sounds like – a giant list of all the conference opportunities for designers in 2020. It’s based on a google sheet with a sortable, searchable design to help you plan training opportunities for the year.

Magical Rainbow Gradients

Magical Rainbow Gradients is a tutorial to help you create this fun effect. It uses CSS Houdini and React Hooks to create buttons with a rainbow effect and animation.

Chocolate Valentine

Chocolate Valentine is a fun comic-style font with fat letterforms and an almost child-like feel. It includes upper- and lower-case letters and numbers.

Dark Light

Dark Light is a handwriting style typeface with interesting letterforms and a thin structure. It includes a full character set and some alternates.

Giant

Giant is a trendy outline style typeface with an extremely high x-height. The character set is somewhat limited but could make for a fun display use.

Jet Brains Mono

Jet Brains Mono is an open source typeface designed for developers. It has an increased height for a better reading experience, weights with matching italics and is usable in 145 languages.

Red Hook

Red Hook is a double layer font with a light fill and slab outline. The design said it is inspired by the brick walls of Red Hook.

Thicker Black

Thicker Black is a super-sized extra black typeface that works for display. The free version has four variants for noncommercial use and the full version is robust with 10 weights.

Source

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Beginner’s guide to creating a killer Customer Loyalty Program in 2020

February 10th, 2020 No comments

Loyalty, Loyalty is something that every human needs in their life. Be it your partner, your pet, or your customers, and everyone hopes to get loyalty.

You can never get enough of loyalty. Keeping your customer satisfied is a tough task in this competitive world. You need robust marketing strategies and innovative customer loyalty programs if you want to satisfy customers and increase your sales. As the competition is growing each day, keeping the customers engaged is becoming tougher.

Setting up an entrancing loyalty program is one engaging step a retailer can take to reach out to their loyal customers and encourage them to come back to your store.

What is a customer loyalty program?

A loyalty program is a set of strategies that enables you to offer timely incentives to the customers based on their previous purchases from the store. A loyal customer will bring other customers to your store, as well. They might bring referrals through social sharing, which will benefit your business. Deliver an amazing customer experience should be your topmost priority because customer loyalty is possible only if they get an excellent customer experience.

We will discuss some tips for creating killer customer loyalty programs in 2020. Let us begin.

1. Do your research

Before the implementation begins, your team needs to do an in-depth analysis to execute a successful customer loyalty program. There are various customer loyalty programs; research will help you choose the one that perfectly suits your business.

Use customer data from a variety of sources such as website analytics, sales and inventory history, etc. to determine what would be most likely to respond too. Don’t forget to take into account customer satisfaction, behavior, and market trends.

With proper and in-depth research, you can use the data to design customer loyalty products as well as improve your products and services.

2. Reward a variety of customer actions

Another way to show your commitment to loyalty programs is by rewarding a variety of customer actions. Customers, who watch product videos, engage in your mobile app, follow you on social media, and share your content are signs that they are engaging with your brand. You must reward these customers

Rewarding these customers will encourage them and keep them engaged in your business. Let them earn points for a variety of actions each week. This way, they will be engaged in your business and keep liking and sharing your content with others.

3. Keep it simple

If you use complicated loyalty programs, many customers will not be able to understand it. It’s better to keep it simple and easily understandable so that all the customers can appreciate it without any difficulty. To make it simple, you can create a points system that is easy to track. Give out points to customers on their purchase, also explain to them how they can redeem those points, and when the points will expire, etc.

An ideal customer loyalty program is the one that is simple and easy to understand for the customers of all age groups.

4. Provide multiple opportunities for customers to enroll

If customers get rewards from buying from your eCommerce online store, share the points they could earn next to the price.

Other ways to provide opportunities to customers include promoting the program on social media and adding on-site notifications when customers make a purchase that earns them reward points. You can also pay the customers who have spent a lot to earn enough loyalty points free tickets to events and concerts. This will surely encourage them to return to your store again and again and also refer your store to others.

5. Market the program

Start investing in marketing so to make your customers aware of the loyalty program. No matter how great your customer loyalty programs are, if your customers are not aware of it, it’s not going to work in your favor. Make sure to create a marketing strategy that suits your business. Here is what you can do-

  • Online Ads
  • Social Media
  • Newspaper
  • Ads
  • Send email newsletter
  • Outdoor contents
  • Press releases

6. Choose incentives carefully

When you decide the incentives for your loyalty program, you need to keep an eye on the behavior of your target customers. Try and think of options that make the incentives exclusive.

For example, in India, Starbucks has designed an effective loyalty program called ‘My Starbucks Rewards.’ There are many ways to enroll in the loyalty program. You can also think of something similar to this for your loyalty program. You can also give your customers one star for every purchase.

7. Stay connected with your customers

Staying in touch with your customers is crucial after creating a loyalty program. One of the best ways to stay in touch with customers is via email campaigns. Using email campaigns, you can inform and update your customers about renewals and exclusive deals for the selected customers.

If needed, you can resend them the mail after some time to remind them of the same. This helps in building a positive impression of your brand.

Another great way of connecting well with your customers is by enabling live chat. If you have a live chat enabled on your website, then you can inform your customers by loyalty programs while you chat with them. It is a great way to stay connected with your customers.

Final Thoughts

Loyalty programs help in boosting profits and improve customer retention. It helps you keep your highly valued customers at close range and keep them coming back to your website. This means these loyalty programs have the power to make a significant impact on your business’ overall growth and sales.

Implement effective loyalty programs for your customers, manage them well, and you are ready to run your business smoothly and successfully for a long time.

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Is Having an RSS Feed Just Giving Content Away for Free?

February 7th, 2020 No comments

I mean, kinda.

I was just asked this question the other day so I’m answering here because blogging is cool.

The point of an RSS feed is for people to read your content elsewhere (hence the last part of the acronym, Syndication, as in, broadcasting elsewhere). Probably an RSS reader. But RSS is XML, so in a sense, it’s a limited API to your content as well, which people can use to do other programmatic things (e.g. show a list of recent posts on some other site).

If you hate the idea of people seeing your work outside of your website, then don’t have an RSS feed. It doesn’t prevent your site from being scraped (nothing really does), but it isn’t inviting people to your content the way RSS does.

But…

Don’t you want people to read your stuff? Having an RSS feed is saying, “I’m happy to meet you where you are. If you like reading stuff over there, then great, read it over there. I just like it when you read my stuff.”

It’s hard enough to get people to care about your work anyway. Being extra protective over it isn’t going to help that.

Who’s comic book are you more likely to buy? The webcomic you read and laugh at every day because they make it so easy and free to read? Or the comic that you can’t see because you have to pay for to get a peek and have to roll the dice on whether you’re going to like it or not?

What consultant are you more likely to hire? The one that shares a ton of knowledge about their skills and has firmly established themselves as a publicly verifiable expert? Or a consultant with a homepage that’s just a pricing sheet and phone number?

What blog are you more likely to trust a recommendation from? One that you subscribe to on purpose because you like their content and writers? Or some site you randomly landed on?

What web do you want to exist? One with fun interoperable possibilities? Or walled gardens?

The post Is Having an RSS Feed Just Giving Content Away for Free? appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Guillermo’s 2019 in Review

February 7th, 2020 No comments

Of all the tech-focused year-in-review posts I read, Guillermo Rauch’s is my favorite. There is a lot in there, jumping from topics like modern architectures, high-fiving specific apps, and philosophical movements.

I’ll pick one quote about the rise of “deploy previews”:

A salient feature is the transition we are seeing away from code review into deployment preview.

Code review is undeniably important (specially speedy code review), but nothing beats teams collaborating by sharing URLs to the actual sites that are being worked on and experiencing them directly.

Having a URL for every single push to every single branch (or at least for every single Pull Request¹ is huge. This isn’t just “staging.” It’s like Super Staging, and Jamstack makes it possible. Both Netlify and ZEIT do it automatically.

Not only does it help the author (and her co-workers) check out the changes on a production replica, it helps out a pile of automation tools that can run against these URLs, making for way more stable development workflows.

  1. GitHub calls them “Pull Requests” but I use GitLab just as much which calls them “Merge Requests,” so I never know which to write. “Pull/Merge Requests” is awkward at best and confusing at worst. I don’t use Bitbucket much, but they are Pull Requests there. I guess I’ll let that tip the scales and just say Pull Request from now on.

Direct Link to ArticlePermalink

The post Guillermo’s 2019 in Review appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features

February 7th, 2020 No comments

It’s entirely possible to build custom checkboxes, radio buttons, and toggle switches these days, while staying semantic and accessible. We don’t even need a single line of JavaScript or extra HTML elements! It’s actually gotten easier lately than it has been in the past. Let’s take a look.

Here’s where we’ll end up:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Things sure have gotten easier than they were!

The reason is that we can finally style the ::before and ::after pseudo-elements on the tag itself. This means we can keep and style an and won’t need any extra elements. Before, we had to rely on the likes of an extra

or , to pull off a custom design.

Let’s look at the HTML

Nothing special here. We can style our inputs with just this HTML:

<!-- Checkbox -->
<input type="checkbox">

<!-- Radio -->
<input type="radio">

<!-- Switch -->
<input type="checkbox" class="switch">

That’s it for the HTML part, but of course it’s recommended to have name and id attributes, plus a matching element:

<!-- Checkbox -->
<input type="checkbox" name="c1" id="c1">
<label for="c1">Checkbox</label>

<!-- Radio -->
<input type="radio" name="r1" id="r1">
<label for="r1">Radio</label>

<!-- Switch -->
<input type="checkbox" class="switch" name="s1" id="s1">
<label for="s1">Switch</label>

Getting into the styling

First of all, we check for the support of appearance: none;, including it’s prefixed companions. The appearance property is key because it is designed to remove a browser’s default styling from an element. If the property isn’t supported, the styles won’t apply and default input styles will be shown. That’s perfectly fine and a good example of progressive enhancement at play.

@supports(-webkit-appearance: none) or (-moz-appearance: none) {
  input[type='checkbox'],
  input[type='radio'] {
    -webkit-appearance: none;
    -moz-appearance: none;
  }
}

As it stands today, appearance is a working draft, but here’s what 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 Firefox IE Edge Safari
82* 74* No 79* TP*

Mobile / Tablet

Android Chrome Android Firefox Android iOS Safari
79* 68* 76* 13.3*

Like links, we’ve gotta consider different interactive states with form elements. We’ll consider these when styling our elements:

  • :checked
  • :hover
  • :focus
  • :disabled

For example, here’s how we can style our toggle input, create the knob, and account for the :checked state:

/* The toggle container */
.switch {
  width: 38px;
  border-radius: 11px;
}

/* The toggle knob */
.switch::after {
  left: 2px;
  top: 2px;
  border-radius: 50%;
  width: 15px;
  height: 15px;
  background: var(--ab, var(--border));
  transform: translateX(var(--x, 0));
}

/* Change color and position when checked */
.switch:checked {
  --ab: var(--active-inner);
  --x: 17px;
}

/* Drop the opacity of the toggle knob when the input is disabled */
.switch:disabled:not(:checked)::after {
  opacity: .6;
}

We are using the element like a container. The knob inside of the input is created with the ::after pseudo-element. Again, no more need for extra markup!

If you crack open the styles in the demo, you’ll see that we’re defining some CSS custom properties because that’s become such a nice way to manage reusable values in a stylesheet:

@supports(-webkit-appearance: none) or (-moz-appearance: none) {
  input[type='checkbox'],
  input[type='radio'] {
    --active: #275EFE;
    --active-inner: #fff;
    --focus: 2px rgba(39, 94, 254, .25);
    --border: #BBC1E1;
    --border-hover: #275EFE;
    --background: #fff;
    --disabled: #F6F8FF;
    --disabled-inner: #E1E6F9;
  }
}

But there’s another reason we’re using custom properties — they work well for updating values based on the state of the element! We won’t go into full detail here, but here’s an example how we can use custom properties for different states.

/* Default */
input[type='checkbox'],
input[type='radio'] {
  --active: #275EFE;
  --border: #BBC1E1;
  border: 1px solid var(--bc, var(--border));
}

/* Override defaults */
input[type='checkbox']:checked,
input[type='radio']:checked {
  --b: var(--active);
  --bc: var(--active);
}
  
/* Apply another border color on hover if not checked & not disabled */
input[type='checkbox']:not(:checked):not(:disabled):hover,
input[type='radio']:not(:checked):not(:disabled):hover {
  --bc: var(--border-hover);
}

For accessibility, we ought to add a custom focus style. We are removing the default outline because it can’t be rounded like the rest of the things we’re styling. But a border-radius along with a box-shadow can make for a rounded style that works just like an outline.

input[type='checkbox'],
input[type='radio'] {
  --focus: 2px rgba(39, 94, 254, .25);
  outline: none;
  transition: box-shadow .2s;
}

input[type='checkbox']:focus,
input[type='radio']:focus {
  box-shadow: 0 0 0 var(--focus);
}

It’s also possible to align and style the element which directly follows the element in the HTML:

<input type="checkbox" name="c1" id="c1">
<label for="c1">Checkbox</label>
input[type='checkbox'] + label,
input[type='radio'] + label {
  display: inline-block;
  vertical-align: top;
  /* Additional styling */
}

input[type='checkbox']:disabled + label,
input[type='radio']:disabled + label {
    cursor: not-allowed;
}

Here’s that demo again:

CodePen Embed Fallback

Hopefully, you’re seeing how nice it is to create custom form styles these days. It requires less markup, thanks to pseudo-elements that are directly on form inputs. It requires less fancy style switching, thanks to custom properties. And it has pretty darn good browser support, thanks to @supports.

All in all, this is a much more pleasant developer experience than we’ve had to deal with in the past!

The post Custom Styling Form Inputs With Modern CSS Features appeared first on CSS-Tricks.

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Old CSS, new CSS

February 7th, 2020 No comments

I love this post that walks through the development of CSS and HTML — it shows just how far web design has come and how much easier it is for us all now.

Eevee looks at designing websites with tables, the Space Jam website, and how for centuries there was no way to easily inspect changes made to a webpage:

Notice the extremely precise positioning of these navigation links. This feat was accomplished the same way everyone did everything in 1996: with tables.

In fact, tables have one functional advantage over CSS for layout, which was very important in those days, and not only because CSS didn’t exist yet. You see, you can ctrl-click to select a table cell and even drag around to select all of them, which shows you how the cells are arranged and functions as a super retro layout debugger. This was great because the first meaningful web debug tool, Firebug, wasn’t released until 2006 — a whole decade later!

This makes me realize two things. First, I cannot imagine a greater horror than this. And secondly, we’re so lucky to have all the excellent DevTools options that modern day browsers have. One example: I recently remembered that if you see a little grid icon next to some CSS or HTML in Firefox, then you can click it and see the Grid outlines appear:

I think we probably take all of this for granted in our day-to-day lives now but this has me thinking: what are some ways we’ll look back at our work today and be like WHAT! You had to do that thing with XYZ??!?

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15 WordPress Plugins to Increase Engagement with Readers

February 7th, 2020 No comments

Do you have a content-rich WordPress website that you believe will help boost your business profits? Developing a feature and content-rich website is definitely the first step, but you cannot increase your conversions if you have not maximized the engagement on your website.

You need to continually work on expanding and improving user engagement so that the readers convert into customers.

You need to continually work on expanding and improving user engagement so that the readers convert into customers.

WordPress plugin development service makes life easier for you. You can choose from a variety of plugins, add it to the website, and optimize it for engagement. The idea is to improve user experience, make it more relevant for your target audience, and make them want to spend more time on your website.

1. Disqus

Who doesn’t like a good discussion? If you give your readers an excellent platform to discuss, you are likely to increase your engagement. Disqus helps you give your comments section a stylish layout. You can use your social login to signup with this plugin, and post your comments on the post. Voting or adding comments to a particular thread is possible with this plugin. With easy coding options and multilingual options, this plugin is a must-have for your website.

2. Super Socializer

You need a plugin that not only supports social media but also incorporates all the regular social media updates and trends. With super socializer, you don’t need the other individual social media plugins, as all the functionality is bundled into this one plugin. This plugin offers a range of features that include social sharing, share counters, social login etc. You can even customize the tool to meet your requirements

3. Geotargeting WP

For a content-rich website like yours, it simply means you can target your posts to a certain audience located in certain parts of the world. This is particularly useful to the travel and news websites as well as the marketing agencies who want to market their products to a particular region. You can even use this plugin to automatically redirect the website to the preferred language, in case of multilingual websites.

4. Ninja Forms

Contact forms are a great way to understand the user’s preferences and know what they are looking for from your website. You can use Ninja forms to customize the contact form to match your needs. being an easy drag-n-drop tool, it will help you with data collection as well as with growing your email list.

5. BuzzStream

Influencer marketing is the way to build your social media audience and increase conversions for your brand. Add Buzzstream to your website, and know the influencers in your niche, and start building relationships with them for better outreach. This plugin allows your team to collaborate over outreach by giving them a single database to work on. You can easily organize the projects and manage content using earned media for better engagement and conversions.

6. BBPress

Forums are a great way to increase engagement, and what better way to integrate forums than activating BBPress, the plugin that benchmarks forums for your website. Easy-to-customize offers impressive management tools and supports Akismet, the plugin that keeps the spammers at bay, the BBPress plugin is lightweight, stylish and pretty too. Start meaningful conversations with this plugin!

7. Yoast SEO Premium

Engagement is directly proportional to the time people spend on your website, and you need to make them spend as much time as possible on the site. That’s why you need Yoast SEO premium. It helps with internal linking and suggests ways in which you can keep the user looped into your website. With the crosslinking process automated for your website, you will see more engagement as a result.

8. WordPress AMP

The performance of your website needs to be considered to increase the engagement on your website WordPress AMP plugin will help improve the website’s performance and user experience along with mobile devices, thus increasing the amount of time the user spends on your website. The reason being, the users can easily navigate through the pages, read the articles on mobile, and not wait for a particular page to load.

9. Bibblio

Have you ever entered a website to read one particular content, and then stayed there for a long while then you had planned because you saw other interesting pieces of content? Bibblio is the plugin that will help you engage your audience by showing them relevant content. You can keep showing them relevant articles that will keep them interested in your website.

10. OptinMonster

You need to create subscribers off the visitors, who have chanced upon your website. OptinMonster is the plugin for you. You can use the geo-targeting method or, simple pop-up techniques to get people to opt for your emails or newsletters. The opt-in marketing tactics introduced with this plugin are hassle-free, easy to incorporate and does not bother the visitor’s user experience.

11. Subscribe to Comments Reloaded

If you believe that the people visiting your blog to comment are interested in a particular type of post, then you can get them to subscribe to a particular post. Each time the post is updated with a comment, or there are relevant posts on the subject, then the subscriber will be notified about it. This will increase engagement and improve conversations on your website.

12. One Signal

Get your visitors to not only opt-in for your emails, but also the desktop notifications. So, every time you post new content, they will receive a notification from you. this way they can stay connected with your website, and you can keep them engaged.

13. Contest Hopper

Another great way to engage the users is by running contests on your website. Everyone loves a good contest. Contest Hopper allows you to add and customize the contest forms to your WordPress site. You can add the contest rules, the timeframe and other details that you want your audience to know of, to this form. Sharing the contest is also made easy with this plugin.

14. MailChimp

Marketing your content to the subscribers and letting them know what’s new on your website is another way of increasing engagement. MailChimp plugin makes it easier for you to create targeted email campaigns, automate the follow-up to your campaigns, and refine your products based on your customer’s preferences and interests.

15. Yet Another Stars Rating

Trust is a strong factor, one that ensures a good amount of engagement on your website. If influencers or the online community commend your work, then people will visit your website and stay there for a long while. You can build trust within the online community by adding the “Yet Another Stars Rating” plugin to your website. The readers can share their ratings and review, which will help visitors engage with your posts.

Summing up

If you have a content-rich website, you need to engage the visitors using all aspects such as social sharing, discussions, contests, subscriptions etc. Using the right mix of plugins will help give out an enriching experience that will help the users engage the right way, and increase website conversions for you. Create your plugin with WordPress plugin development service, in case you don’t want to use any of the off-the-shelf plugins.

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