Fantasy is a great genre, whether the setting takes on the problems that humanity faces or just provides pure escapism. It’s been around for a long time, and it’ll be. So why not make your computer’s desktop or phone’s main page stand out by updating it with a badass fantasy wallpaper?
We have compiled a list of digital artwork that you can use as fantasy wallpapers and fantasy backgrounds around the web for you to do just that!
Brad Pascual works at Disney as a Sr VFX Designer, and his works are amazing. Besides, who wouldn’t want Vader to be sitting on their background when they pick up their phone to call their grandmother?
Silent yet so loud. This one is an incredible work by Julian Bauer.
These are some of our favorite CG artwork around the web that you can also use as fantasy wallpapers. Make sure to check the artist’s personal websites, ArtStation, Dribble, and social media accounts to appreciate more of their art.
Let us know which one is your favorite in the comments down below!
There is no denying that acquiring links from websites with high authority can translate to a better search engine ranking of your website.
But the thing about link building is that it is not always easy. That’s why an effective link building strategy is essential, and you must stick to it no matter what.
This guide will show you powerful link building strategies that you can apply to earn more high-quality backlinks and brand mentions, from various channels and relevant websites.
1. Guest Blogging
So, you’re probably familiar with guest blogging. In fact, this is a common component of link building services. That’s because guest blogging is one of the most common ways to help build your links.
The entire concept of guest blogging is simple, as long as you know which sites to approach. Look for relevant sites in your niche and then come up with a write-up or do a collaboration with them.
In return for your content and efforts, you’ll get at least one backlink in return. This could either be found in your content or in the bio section at the bottom of the page.
2. Internal Link Building
Internal links are the links that go from one page to another on a website. Although often dismissed, or forgotten, this is a great way for users to dig in more content on your site.
When creating these internal links, always look for a great keyword phrase in your site content, then linking to your homepage, or any inner page.
As a result, the user will stay longer on your site, exploring your site even further.
3. Broken Link Building
Broken links usually happen when someone removes a particular page that has the backlink or the third-party site or publisher mistyped it.
Now, your job is to look for all these broken links to help strengthen your link building strategy. Broken link building is broken down into three simple steps:
Find a relevant broken link on websites
Come up with something similar to the broken link resource
Ask the webmaster that links to the dead resource if they could replace it with your own working resource.
Additionally, you can also install the Broken Link Checker of Google Chrome so that you can easily find broken links on relevant websites and try to fix them.
4. Competitor Analysis
Do you know your competitors’ current backlinking strategies? If you observe them carefully, you’ll know where their links are coming from, as well as the anchor texts they use.
Keep in mind that Google is constantly switching things up. And in the process, you might notice that your competitors are getting links from high authority sites.
Instead of feeling frustrated, allow them to do the work and be inspired by their efforts. While we don’t advise that you copy them, you can take inspiration from them. Whatever your competitors are doing, always strive to do a better job.
For instance, you can also get in touch with sites that link back to your competitors and provide them with much better content.
Give them a reason to link back to you. In this way, you’re increasing the chances of getting backlinks from these sites.
5. Infographics
Crafting infographics is another great way to promote links. This is one of the most effective ways to maximize your reach and play a key role in your current link building strategy.
One of the benefits of using infographics is that you do not need to generate traffic from your blog constantly. You will also be earning quality links even if you do not ask for them.
6. Unlinked Mentions
Another simple way to gain links is to be on the lookout for brand mentions online regularly.
You can use a tool like BrandMentions to do a quick search of your brand, and then analyze the data that you get.
Check out each site under the web category, and the same thing goes for posts under the social media category. Then, see if any of these links back to you.
If they do not, you could still convert these mentions into links. You can also contact the author of the article or the webmaster if they could add a link that mentions your brand.
7. Link Roundups
These are usually made up of daily, weekly, or monthly summaries of the best content in the industry.
Link roundups are an excellent way to build links and receive a decent amount of referral traffic.
8. Testimonial Links
Testimonials are also great if you want to boost your backlink strategy. With it, you can create strong relationships and build your site authority, which will eventually lead to solid homepage links.
You need to come up with a testimonial for a business where you purchased a great product or hired an excellent service. You then have the chance to be featured on their site along with an active link to your site.
This isn’t difficult to do, and this will be a win-win for both parties in the end.
9. Link Reclamation
Have you checked all the links you’ve earned in the past? Do they still exist?
If you couldn’t find them anymore, then chances are, they’re either broken or removed by the publisher.
Get in touch with the webmaster or publisher of that site to get your links back.
10. Resource Pages
Although this might be similar to a link roundup, there are a couple of differences:
Link roundups take place regularly and feature content that has been published recently. On the other hand, a resource page is like a one-time page update that links out to evergreen content. Meaning, your site is included in the page resources of a website.
So, make sure that you create high-quality content. That way, site owners would want to link out to you voluntarily. You’re also doing them a favor by providing them with an excellent resource.
A solid link building strategy takes time, but it is worth it because it will help you earn a better position on SERPs and gain more site traffic. So, put these techniques into action and start seeing the results!
If we don’t question this kind of design homogenization, do we put ourselves at risk of perpetuating the same mistakes in the years to come? Or is it even a mistake to begin with?
Today, I’m going to look at four things that are likely causing this, and what you can do to break the mold.
1. Education
We used to have a design school in every city in the world, each with its own design style or, at the very least, the encouragement of its designers to be creative and come up with something new.
These days, though, traditional design education isn’t as popular as it once was. According to Design Census 2019, only about a third of working designers have a formal education and degree:
The rest have been trained through a variety of means:
Online learning (17%)
Self taught (12%)
Workshops (10%)
Mentorship (6%)
Certificate programs (4%)
Cost and convenience are definitely two factors influencing this shift towards online learning methods. And with a wealth of resources online to teach them how to design and code, why not go that route? Plus, designers have to keep learning new things in order to remain competitive, so it’s not as though a degree is the be-all and end-all of their design training.
Plus, there isn’t as much demand for it from employers. Unless you plan on working for one of the top global marketing agencies, many hiring companies just want to see proof in the form of a portfolio and maybe have you do a test job.
Now, I’m not saying that online courses and other informal design education don’t foster creativity. However, in order to make them cost-efficient and quick to get through, they have to focus on teaching essential best practices, which means less room for experimentation. Perhaps more importantly, their curriculums are guided by fewer voices. So, this could likely be one of the culprits.
2. Design Blogs and Vlogs
You have to wonder if all the design blogs out there (yes, like Webdesigner Depot) impair designers’ ability to break free from the homogeneity of websites.
I think the answer to that is both “yes,” and “no”.
Why, Yes?
What is the purpose of a web design blog? Mainly it’s to educate new and existing designers on best practices, new trends, and web standards.
By their very nature, they really should be teaching web designers the same kinds of things. Let me show you an example.
This is a Google search for “web design trends 2020”:
Most design blogs will publish trends predictions around January 1. And herein lies the problem. The writers/designers can only deviate so far from what we know to be true when writing on the same topic… so these sites end up with similar recommendations.
For instance, the top search results recommended similar things for 2020:
Dark mode
Hand-drawn illustrations
Immersive 3D
Glowing colors
Minimalist navigation
Geometric shapes
Inclusivity
Accessibility
When web designers receive the same guidance no matter where they turn, it’s only logical that they’d end up creating websites that adhere to those same practices.
Why, No?
Because I write for web design publications, I can tell you that there’s a big difference in the kinds of content some of them publish.
For instance, I find that WebDesigner Depot isn’t interested in rehashing what everyone else is writing about this month. We’re given topics that challenge us to think outside the box and present readers with meaningful insights and recommendations.
So, I think that finding design blogs that push the boundaries and don’t just want to recap what everyone else is saying is really important. That’s how web designers are going to master the basic skills they need to succeed while getting inspired to try new things.
3. Designs Tools and Frameworks
This is another one that’s not as cut and dried. I think it depends on the tools used and the intent to use them.
Where Issues Start to Arise
There are certain site builder solutions that you’re going to be hard-pressed to create something innovative with. The same goes with using templates from sources like Dribbble. It’s just the nature of the beast.
If your goal is to create a cheap website very quickly for a client, then you’re probably going to use a cheap builder to do so. With ready-made templates and a lot of the work already done for you, you can create something that looks good with little effort.
When you’re limited by time and cost, of course you’re going to rely on shortcuts like cheap site builders or boring (but professional) design templates.
How to be More Careful
You can run into these kinds of issues with more flexible content management systems like WordPress or frameworks like Bootstrap, too.
Whenever you rely heavily on ready-made templates, pre-defined styles, or pre-built components, you run the risk of someone else’s work informing your own.
The solution is simple: Use demos, templates, UI kits, and so on as a base. Let them lay down the foundation that you work from.
But if you want your website to look different from the sea of lookalikes, you’re going to have to spend much more time developing a unique visual style that’s equally as effective in its mission. Which also means moving beyond clients that have small budgets or low expectations.
4. User Data
Data gathering is an important part of the job you do as a web designer.
You research the target user (or the existing user, when applicable). You look at industry trends as well as the competition to formulate an idea of what you need to build and how you’re going to do it. And you also use resources like Nielsen Norman Group and Think with Google that put out definitive research on what users want.
Even with the most niche of audiences, consumers’ wants and needs are all basically the same. So, obviously, you have to design experiences that align with them. If you deviate too much from what they expect from your site or brand, you run the risk of creating too much friction.
Is This a Bad Thing?
It’s not in terms of usability. If we build simple, predictable and user-friendly interfaces based on data that successfully drive visitors to convert, that’s great. So long as the content remains strong and the UI attractive, there’s nothing wrong with that approach.
But…
This is the same issue presented by templates and site builders. If you do exactly what’s needed and not much more, your site is going to look and act just like everyone else’s. Which comes at the cost of your brand reputation.
Just look at Google’s Material Design. This design system may have made it easier for web and app designers to create new solutions that were user-friendly and responsive, but there was just too much spelled out. And this led to a slew of Material Design lookalikes everywhere you turned.
This is the whole reason why companies take the time to craft a unique selling proposition. Without a USP, brands become interchangeable in the eyes of consumers.
So, again, my suggestion here is to use data to formulate a strategy for building your website. But don’t forget to spend time adding a unique style, and voice of the brand to the site.
Wrap-Up
It seems like, despite all that we’ve learned to do, websites are becoming less and less diverse in terms of design. And I think a lot of that is due to the fact that it’s much easier to design websites today than it was ten, or even five years ago.
Modern-day education, resources, tools, and consumer data take a lot of the questions and the work out of building websites. Which is good… but only to a point.
Unless you’re building websites for clients who have absolutely no budget, you can’t afford to skimp on the creativity and personalization that will set their website apart. Yes, you need to adhere to tried-and-true practices and standards, but beyond that, you should be experimenting.
Event management can be a time-consuming and daunting task if you don’t have the right tools. No matter if you hold the event for office meetings, classes, seminars, or anniversaries, proper event management should begin far before the scheduled date.
The way you promote your event, the booking tools and procedures you use, and the communication with attendees before the event all carry weight in your success.
It doesn’t end here since you should have plans to increase engagement on the event’s day and also after it finishes. It should come as no surprise to go wrong in any of these steps unless you have the necessary tools for them.
We all know about the way WordPress has made website management easy, and fortunately, it applies to event management as well. In this article, we introduce Modern Events Calendar (MEC), which is the best WordPress event calendar plugin on the market and go through an overview of its capabilities.
Without further ado, let’s find out about the features of this fantastic tool.
Modern Events Calendar introduction
Modern Events Calendar is a stylish and feature-heavy event management platform that comes in two versions, Lite and Pro. It is the best event calendar that can equip your website with whatever tool you need for managing events online.
The Webnus team is streets ahead of its counterparts as their product offers numerous features and advantages compared to other event management plugins of WordPress. To put in perspective, more than ten additional add-ons were published in less than a year despite the complete set of pre-made options for creating and managing events. The total number of active installations achieved exceptional growth in 2019, and by the end of the year, it reached 40,000. MEC currently has above 60,000 active installations and is by far the most practical tool for this purpose.
Watch the following video to get familiar with the general features of this professional tool.
Modern Events Calendar features
Customizability and modern design are the two principles that have been prioritized in the development of MEC. The provided features can accommodate both beginner and advanced users most conveniently. Some important free features of MEC are only made available in premium versions of similar WordPress event management plugins such as The Events Calendar, and EventOn. With that in mind, you can rest assured to get the most out of this plugin if you don’t want to set a budget for your event management tool.
You can set various views for your events in different sizes, let it be full-screen sliders, countdown displays, or small-sized widgets on the sidebar of pages. Purchasing a premium license allows you to add extra capabilities that can come in handy in many aspects.
For instance, if you are stuck selling tickets for your events and allowing participants to book their reservations in advance, there is no need for other plugins since it is included in the premium version of MEC. By activating this feature, your participants will be able to pay the fees using different gateways such as PayPal, Stripe, and credit card. Additionally, instead of using one standard layout for all, you can design customized tickets and increase user engagement even more.
The following comparison displays the differences and similarities between MEC and other popular WordPress event management plugins.
The next paragraphs cover a more detailed description of the satisfying features offered in this top-rating WordPress plugin.
Creating events with MEC
Businesses could hold one-time events or recurring ones that repeat on specific intervals based on their needs. Event creation options of the Modern Events Calendar plugin include all types of single and repeated ones that allow you to make them customized to the last details. For example, you can add an hourly schedule to each event to let people know accurately what happens during that day.
Proper categorization of events helps your website visitors find what they require in a more straightforward approach, especially if you hold events regularly. The events of MEC can be put into different categories by tags, colors, labels, and even the host or organizers of each one.
Moreover, you can define the location of each event on the map and display it in a stylish format so that people would be able to find it much more comfortable. Sharing options are likewise made available in the best way, and you can use a QR code for each occasion to inform others about it more conveniently.
Displaying events on a website
A proper and engaging approach for displaying events is a potential game changer in increasing the number of headcounts on the scheduled date. The variety of display features is considered to be an additional distinguishable option for this product.
Events appear sharp and clean, and you can promote them using an array of display options on your site. Countdown views are great for conveying a sense of necessity to people, and map views can be best used to showcase that your business is not limited to a single city or country.
All the view options can be customized and used through shortcodes that are fully integrated with Elementor, the widely-used WordPress page builder all around the world. On the other hand, it’s a no-brainer that people now use their mobile and tablet devices more than PC to surf the internet, and your event announcements should likewise be responsive to adapt to those screens. All the display options of MEC are mobile-friendly and support translation to other languages, even the RTL ones.
Integration of Modern Events Calendar
If you currently use other products for managing events and find MEC a better solution, there is nothing to worry about. There are integration features available in the plugin’s control panel that let you import data from other tools most flawlessly.
Furthermore, you can link your Facebook, Google Maps, and MailChimp accounts to MEC and synchronizes data between them. This feature assists you pursue your Mailchimp marketing plans and social interactions on other platforms within your event management tool and make everything synchronized to the best of your ability.
The ground-breaking add-ons of MEC
As earlier stated out, there are a number of custom-made add-ons for MEC to let you make more in-depth and professional use of it for your event management.
Here is a list of these amazing extensions.
Add-ons for Elementor
Modern Events Calendar is an Elementor based tool by default. However, you can add more functionality to it using its additional add-ons. Dedicated shortcode builder, form and single builders, shortcode designer, and Woo Plus bundle are some of the practical add-ons in this regard.
WooCommerce add-on
This innovative solution can dramatically help those who sell products or services on their site. By installing the WooCommerce add-on, every ticket of your paid events will turn into a separate product to be added to the users’ cart. It comes in convenient as people don’t’ fancy entering the details of their credit card multiple times and prefer to finalize their purchase with a single payment.
Event API
Many times website owners prefer to share their events on other related websites to their business and let a larger circle of the audience find out about it. Event API is a perfect solution to this end since you can display all the details of your personalized events on other websites that don’t have MEC installed through a dedicated API.
User Dashboard
You have probably come across larger businesses that have multiple authors, editors, and even managers for their WordPress website. User Dashboard add-on allows you to customize the accessibility of users to your events and will enable them to make changes according to the permissions of your grant.
Multisite Event Sync
Businesses sometimes have subdomains or multiple other websites that are related to each other. If that is the case for you, and don’t want to create everything from scratch on every single one of them, then you need the Multisite Event Sync add-on. Using this tool means creating an event once, and then displaying it on other websites while the other displays automatically inherit changes from the parent one.
Ticket and Invoice
Making customized and different tickets are the right approach to friendlier communication with the audience. The Ticket and Invoice add-on lets you personalize tickets and invoices and send custom-made emails while having better control over user invoices.
Advanced Map
We talked about map view in display features of MEC and the way it benefits your business. The Advanced Map add-on replaces the standard map views with OpenStreetMap to provide users with more options and tools on the map.
Advanced Reports
If you have a lot of reservations on your site, you’d probably need the Advanced Reports add-on. It helps you make use of in-depth reports for bookings while being able to filter them based on different criteria. Similarly, you can compare the incomes and export all the reports in CSV, XML, and JSON formats.
Fluent-view Layouts
Fluent View Layouts add-on adds more neat and stylish displays to your event display list. Those who keep an eye on the latest trends should know that these updated layouts follow the updated global UX/UI principles and are available for free. Make your event views more engaging by installing this free add-on right away.
How much does MEC cost?
Premium plans of MEC are priced reasonably, and you can enjoy a year of full support alongside lifetime auto-updates with every license. A single license costs you $75, and if you want to install the plugin on more websites, you can enjoy the discounts provided in 5-license and 10-license plans.
The fair price applies to the mentioned add-ons as well. For instance, the Advanced Reports tool only charges you $15, which has continual updates and one-year support, too.
Final thoughts
Managing website events could cause a stir for you or your team if you don’t own appropriate tools. In this review, we introduced MEC and its great features, which is by far the best WordPress event calendar and can open new doors for easy and efficient online event management experience.
The plugin is ready to be used right out of the box, and you can put all the mentioned options into use in a few minutes. We suggest you use the free version today and find out about the way it helps your business yourself.
The Coronavirus pandemic and its aftereffects have got the marketing realms overwhelmed as a result of which marketers have been compelled to alter their marketing strategy in view of the current situation. From being empathetic to drafting the right message for the audience, marketers have to spend several hours on their marketing plan.
Things are no different for email marketers. They have to rethink the tone of the email, the language, the kind of offers highlighted, and of course, the overall goal of their campaigns.
It is not advisable to carry out email marketing as usual or set automation workflows and forget about it. In this article, we shall shed light on how to adapt your email automation during such times.
Adapting to the COVID-19 Crisis
1. Try to understand your audience
37% marketers have given special consideration to segmentation during the pandemic. Your automated email campaigns should consider parameters like geographical location, previous interaction, and any change in their behavior or buying patterns. Rather than sending batch-and-blast emails to everyone on the list, revamp your emails to have only relevant information.
2. Determine the goals of your emails
Your prospects or customers might not be thinking about purchasing at the moment. Therefore, you must redefine the goals of your email campaigns. While you executed email automation to ‘convert’ maximum subscribers into customers in a pre-COVID-19 world, your goals during the crisis might be to offer maximum support to them rather than bringing in sales.
3. Let them know any changes in your business model
Use your automated emails to “inform” rather than “sell”. Keep your subscribers updated about any changes that you make in the way you are rendering your services or delivering your products. Let them know if you are organizing a donation drive to help the underprivileged and encourage them to come forward to do their bit.
How can you revise your automated emails to fit in the situation?
Having discussed how you can adapt to the COVID-19 crisis, let’s get into the details about how you can revise the kind of automated emails that you have in your workflow.
1. Welcome Emails
Getting a subscriber during such times is indeed a matter of great fortune. You must leave no stone unturned to create an impressive brand appeal so that the prospect remembers you and purchases from you whenever a need arises. With the pandemic spreading its tentacles throughout the world, it has become important to assure the subscribers that they can avail your email marketing services without being apprehensive of contracting the virus.
As soon as a user signs up on their website, they receive this email that informs them about their services and how they have started a “No-contact car repair service” taking into consideration COVID-19 crisis. The email includes a personal message by the CEO along with his headshot and that increases the brand credibility.
Target sets another fine example for welcome email. It lets the subscriber know how they are doing the best to cater to the subscriber’s needs during these trying times.
2. Promotional Emails
While it is not the right time to promote your products with an idea to capitalize on the opportunity and generate sales, you can lend a helping hand to your subscribers by letting them know that you are there for them.
Timeshifter has sent out an empathetic email that informs the subscribers that they do not need to pay when they are not flying. It subtly promotes the jet lag plan credit which would help the users during these times of crisis.
3. Cart Abandonment Emails
During these difficult times, every conversion matters. Therefore, you must send out cart recovery emails to the cart abandoners or subscribers who leave the checkout page without making the purchase. These emails become all the more important during such times when each conversion paves avenues to keep the business afloat.
4. Re-engagement Emails
COVID-19 has brought a situation in which subscribers might not be able to open your email or engage with it. During such times, you must gently remind those inactive subscribers that you remember them and care for them. You can let them know about the new initiatives or donation drives that you have launched in the light of the pandemic.
Alternatively, you can segment them into people who have not engaged with your brand in the last 60 days, 90 days, and 120 days, according to your business and industry.
Campaign Monitor has taken a commendable approach in this direction and sent out an email that allows the user to pause the emails for 30 days.
Wrapping Up
Whether you are in the education industry, ecommerce, healthcare sector, or any other field, it is inevitable to adapt your communication to match the vulnerable minds of your subscribers, financial crisis, and health issues.
These tips will surely empower your email automation strategy and help you adjust it according to the situation.
Lots of fun with gradients from Bennet Feely: stars, stripes, banners, bursts… I love being able to use nice patterns with either no image requests at all, or very little SVG.
And important reminder: Bennet does all sorts of cool stuff. I’ve probably used Clippy about a million times.
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.
Apple, Big Sur, and the Rise of Neumorphism
GIF Directions
How to Design a Sleek Dashboard UI
8+ Web Design Myths Busted: Old Ideas & Modern Best Practices
4 Unique ‘About Me’ Page Ideas to Inspire your own
Webdesign Toolbox – Discover the Newest and Best Resources for Web Designers
Altermind
$0 Marketing Budget? Here are 10 Creative Ways to Land Clients
Visual Storytelling for UI-UX Design with Examples
DeLorean Ipsum
How to Stay Transparent When WFH
Scraper AI – Automate Website Data Extraction in a Few Clicks
UX Website Audit: How UX Tests Can Make your Site like a 5-Star Resort
How Working from Home is Helping Me Design Better Products
SEO for Designers: A 101 Primer
18 Things Apple Announced for iOS 14 that We Want on Android
PEST – Pest is a Testing Framework with a Focus on Simplicity
7 Best Practices for Highly Relevant Email Automation
Font in Logo – Search Engine for Logos & Fonts
25 Most Common Web Developer Interview Questions and Answers
Online Illustrations: How to Draw Illustrations on your Computer
Introduction to UX Writing
8 Essential Bootstrap Components for your Web App
Writing Design in a French Style
Type Directors Club Shuts Down Amid Allegations of Racism
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
Well boy howdy. The 13th birthday of CSS-Tricks has rolled around. A proper teenager now, howabouthat? I always take the opportunity to do a bit of a state of the union address at this time, so let’s get to it!
Design
Technically, we’re still on v17 of the site design. This was the first design that I hired first-class help to do, and I’m still loving it, so I haven’t had much of an itch to do massive changes to it. Although it is quite different¹ today than it was on launch day.
I re-did the typography using Hoefler&Co. Sentinel and Ringside. The monospace font code snippets are in Operator Mono and the logo has long-been Gotham Rounded, so it feels like one big happy family of typefaces.
Maybe next year we’ll do something different again. My list is starting to grow for some behind-the-scenes tech stuff I wanna re-jigger, and sometimes that goes hand in hand with redesign work.
Closed Forums
The forums on this site have been a mental weight on me for literally years. Earlier this year I finally turned them off. They are still there, and probably always will be (so the URLs are maintained), but nobody can post new threads or replies.
It was a painful move. Even as I did it, there was still some regular daily activity there and I’m sure it didn’t feel good to those people to have a place they have invested time in shut down. Here’s why I did it:
Nobody here, including me, checked in on the forums with any regularity. Unmoderated public forums on the internet are not acceptable to me.
The spam volume was going up. There were periods where most posts, even after the automatic spam blocking I get from Akismet, where spam that required manual removal. Even if we had a dedicated forums employee, that’s no fun, and since we didn’t, it was just a random job for me and I don’t need a time sink like that.
The forums represent a certain level of technical debt. They need to be updated. Their design needs to be functional in the context of this site. At one point I ripped out all custom styles and left it be the default theme, which was a good step toward reducing technical debt, but in the end it wasn’t enough.
I can handle some work and some technical debt, of course. But when you combine those things with the fact that the forums don’t contribute much to what I consider to be the success of the site. They don’t exactly drive page views or advertising demand. There isn’t really money to hire help specifically for the forums. But that’s a small part of it. I want this site to help people. I think we can do that best if we focus on publishing with as little divided attention as possible. I think there are places on the internet that are better for forum-like discourse.
Now that they’ve been off a number of months, I can report that the lifting of the mental weight feels very good to me and there is been little if any major negatives.
Social
Here’s another mental weight I lifted: I stopped hand-managing the Twitter account (@css). I still think it’s good that we have a Twitter account (and that we have that cool handle), but I just don’t spend any time on it directly like I used to.
In the past, I’d queue up special articles with commentary and graphics and stuff and make sure the days were full with a spread of what I thought would be interesting tweets about web design and development. That’s fine and all, but it began to feel like a job without a paycheck.
We don’t get (or seem to drive) a lot of traffic from Twitter. Google Analytics shows social media accounts for less than 1% of our traffic. Investing time in “growing” Twitter just doesn’t have enough of an upside for me. Not to mention the obvious: Twitter can be terribly toxic and mentally draining.
So now, all our posts to Twitter are automated through the Jetpack social media connection (we really use Jetpack for tons of stuff). We hit publish on the site and the article is auto-tweeted. So if you use Twitter like an RSS feed of sorts (just show me the news!), you got it.
The result? Our follower count goes up at the same rate it always did. Engagement there is the same, or higher, than it ever was. What a relief. Do ten times less work for the same benefit.
When I have the urge to share a link with commentary I use the same system we’ve always had here: I write it up as a link blog post instead. Now we’re getting even more benefit: long-term content building, which is good for the thing that we actually have on our side: SEO.
Someday we could improve things by hand-writing the auto-tweet text with a bit more joie de vivre, crediting the author more clearly, and, #stretchgoal, a custom or fancy-generated social media graphic.
Opened Up Design Possibilities
One aspect of this site that I’ve been happy with is the opportunity to do custom design on content. Here are some examples of that infrastructure.
On any given blog post, we can pick a template. Some of those templates are very specific. For example, my essay The Great Divide is a template all to itself.
In the code base, I have a PHP template and a CSS file that are entirely dedicated to that post. I think that’s a fine way to handle a post you want to give extra attention to, although the existence of those two files is a bit of technical debt.
I learned something in the creation of that particular essay: what I really need to open up the art direction/design possibility on a post is a simple, stripped-down template to start from. So that’s what we call a “Fancy Post” now, another template choice for any particular post. Fancy Posts have a hero image and a centered column for the content of the post. From there, we can use custom CSS to style things right within WordPress itself.
The Block Editor itself is a huge deal for us. That was one of my goals for the year, and we’ve really exceeded how far we’d get with it. I think writing and editing posts in the block editor is a million miles ahead of the old editor.
The hardest challenge was (and still is really) getting the block transforms set up for legacy content. But once you have the power to build and customize blocks, that alone opens up a ton of design possibility within posts that is too big of a pain in the butt and too heavy on technical debt otherwise.
Another door we opened for design possibilities is a classic one: using categories. A sort of freebie you get in WordPress is the ability to create templates for all sorts of things that just sort of automatically work if they are named correctly. So for example I have a filed called category-2019-end-of-year-thoughts.php and that fully gives me control over making landing pages for groups of posts, like our end-of-year thoughts homepage. Not to mention our “Guide Collection” pages which are another way to programmatically build collections of pages.
That’s a lot of tools to do custom work with, and I’m really happy with that. It feels like we’ve given ourselves lots of potential with these tools, and only started taking advantage of it.
Speaking of which, another aspect of custom design we have available is the new book format…
eCommerce
We’re using WooCommerce here on the site now again. I just got done singing the praises of the Block Editor and how useful that is been… WooCommerce is in the same boat. I feel like I’m getting all this powerful functionality with very little effort, at a low cost, and with little technical debt. It makes me very happy to have this site on WordPress and using so much of suite of functionality that offers.
So for one thing, I can sell products with it, and we have products now! Lynn Fisher designed a poster for our CSS Flexbox guide and designed a poster for our CSS Grid guide, which you can now buy and ship anywhere in the world for $25 each. Look, with the Block Editor I can put a block for a poster right here in this post:
CSS Flexbox Poster
Find yourself constantly looking up the properties and values for CSS flexbox? Why not pin this beautiful poster up to the wall of your office so you can just glance over at it?
Another thing we’re using WooCommerce for is to sell our new book, The Greatest CSS Tricks Vol. I. If we actually made it into a proper eBook format, WooCommerce could absolutely deliver those files digitally to you, but we haven’t done that yet. We’ve take another path, which is publishing the book as chapters here on the site behind a membership paywall we’re calling MVP supporters. The book is just one of the benefits of that.
WooCommerce helps:
Build a membership system and sell memberships. Membership can lock certain pages to members-only as has programmatic hooks I can use for things like removing ads.
Sell subscriptions to those memberships, with recurring billing.
Sell one-off products
And I’m just scratching the surface of course. WooCommerce can do anything eCommerce wise.
Analytics
They are fine. Ha! That’s how much I worry about our general site analytics. I like to check in on them from time to time to make sure we’re not tanking or anything scary, but we never are (knock on wood). We’re in the vicinity of 8m page views a month, and year-over-year traffic is a bit of a dance.
Sponsors
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
That’s what I have to say to all our sponsors. We’re so damn lucky to work with a lineup of sponsors that I wholeheartedly endorse as well as literally use their products. We have different sponsors all the time, but these are the biggest and those who have been with us the longest.
Automattic: Thanks for building great software for the WordPress ecosystem. This site is made possible by a heaping helping of that software.
Netlify: Thanks for bringing the Jamstack world to life. I’m also a big fan of this way of building websites, and think that Jamstack should be the foundation for most websites. Beyond that, you’ve redefined modern developer experience.
Flywheel: Thank you for hosting this website, being a high-quality host I can trust and who has been helpful to me countless times. This is what high-quality WordPress hosting looks like.
Frontend Masters: Thank you for being an education partner that does things right and helps me have the best possible answer for people when they are searching a more structured formal education about doing web work: go try Frontend Masters.
If you’re trying to reach front-end developers with your products, that’s literally how I make a living and can help.
My Other Projects
CodePen is no spring chicken either, being over 8 years old itself. I repeat myself a lot with this particular aspect of talking about CodePen: we’ve got a ton of ideas, a ton of work to do, and we can’t wait to show you the CodePen of tomorrow. 2020 for CodePen has been a lot different than the last 2-3 years of CodePen. Some technical choices we’ve made have been starting to pay off. The team is vibing very well and absolutely tearing through work faster than I would have thought possible a few years ago, and we haven’t even unlocked some of the biggest doors yet. I know that’s vague, but we talk in more detail about stuff on CodePen Radio.
ShopTalk, as ever, is going strong. That’s 420 episodes this week, friends. Dave has me convinced that our format as it is, is good. We aren’t an instruction manual. You don’t listen to any particular episode because we’re going to teach you some specific subject that we’ve explicitly listed out. It’s more like water cooler talk between real world developers who develop totally different things in totally different situations, but agree on more than we disagree. We might evolve what ShopTalk show is over time, but this format will live on because there is value in discussion in this format.
Life
My wife Miranda and I are still in Bend, Oregon and our Daughter Ruby is two and a half. She’s taking a nap and I’m looking at the monitor as I type.
We have the virus here like everywhere else. It’s sad to think that we’re this far into it and our local hospital is pleading with people to be careful this holiday weekend because they are very near capacity and can’t take much more. Here’s hoping we can get past this painful period. Stay safe and stay cool, friends, thanks for reading.
I always feel bad when I make design changes away from an actual professional designer’s work. Is the site design better today than Kylie’s original? Uhm probably not (sorry for wrecking it Kylie!), but sometimes I just have an itch to fiddle with things and give things a fresh look. But the biggest driver of change is the evolving needs of the site and my desire to manage things with as little technical debt as possible, and sometimes simplifying design things helps me get there.
Creating fluid images when they stand alone in a layout is easy enough nowadays. However, with more sophisticated interfaces we often have to place images inside responsive elements, like this card:
For now, let’s say this image is not semantic content, but only decoration. That’s a good use for background-image. And because in this context the image contains an object, we can’t allow any parts to be cropped out when it’s responsive, so we’d pick background-size: contain.
Here’s where it starts to get tricky: on mobile devices, this card shifts direction and becomes vertical, with the image on top. We can make that happen with any sort of CSS layout technique, and probably best handled with CSS grid or flexbox.
But as we test for smaller screens, because of the contain property, this is what we get:
Hey, get back up there!
That’s not very nice. The image resizes to maintain its aspect ratio without cutting off any details, and if the image is important content and should not be cropped, we can’t change background-size to cover.
At this point, our next attempt might be familiar to you: placing the image inline, instead the background.
On desktop, this works fine:
It’s not bad on mobile either:
But on smaller screens, because of all the fixed sizes, the image’s proportions get distorted.
Hmm, those strawberries are not as appetizing when stretched.
We could spend hours fiddling with the image, the card, the flex properties, going back and forth. Or, we could…
Separate main content from the background
This is the base for obtaining much more flexibility and resilience when it comes to responsive images. It might not be possible 100% of the time but, in many cases, it can be achieved with a little effort on the design side of things, especially if this approach is planned beforehand.
For our next iteration, we’re placing our strawberries image on a transparent background and setting what was the blue color in the raster image with CSS instead. Go ahead and play with viewport sizes in this demo by adjusting the size of the sample space!
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Looking deeper at the styles, notice that we’ve also added padding to the div that holds the image, so the strawberries don’t come too close to the edges. We have full control of how close or distant we want them to be, through this padding.
Note how we’re also using negative margins to compensate for the padding on our outer card wrapper, otherwise we’d get white space all around the image.
Use the object-fit property for inline images
As much as the previous demo works, we can still improve the approach. Up to now, we’ve assumed that the image was un-semantical content — but with this layout, it’s also likely that the image illustration could be more than decoration.
If that’s the case, we definitely don’t want the image to get cut off because that would essentially amount to data loss. It’s semantically better to put the image inline instead of a background to prevent that, and we can use the object-fit property to make it happen.
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We’ve extracted the strawberries from the background and it’s now an inline element, but we kept the background color in that same image div.
Finally, combining the object-fit: contain with a 100% width makes it possible to resize the window and keep the aspect ratio of the strawberries. The caveat of this approach, however, is that we need to set a fixed height for the image on the desktop version — otherwise it’s going to follow the proportion of the set width (and reducing it will alter the layout). That might make things too constrained if we need to generate these cards with a variable amount of text that breaks into several lines.
Coming soon: aspect-ratio
The solution for the concern above might be just around the corner with the upcoming aspect-ratio property. This will enable setting a fixed ratio for an element, like this:
.el {
aspect-ratio: 16 / 9;
}
This means we’ll be able to eliminate fixed height and replace it with our calculated aspect ratio. For example, the dimensions in the desktop breakpoint of our last example looked like this:
.image {
/* ... */
height: 184px;
width: 318px;
}
With aspect-ratio, we could remove the height declaration and do the math to get the closest ratio that amounts to 184:
.image {
/* ... */
width: 318px; /* Base width */
height: unset; /* Resets the height that was set outside the media query */
aspect-ratio: 159 / 92; /* Amounts close to a 184px height */
}
The upcoming property is better explored in this article, if you want to learn more about it.
In the end, there are multiple ways to achieve reliably responsive images in a variable proportion layout. However, the trick to make this job easier — and better — does not necessarily lie with CSS; it can be as simple as adapting your images, whether that’s by separating the foreground from background (like we did) or selecting specific images that will still work if a fair portion of the edges get cropped.
One of the things I like about Jamstack is that it’s just a philosophy. It’s not particularly prescriptive about how you go about it. To me, the only real requirement is that it’s based on static (CDN-backed) hosting. You can use whatever tooling you like. Those tools, though, tend to be somewhat new, and new sometimes comes with issues. Some pragmatism from Sean C Davis here:
I have two problems with solving problems using the newest, best tool every time a problem arises.
1. It’s simply not productive. Introducing new processes and tools takes time. Mastery and efficiency are built over time. If we’re trying to run a profitable business, we shouldn’t start from scratch every time.?
2. We can’t know everything, all the time. With the rapidity at which we’re seeing new tools, there’s simply no way of knowing the best tool for the job because there’s no way to know all the tools available.
The trick is to settle into some tools you’ve proved that work and then keep using them to increase that level of expertise.
