They’re out! Like many of you, I look forward to these coming out each year. I don’t put much stock in surveys but they can be insightful and give a snapshot of the CSS zeitgeist. There are a few little nuggets in this year’s results that I find interesting. But before I get there, you’ll want to also check out what others have already written about it.
Oh, I guess that’s it — at least it’s the most formal write-up I’ve seen. There’s a little summary by Ahmad Shadeed at the end of the survey that generally rounds things up. I’ll drop in more links as I find ’em.
In no particular order…
Demographics
Josh has way more poignant thoughts on this than I do. He rightfully calls out discrepancies in gender pay and regional pay, where men are way more compensated than women (a nonsensical and frustratingly never-ending trend) and the United States boasts more $100,000 salaries than anywhere else. The countries with the highest salaries were also the most represented in survey responses, so perhaps the results are no surprise. We’re essentially looking at a snapshot of what it’s like to be a rich, white male developer in the West.
Besides pay, my eye caught the Age Group demographics. As an aging front-ender, I often wonder what we all do when we finally get to retirement age. I officially dropped from the most represented age group (30-39, 42%) a few years ago into the third most represented tier (40-49, 21%). Long gone are my days being with the cool kids (20-29, 27%).
And if the distribution is true to life, I’m riding fast into my sunset years and will be only slightly more represented than those getting into the profession. I don’t know if anyone else feels similarly anxious about aging in this industry — but if you’re one of the 484 folks who identify with the 50+ age group, I’d love to talk with you.
Before we plow ahead, I think it’s worth calling out how relatively “new” most people are to front-end development.
Wow! Forty-freaking-four percent of respondents have less than 10 years of experience. Yes, 10 years is a high threshold, but we’re still talking about a profession that popped up in recent memory.
For perspective, someone developing for 10 years came to the field around 2014. That’s just when we were getting Flexbox, and several years after the big bang of CSS 3 and HTML 5. That’s just under half of developers who never had to deal with the headaches of table layouts, clearfix hacks, image sprites, spacer images, and rasterized rounded corners. Ethan Marcotte’s seminal article on “Responsive Web Design” predates these folks by a whopping four years!
I’m not entirely sure what to make of this section. When there are so many CSS features, how do you determine which are most widely used? How do you pare it down to just 50 features? Like, are filter effects really the most widely used CSS feature? So many questions, but the results are always interesting nonetheless.
What I find most interesting are the underused features. For example, hanging-punctuation comes in dead last in usage (1.57%) but is the feature that most developers (52%) have on their reading list. (If you need some reading material on it, Chris initially published the Almanac entry for hanging-punctuation back in 2013.)
I also see Anchor Positioning at the end of the long tail with reported usage at 4.8%. That’ll go up for sure now that we have at least one supporting browser engine (Chromium) but also given all of the tutorials that have sprung up in the past few months. Yes, we’ve contributed to that noise… but it’s good noise! I think Juan published what might be the most thorough and thoughtful guide on the topic yet.
I’m excited to see Cascade Layers falling smack dab in the middle of the pack at a fairly robust 18.7%. Cascade Layers are super approachable and elegantly designed that I have trouble believing anybody these days when they say that the CSS Cascade is difficult to manage. And even though @scope is currently low on the list (4.8%, same as Anchor Positioning), I’d bet the crumpled gum wrapper in my pocket that the overall sentiment of working with the Cascade will improve dramatically. We’ll still see “CSS is Awesome” memes galore, but they’ll be more like old familiar dad jokes in good time.
Interestingly enough, viewport units come in at Number 11 with 44.2% usage… which lands them at Number 2 for most experience that developers have with CSS layout. Does that suggest that layout features are less widely used than CSS filters? Again, so many questions.
Frameworks
How many of you were surprised that Tailwind blew past Bootstrap as Top Dog framework in CSS Land? Nobody, right?
More interesting to me is that “No CSS framework” clocks in at Number 13 out of 21 list frameworks. Sure, its 46 votes are dwarfed by the 138 for Material UI at Number 10… but the fact that we’re seeing “no framework” as a ranking option at all would have been unimaginable just three years ago.
The same goes for CSS pre/post-processing. Sass (67%) and PostCSS (38%) are the power players, but “None” comes in third at 19%, ahead of Less, Stylus, and Lightning CSS.
It’s a real testament to the great work the CSSWG is doing to make CSS better every day. We don’t thank the CSSWG enough — thank you, team! Y’all are heroes around these parts.
CSS Usage
Josh already has a good take on the fact that only 67% of folks say they test their work on mobile phones. It should be at least tied with the 99% who test on desktops, right? Right?! Who knows, maybe some responses consider things like “Responsive Design Mode” desktop features to be the equivalent of testing on real mobile devices. I find it hard to believe that only 67% of us test mobile.
Oh, and The Great Divide is still alive and well if the results are true and 53% write more JavsScript than CSS in their day-to-day.
This is where I get to toot our own horn a bit because CSS-Tricks continues to place first among y’all when it comes to the blogs you follow for CSS happenings.
I’m also stoked to see Smashing Magazine right there as well. It was fifth in 2023 and I’d like to think that rise is due to me joining the team last year. Correlation implies causation, amirite?
But look at Kevin Powell and Josh in the Top 10. That’s just awesome. It speaks volumes about their teaching talents and the hard work they put into “helping people fall in love with CSS” as Kevin might say it. I was able to help Kevin with a couple of his videos last year (here’s one) and can tell you the guy cares a heckuva lot about making CSS approachable and fun.
Honestly, the rankings are not what we live for. Now that I’ve been given a second wind to work on CSS-Tricks, all I want is to publish things that are valuable to your everyday work as front-enders. That’s traditionally happened as a stream of daily articles but is shifting to more tutorials and resources, whether it’s guides (we’ve published four new ones this year), taking notes on interesting developments, spotlighting good work with links, or expanding the ol’ Almanac to account for things like functions, at-rules, and pseudos (we have lots of work to do).
My 2024 Pick
No one asked my opinion but I’ll say it anyway: Personal blogging. I’m seeing more of us in the front-end community getting back behind the keyboards of their personal websites and I’ve never been subscribed to more RSS feeds than I am today. Some started blogging as a “worry stone” during the 2020 lockdown. Some abandoned socials when Twitter X imploded. Some got way into the IndieWeb. Webrings and guestbooks are even gaining new life. Sure, it can be tough keeping up, but what a good problem to have! Let’s make RSS king once and for all.
That’s a wrap!
Seriously, a huge thanks to Sacha Greif and the entire Devographics team for the commitment to putting this survey together every year. It’s always fun. And the visualizations are always to die for.
You could provide contextual information, like stating the number of notifications, by giving a space-separated list of ids to aria-labelledby.
<button aria-labelledby="notifications-count notifications-label">
<!-- bell icon here -->
<span id="notifications-count">3</span>
</button>
<div role="tooltip" id="notifications-label">Notifications</div>
Providing contextual description
If your tooltip provides a contextual description of the icon, you should use aria-describedby. But, when you do this, you also need to provide an accessible name for the icon.
In this case, Heydon recommends including the label as the text content of the button. This label would be hidden visually from sighted users but read for screen readers.
Then, you can add aria-describedby to include the auxiliary description.
<button class="notifications" aria-describedby="notifications-desc">
<!-- icon for bell here -->
<span id="notifications-count">3</span>
<span class="visually-hidden">Notifications</span>
</button>
<div role="tooltip" id="notifications-desc">View and manage notifications settings</div>
Here, screen readers would say “3 notifications” first, followed by “view and manage notifications settings” after a brief pause.
Additional tooltip dos and don’ts
Here are a couple of additional points you should be aware of:
Do:
Use aria-labellebdy or aria-describedby attributes depending on the type of tooltip you’re building.
Use the tooltip role even if it
In this article, I try to summarize the best practices mentioned by various accessibility experts and their work (like this, this, and this) into a single article that’s easy to read, understand, and apply.
Let’s begin.
What are tooltips?
Tooltips are used to provide simple text hints for UI controls. Think of them as tips for tools. They’re basically little bubbles of text content that pop up when you hover over an unnamed control (like the bell icon in Stripe).
The “Notifications” text that pops up when you hover over Stripe’s bell icon is a tooltip.
If you prefer more of a formal definition, Sarah Highley provides us with a pretty good one:
A “tooltip” is a non-modal (or non-blocking) overlay containing text-only content that provides supplemental information about an existing UI control. It is hidden by default, and becomes available on hover or focus of the control it describes.
She further goes on to say:
That definition could even be narrowed down even further by saying tooltips must provide only descriptive text.
This narrowed definition is basically (in my experience) how every accessibility expert defines tooltips:
Heydon Pickering takes things even further, saying: If you’re thinking of adding interactive content (even an ok button), you should be using dialog instead.
If your tooltip is used to label an icon — using only one or two words — you should use the aria-labelledby attribute to properly label it since it is attached to nothing else on the page that would help identify it.
You could provide contextual information, like stating the number of notifications, by giving a space-separated list of ids to aria-labelledby.
<button aria-labelledby="notifications-count notifications-label">
<!-- bell icon here -->
<span id="notifications-count">3</span>
</button>
<div role="tooltip" id="notifications-label">Notifications</div>
Providing contextual description
If your tooltip provides a contextual description of the icon, you should use aria-describedby. But, when you do this, you also need to provide an accessible name for the icon.
In this case, Heydon recommends including the label as the text content of the button. This label would be hidden visually from sighted users but read for screen readers.
Then, you can add aria-describedby to include the auxiliary description.
<button class="notifications" aria-describedby="notifications-desc">
<!-- icon for bell here -->
<span id="notifications-count">3</span>
<span class="visually-hidden">Notifications</span>
</button>
<div role="tooltip" id="notifications-desc">View and manage notifications settings</div>
Here, screen readers would say “3 notifications” first, followed by “view and manage notifications settings” after a brief pause.
Additional tooltip dos and don’ts
Here are a couple of additional points you should be aware of:
Do:
Use aria-labellebdy or aria-describedby attributes depending on the type of tooltip you’re building.
Don’t use the aria-haspopup attribute with the tooltip role because aria-haspopup signifies interactive content while tooltip should contain non-interactive content.
Don’t include essential content inside tooltips because some screen readers may ignore aria-labelledby or aria-describedby. (It’s rare, but possible.)
Tooltip limitations and alternatives
Tooltips are inaccessible to most touch devices because:
users cannot hover over a button on a touch device, and
users cannot focus on a button on a touch device.
The best alternative is not to use tooltips, and instead, find a way to include the label or descriptive text in the design.
If the “tooltip” contains a lot of content — including interactive content — you may want to display that information with a Toggletip (or just use a element).
Toggletips exist to reveal information balloons. Often they take the form of little “i” icons.
These informational icons should be wrapped within a element. When opened, screen readers can announce the text contained in it through a live region with the status role.
Speaking anymore about toggletips detracts this article from tooltips so I’ll point you to Heydon’s “Tooltips and Toggletips” article if you’re interested in chasing this short rabbit hole.
That’s all you need to know about tooltips and their current best practices!
Welcome to our roundup of the best new fonts we’ve found online in the last four weeks. In this month’s selection we have a mixture of different styles, from highly practical serifs, to experimental display typefaces. Enjoy!
GT Flaire aims to translate the bold expressive curves of calligraphy into digital form. It blends profesionalism with a lively, playful style to bridge the gap between business and creativity. It’s an excellent choice for corporations hoping to create a more relaxed brand image.
Paramount Rounded
Paramount Rounded is a humanist-geometric typeface blending neo-futuristic style with geometric traditions. Featuring versatile alternates, it adapts from sleek spaceship branding to everyday packaging. Also available in a regular, non-rounded version, Paramount Rounded is a great option for branding.
Wulkan
Wulkan was designed a decade ago when the designer needed an expressive serif, couldn’t find one, and ended up creating his own. It started out as a display font; the latest iteration is a complete redesign that includes text and heading variations, new weights, and variable font options.
Groutpix
Groutpix is an extreme pixel-based font that references the graphics in dance music. It works best in small doses, with wide letter-spacing. It would be an excellent logo font for the right combination of letters.
Callas
Callas is a high-contrast typeface with a fresh, lively appearance, blending classic forma with the elegance of modernist styles. Its design is distinguished and crisp, offering a clean look with a hint of extravagance, ideal for refined yet expressive typography.
Gelatic
Gelatic is a vibrant display sans with a sunny outlook. The playful, positive shapes are ideal for relaxed, friendly logotypes. There are six styles and a variable font option for flexibility.
Zybo Pop
Zybo Pop is a playful, bubble-style graffiti font that delivers a bold, confident aesthetic to any project. It‘s amazing that a style that dates back to the late 1970s can still feel fresh and young, but it does. It’s a great choice for editorials, posters, and lifestyle branding.
RT Dromo
RT Dromo is a geometric sans that was inspired by vintage 1980s concert tickets. It combines robust, functional shapes with contemporary digital aesthetics for a balanced, retro-charm. It’s available in 16 fonts across four weights, including italics and monospace styles.
Aukio
Aukio, which means “square” in Finnish, is a high-contrast display typeface inspired by Nordic calligraphy. Its angular, squarish forms blend traditional humanistic shapes with a digital approach, creating a contemporary design suited for striking titles.
Apex Bound
Apex Bound is an graffiti font with Solid, Outline, Inner Shadow and Extrude styles that allow you to create depth, volume and definition for dynamic street art-style typography.
Melun
Melun is a geometric sans-serif with retro flair. It comes in three distinct styles: Normal, High, and Display, each with a range of different weights and accompany italics. It has a futuristic quality that makes it excellent for posters and editorial work.
Editora
Editora is a modern take on neoclassical styles. Designed for editorial design where elegance is required. Editora has 18 styles, with a range of weights, making it as practical as it is charming.
Julia
Julia is a cursive font that blends elegance, fluidity, and readability. Its refined loops, swashes and clean forms create a modern take on a classic look. It’s currently only available in a Light weight, but more weights are on the way.
Pulso
Pulso is one of DSType’s Next Fonts project — essentially beta releases of upcoming fonts. Designed for demanding display conditions, from screens to print, Pulso features three weights plus italics, and large text versions. Pulso will be finalised in 2025 with full language support but you can get early access now.
Fox Gavin
Fox Gavin is a playful font that’s excellent for children’s branding. It comes in four styles for layering and is perfect for display type, logos, T-shirts, and any time you need an eye-catching, friendly typeface.
You’d be forgiven for thinking coding up both a dark and a light mode at once is a lot of work. You have to remember @media queries based on prefers-color-scheme as well as extra complications that arise when letting visitors choose whether they want light or dark mode separately from the OS setting. And let’s not forget the color palette itself! Switching from a “light” mode to a “dark” mode may involve new variations to get the right amount of contrast for an accessible experience.
It is indeed a lot of work. But I’m here to tell you it’s now a lot simpler with modern CSS!
Default HTML color scheme(s)
We all know the “naked” HTML theme even if we rarely see it as we’ve already applied a CSS reset or our favorite boilerplate CSS before we even open localhost. But here’s a news flash: HTML doesn’t only have the standard black-on-white theme, there is also a native white-on-black version.
We have two color schemes available to use right out of the box!
If you want to create a dark mode interface, this is a great base to work with and saves you from having to account for annoying details, like dark inputs, buttons, and other interactive elements.
Switching color schemes automatically based on OS preference
Without any @mediaqueries — or any other CSS at all — if all we did was declare color-scheme: light dark on the root element, the page will apply either the light or dark color scheme automatically by looking at the visitor’s operating system (OS) preferences. Most OSes have a built-in accessibility setting for your preferred color scheme — “light”, “dark”, or even “auto” — and browsers respect that setting.
html {
color-scheme: light dark;
}
We can even accomplish this without CSS directly in the HTML document in a tag:
<meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark">
Whether you go with CSS or the HTML route, it doesn’t matter — they both work the same way: telling the browser to make both light and dark schemes available and apply the one that matches the visitor’s preferences. We don’t even need to litter our styles with prefers-color-scheme instances simply to swap colors because the logic is built right in!
You can apply light or dark values to the color-scheme property. At the same time, I’d say that setting color-scheme: light is redundant, as this is the default color scheme with or without declaring it.
You can, of course, control the tag or the CSS property with JavaScript.
There’s also the possibility of applying the color-scheme property on specific elements instead of the entire page in one fell swoop. Then again, that means you are required to explicitly declare an element’s color and background-color properties; otherwise the element is transparent and inherits its text color from its parent element.
What values should you give it? Try:
Default text and background color variables
The “black” colors of these native themes aren’t always completely black but are often off-black, making the contrast a little easier on the eyes. It’s worth noting, too, that there’s variation in the blackness of “black” between browsers.
What is very useful is that this default not-pure-black and maybe-not-pure-white background-color and text color are available as variables. They also flip their color values automatically with color-scheme!
They are: Canvas and CanvasText.
These two variables can be used anywhere in your CSS to call up the current default background color (Canvas) or text color (CanvasText) based on the current color scheme. If you’re familiar with the currentColor value in CSS, it seems to function similarly. CanvasText, meanwhile, remains the default text color in that it can’t be changed the way currentColor changes when you assign something to color.
In the following examples, the only change is the color-scheme property:
Not bad! There are many, many more of these system variables. They are case-insensitive, often written in camelCase or PascalCase for readability. MDN lists 19 variables and I’m dropping them in below for reference.
Open to view 19 system color names and descriptions
AccentColor: The background color for accented user interface controls
AccentColorText: The text color for accented user interface controls
ActiveText: The text color of active links
ButtonBorder: The base border color for controls
ButtonFace: The background color for controls
ButtonText: The text color for controls
Canvas: The background color of an application’s content or documents
CanvasText: The text color used in an application’s content or documents
Field: The background color for input fields
FieldText: The text color inside form input fields
GrayText: The text color for disabled items (e.g., a disabled control)
Highlight: The background color for selected items
HighlightText: The text color for selected items
LinkText: The text color used for non-active, non-visited links
Mark: The background color for text marked up in a element
MarkText: The text color for text marked up in a element
SelectedItem: The background color for selected items (e.g., a selected checkbox)
SelectedItemText: The text color for selected items
VisitedText: The text visited links
Cool, right? There are many of them! There are, unfortunately, also discrepancies as far as how these color keywords are used and rendered between different OSes and browsers. Even though “evergreen” browsers arguably support all of them, they don’t all actually match what they’re supposed to, and fail to flip with the CSS color-scheme property as they should.
Egor Kloos (also known as dutchcelt) is keeping an eye on the current status of system colors, including which ones exist and the browsers that support them, something he does as part of a classless CSS framework cleverly called system.css.
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Declaring colors for both modes together
OK good, so now you have a page that auto-magically flips dark and light colors according to system preferences. Whether you choose to use these system colors or not is up to you. I just like to point out that “dark” doesn’t always have to mean pure “black” just as “light” doesn’t have to mean pure “white.” There are lots more colors to pair together!
But what’s the best or simplest way to declare colors so they work in both light and dark mode?
In my subjective reverse-best order:
Third place: Declare color opacity
You could keep all the same background colors in dark and light modes, but declare them with an opacity (i.e. rgb(128 0 0 / 0.5) or #80000080). Then they’ll have the Canvas color shine through.
It’s unusable in this way for text colors, and you may end up with somewhat muted colors. But it is a nice easy way to get some theming done fast. I did this for the code blocks on this old light and dark mode demo.
Second place: Use color-mix()
Like this:
color-mix(in oklab, Canvas 75%, RebeccaPurple);
Similar (but also different) to using opacity to mute a color is mixing colors in CSS. We can even mix the system color variables! For example, one of the colors can be either Canvas or CanvasText so that the background color always mixes with Canvas and the text color always mixes with CanvasText.
We now have the CSS color-mix() function to help us with this. The first argument in the function defines the color space where the color mixing happens. For example, we can tell the function that we are working in the OKLAB color space, which is a rectangular color space like sRGB making it ideal to mix with sRGB color values for predictable results. You can certainly mix colors from different color spaces — the OKLAB/sRGB combination happens to work for me in this instance.
The second and third arguments are the colors you want to mix, and in what proportion. Proportions are optional but expressed in percentages. Without declaring a proportion, the mix is an even 50%-50% split. If you add percentages for both colors and they don’t match up to 100%, it does a little math for you to prevent breakages.
The color-mix() approach is useful if you’re happy to keep the same hues and color saturations regardless of whether the mode is light or dark.
In this example, as you change the value of the hue slider, you’ll see color changes in the themed boxes, following the theme color but mixed with Canvas and CanvasText:
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You may have noticed that I used OKLCH and HSL color spaces in that last example. You may also have noticed that the HSL-based theme color and the themed paragraph were a lot more “flashy” as you moved the hue slider.
I’ve declared colors using a polar color space, like HSL, for years, loving that you can easily take a hue and go up or down the saturation and lightness scales based on need. But, I concede that it’s problematic if you’re working with multiple hues while trying to achieve consistent perceived lightness and saturation across them all. It can be difficult to provide ample contrast across a spectrum of colors with HSL.
The OKLCH color space is also polar just like HSL, with the same benefits. You can pick your hue and use the chroma value (which is a bit like saturation in HSL) and the lightness scales accurately in the same way. Both OKLCH and OKLAB are designed to better match what our eyes perceive in terms of brightness and color compared to transitioning between colors in the sRGB space.
While these color spaces may not explicitly answer the age-old question, Is my blue the same as your blue? the colors are much more consistent and require less finicking when you decide to base your whole website’s palette on a different theme color. With these color spaces, the contrasts between the computed colors remain much the same.
First place (winner!): Use light-dark()
Like this:
light-dark(lavender, saddlebrown);
With the previous color-mix() example, if you choose a pale lavender in light mode, its dark mode counterpart is very dark lavender.
The light-dark() function, conversely, provides complete control. You might want that element to be pale lavender in light mode and a deep burnt sienna brown in dark mode. Why not? You can still use color-mix() within light-dark() if you like — declare the colors however you like, and gain much more fine-grained control over your colors.
Feel free to experiment in the following editable demo:
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Using color-scheme: light dark; — or the corresponding meta tag in HTML on your page —is a prerequisite for the light-dark() function because it allows the function to respect a person’s system preference, or whichever single light or dark value you have set on color-scheme.
Another consideration is that light-dark() is newly available across browsers, with just over 80% coverage across all users at the time I’m writing this. So, you might consider including a fallback in your CSS for browsers that lack support for the function.
What makes using color-scheme and light-dark() better than using @media queries?
@media queries have been excellent tools, but using them to query prefers-color-scheme only ever follows the preference set within the person’s operating system. This is fine until you (rightfully) want to offer the visitor more choices, decoupled from whether they prefer the UI on their device to be dark or light.
We’re already capable of doing that, of course. We’ve become used to a lot of jiggery-pokery with extra CSS classes, using duplicated styles, or employing custom properties to make it happen.
The joy of using color-scheme is threefold:
It gives you the basic monochrome dark mode for free!
It can natively do the mode switching based on OS mode preference.
You can use JavaScript to toggle between light and dark mode, and the colors declared in the light-dark() functions will follow it.
Light, dark, and auto mode controls
Essentially, all we are doing is setting one of three options for whether the color-scheme is light, dark, or updates auto-matically.
I advise offering all three as discrete options, as it removes some complications for you! Any new visitor to the site will likely be in auto mode because accepting the visitor’s OS setting is the least jarring default state. You then give that person the choice to stay with that or swap it out for a different color scheme. This way, there’s no need to sniff out what mode someone prefers to, for example, display the correct icon on a toggle and make it perform the correct action. There is also no need to keep an event listener on prefers-color-scheme in case of changes — your color-scheme: light dark declaration in CSS handles that for you.
Adjusting color-scheme in pure CSS
Yes, this is totally possible! But the approach comes with a few caveats:
You can’t use — only radio inputs, or in a element.
It only works on a per page basis, not per website, which means changes are lost on reload or refresh.
The browser needs to support the :has() pseudo-selector. Most modern browsers do, but some folks using older devices might miss out on the experience.
Using the :has() pseudo-selector
This approach is almost alarmingly simple and is fantastic for a simple one-pager! Most of the heavy lifting is done with this:
The second and third rulesets above look for an attribute called value on any element that has “light” or “dark” assigned to it, then change the color-scheme to match only if that element is :checked.
This approach is not very efficient if you have a huge page full of elements. In those cases, it’s better to be more specific. In the following two examples, the CSS selectors check for value only within an element containing id="mode-switcher".
html:has(#mode-switcher [value="light"]:checked) { color-scheme: light }
/* Did you know you don't need the ";" for a one-liner? Now you do! */
Using a element:
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Using :
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We could theoretically use checkboxes for this, but since checkboxes are not supposed to be used for mutually exclusive options, I won’t provide an example here. What happens in the case of more than one option being checked? The last matching CSS declaration wins (which is dark in the examples above).
JavaScript should only do what only JavaScript can do.
This is exactly that kind of situation.
If you want to allow visitors to change the color scheme using buttons, or you would like the option to be saved the next time the visitor comes to the site, then we do need at least some JavaScript. Rather than using the :has() pseudo-selector in CSS, we have a few alternative approaches for changing the color-scheme when we add JavaScript to the mix.
Using tags
If you have set your color-scheme within a meta tag in the of your HTML:
<meta name="color-scheme" content="light dark">
…you might start by making a useful constant like so:
And then you can manipulate that, assigning it light or dark as you see fit:
colorScheme.setAttribute("content", "light"); // to light mode
colorScheme.setAttribute("content", "dark"); // to dark mode
colorScheme.setAttribute("content", "light dark"); // to auto mode
This is a very similar approach to using tags but is different if you are setting the color-scheme property in CSS:
html { color-scheme: light dark; }
Instead of setting a colorScheme constant as we just did in the last example with the tag, you might select the element instead:
const html = document.querySelector('html');
Now your manipulations look like this:
html.style.setProperty("color-scheme", "light"); // to light mode
html.style.setProperty("color-scheme", "dark"); // to dark mode
html.style.setProperty("color-scheme", "light dark"); // to auto mode
I like to turn those manipulations into functions so that I can reuse them:
function switchAuto() {
html.style.setProperty("color-scheme", "light dark");
}
function switchLight() {
html.style.setProperty("color-scheme", "light");
}
function switchDark() {
html.style.setProperty("color-scheme", "dark");
}
Alternatively, you might like to stay as DRY as possible and do something like this:
The following demo shows how this JavaScript-based approach can be used with buttons, radio buttons, and a element. Please note that not all of the controls are hooked up to update the UI — the demo would end up too complicated since there’s no world where all three types of controls would be used in the same UI!
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I opted to use onchange and onclick in the HTML elements mainly because I find them readable and neat. There’s nothing wrong with instead attaching a change event listener to your controls, especially if you need to trigger other actions when the options change. Using onclick on a button doesn’t only work for clicks, the button is still keyboard-focusable and can be triggered with Spacebar and Enter too, as usual.
Remembering the selection for repeat visits
The biggest caveat to everything we’ve covered so far is that this only works once. In other words, once the visitor has left the site, we’re doing nothing to remember their color scheme preference. It would be a better user experience to store that preference and respect it anytime the visitor returns.
The Web Storage API is our go-to for this. And there are two available ways for us to store someone’s color scheme preference for future visits.
localStorage
Local storage saves values directly on the visitor’s device. This makes it a nice way to keep things off your server, as the stored data never expires, allowing us to call it anytime. That said, we’re prone to losing that data whenever the visitor clears cookies and cache and they’ll have to make a new selection that is freshly stored in localStorage.
You pick a key name and give it a value with .setItem():
localStorage.setItem("mode", "dark");
The key and value are saved by the browser, and can be called up again for future visits:
const mode = localStorage.getItem("mode");
You can then use the value stored in this key to apply the person’s preferred color scheme.
sessionStorage
Session storage is thrown away as soon as a visitor browses away to another site or closes the current window/tab. However, the data we capture in sessionStorage persists while the visitor navigates between pages or views on the same domain.
Personally, I started with sessionStorage because I wanted my site to be as simple as possible, and to avoid anything that would trigger the need for a GDPR-compliant cookie banner if we were holding onto the person’s preference after their session ends. If most of your traffic comes from new visitors, then I suggest using sessionStorage to prevent having to do extra work on the GDPR side of things.
That said, if your traffic is mostly made up of people who return to the site again and again, then localStorage is likely a better approach. The convenience benefits your visitors, making it worth the GDPR work.
The following example shows the localStorage approach. Open it up in a new window or tab, pick a theme other than what’s set in your operating system’s preferences, close the window or tab, then re-open the demo in a new window or tab. Does the demo respect the color scheme you selected? It should!
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Choose the “Auto” option to go back to normal.
If you want to look more closely at what is going on, you can open up the developer tools in your browser (F12 for Windows, CTRL+ click and select “Inspect” for macOS). From there, go into the “Application” tab and locate https://cdpn.io in the list of items stored in localStorage. You should see the saved key (mode) and the value (dark or light). Then start clicking on the color scheme options again and watch the mode update in real-time.
Accessibility
Congratulations! If you have got this far, you are considering or already providing versions of your website that are more comfortable for different people to use.
For example:
People with strong floaters in their eyes may prefer to use dark mode.
People with astigmatism may be able to focus more easily in light mode.
So, providing both versions leaves fewer people straining their eyes to access the content.
Contrast levels
I want to include a small addendum to this provision of a light and dark mode. An easy temptation is to go full monochrome black-on-white or white-on-black. It’s striking and punchy! I get it. But that’s just it — striking and punchy can also trigger migraines for some people who do a lot better with lower contrasts.
Providing high contrast is great for the people who need it. Some visual impairments do make it impossible to focus and get a sharp image, and a high contrast level can help people to better make out the word shapes through a blur. Minimum contrast levels are important and should be exceeded.
Thankfully, alongside other media queries, we can also query prefers-contrast which accepts values for no-preference, more, less, or custom.
In the following example (which uses :has() and color-mix()), a element is displayed to offer contrast settings. When “Low” is selected, a filter of contrast(75%) is placed across the page. When “High” is selected, CanvasText and Canvas are used unmixed for text color and background color:
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Adding a quick high and low contrast theme gives your visitors even more choice for their reading comfort. Look at that — now you have three contrast levels in both dark and light modes — six color schemes to choose from!
ARIA-pressed
ARIA stands for Accessible Rich Internet Applications and is designed for adding a bit of extra info where needed to screen readers and other assistive tech.
The words “where needed” do heavy lifting here. It has been said that, like apostrophes, no ARIA is better than bad ARIA. So, best practice is to avoid putting it everywhere. For the most part (with only a few exceptions) native HTML elements are good to go out of the box, especially if you put useful text in your buttons!
The little bit of ARIA I use in this demo is for adding the aria-pressed attribute to the buttons, as unlike a radio group or select element, it’s otherwise unclear to anyone which button is the “active” one, and ARIA helps nicely with this use case. Now a screen reader will announce both its accessible name and whether it is in a pressed or unpressed state along with a button.
Following is an example code snippet with all the ARIA code bolded — yes, suddenly there’s lots more! You may find more elegant (or DRY-er) ways to do this, but showing it this way first makes it more clear to demonstrate what’s happening.
Our buttons have ids, which we have used to target them with some more handy consts at the top. Each time we switch mode, we make the button’s aria-pressed value for the selected mode true, and the other two false:
On load, the buttons have a default setting, which is when the “Auto” mode button is active. Should there be any other mode in the localStorage, we pick it up immediately and run either switchLight() or switchDark(), both of which contain the aria-pressed changes relevant to that mode.
Finally, we have a nice little button switcher, with its state clearly shown and announced, that remembers your choice when you come back to it. Done!
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Outroduction
Or whatever the opposite of an introduction is…
…don’t let yourself get dragged into the old dark vs light mode argument. Both are good. Both are great! And both modes are now easy to create at once. At the start of your next project, work or hobby, do not give in to fear and pick a side — give both a try, and give in to choice.
Thanks to generative AI, content creation has become one of the most important trends in today’s world, with a completely new approach. It is revolutionizing the creative field in many different ways, from advertising to marketing to automated newspapers and magazines. Users of this technology must note its opportunities and problems. This blog discusses generative AI in content generation. It focuses on its potential to boost efficiency, creativity, and enrichment. It also examines moral issues.
Getting to Know About Generative AI
AI has existing categories. One is ‘generative AI’. It refers to systems that can generate text, images, and videos in response to an input. The public release of ChatGPT and other models in late 2022 made them very popular. Indeed, we are living in the “Year of Generative AI.”
The global generative AI market is now valued at $45 billion in 2023, up from $29 billion in 2022. Two factors caused the rise in content creation. First, the enterprise content market has matured. Second, advances in machine learning and NLP now enable content automation. As more firms use generative AI tools, their effects grow across industries. This toolkit changes how Internet content is created and shared.
The table below shows the features of generative AI:
Feature
Description
Automated Content Generation
AI tools can now instantly and efficiently create articles, blogs, and marketing materials.
Personalization
Generative AI can customize the generated content according to the preferences of the individual user by studying past interactions and data.
Idea Brainstorming
AI will be able to work with content creators who can create novel ideas and outlines, thus being a creative assistant when brainstorming.
Multilingual Capabilities
AI can translate content into several different languages, increasing the audience and reach across borders and languages.
SEO Optimization
Generative AI tools allow optimization of content for search by auto-completing keywords and improving readable flow.
Quality Control
AI will proofread as well as check grammar to ensure that there are no errors of typos or types in the generated content.
Rapid Prototyping
AI lets you do quick iterations on content drafts, hence permitting faster feedback and adjustments in the creative process.
Data-Informed Observations
Generative AI processes big data to derive insights which could be used for the content strategy, as well as marketing campaigns.
Generative AI’s Benefits for Content Creation
Ripple effects are coming for content creation. It seeks to boost productivity, cut costs, and spark creativity. It also aims to improve content marketing with generative AI. Here is a thorough examination of these advantages:
Speed and Effectiveness
Quick Content Creation: Another factor is that generative AI content writing can occur so much faster than by a human writer. Through such AI systems, you get product descriptions, social media posts, and articles within a few minutes.
Applications in Industry:
Journalism: Since AI provides quick news updates, news organizations help their journalists focus on investigative journalism.
Marketing: Organizations can create a range of marketing materials at once with the help of top artificial intelligence companies. Thereby, ensuring that the available information constantly engages the audience.
Scalability: Content is vital for large businesses, as seen in a Starbucks China case study. Hiring is a significant process that can take a lot of time and money. At the same time, generative AI can help businesses scale content production.
Cost-effectiveness
Lower Labor Costs: Freelancers are usually very expensive. Their writing and design skills are in demand. So, it is cheap to produce lots of content. Generative AI automates much of the process. Most of these tools might not cut labor costs. But, once implemented, they could generate content at fixed intervals.
Increased ROI: Generative AI reduces production costs and boosts output. So, users often see a big rise in ROI. This can especially benefit startups or small enterprises that work with limited capital.
Increased Originality
Brainstorming Support: Generative AI will be valid for content creators who need preliminary drafts and ideas. Based on the information and patterns of the present moment, it provides recommendations that encourage the authors to develop unique concepts.
Collaborative Tools: In other words, tools like ChatGPT enrich creativity. They do this when humans and AIs collaborate. The programs may help authors improve the flow of their work. They show multiple options or paths in the piece. Most AI Developers focus on creating innovative applications in content development.
Customization and Targeting
Customized Material Production: It creates content that is relevant for specific target audiences. AI can analyze users’ data. It can then design a better way to deliver messages to diverse groups. This would improve communication with them.
Personalized Campaign Examples:
Netflix: Regarding the efficiency of the proposed concept, algorithms that suggest films and TV series based on each user’s preferences enhance users’ engagement.
Email marketing: For open and conversion rates, businesses use generative AI to craft email marketing messages tailored to the individual recipient’s interest.
Influence and Impacts of Big Data on Future Trends
Hyper-Personalization: The application of generative AI to marketers will make it easier for them to deliver content that meets the specific user’s needs rather than providing a one-size-fits-all alternative.
Large-Scale Automation: Acts or events such as news writing are already underway, with organizations like Google automating the process and thereby enabling human Journalists to focus on features such as investigations and detailed reports.
Immersion Content Creation: Technological advancements in AI will provide capabilities for dynamic and interactive audio-video presentations of media and games, enhancing media and interactive game narratives.
Possible technological developments
Improved Natural Language Processing: Subsequent generative AI renditions should produce language that is quantitatively much more sophisticated and qualitatively more context-sensitive, thereby considerably improving the quality of generated language.
Visual AI Capabilities: Growth in the authentic production of realistic pictures and moving pictures from print text will increase the creative possibilities of several industries, including sales promotion and the film and television industries.
AI Companies’ Role: The role of leading machine intelligence companies is to continue to extend capital expenditure in the enhancement of more elaborate models that can both understand and create material.
Why Should Ethical Standards be Necessary?
As generative AI develops, the issue of ethical regulation goes to the forefront, and moral standards and laws start to emerge. Possible issues over fake news, piracy, and potential prejudice in AI outputs are discussed by the rapid dissemination of AI content. It demonstrates that appropriate usage of these technologies will require close cooperation between policymakers, content producers, and AI businesses.
The opportunity of utilizing generative AI in content creation is, therefore, great while managing risks lower by designing the structures that enforce those that ensure accountability and transparency.
Challenges and Ethical Concerns
To address the challenges mentioned above, stakeholders can approach the challenges of integrating generative AI in content creation while boosting its advantages, as follows:
Quality Control
Issues with Accuracy: Some of them are features like One of the biggest problems is ensuring the quality and accuracy of the generated material. While the generative AI system can write writing that appears to be coherent, it could not be insightful or accurate.
Human Oversight: For these issues, human control and intervention are essential. Still, once competent professionals edit the generated content, the quality will be adequate for the task and convey the overall intended message.
Issues Related to Intellectual Property
Ownership Issues: As with most things generative AI does, the question of ownership arises. It is still unclear who owns the content generated by artificial intelligence. To artists and companies, this ambiguity is not helpful and makes legal issues more complicated.
Legal Implications: Copyright laws and related risks the companies face when employing the material created by AI must be understood to bring a proper approach to the legal aspect of this phenomenon.
Bias and False Information
Possibility of Bias: Strangely enough, in the best-case scenario, such biases reproduce in the training data and can become ingrained in AI algorithms. This in-created content may reinforce stereotypes or may lead to distorted representations.
Misinformation Risks: One of the greatest threats of using automated content creation is that it serves as a channel for spreading fake news. This could be of significant concern since AI generates information that is sometimes inaccurate or misleading when not monitored regularly and could erode credibility and confidence.
About job insecurity:
Fears of Employment Loss: A recent problem of the generative AI model is the concern that it brings about the loss of jobs in creative professions. Most are convinced that automation eliminates the need for human content production, thus leading to unemployment.
Emerging Job Roles: Using AI tools will create new jobs. To avoid this, humans will remain in charge and responsible for AI as well as its implementation. Some will use AI in their productions—more details are at this link. Others will use it in art. As more firms use AI, the chance of having these roles will rise.
Conclusion
AI is more than search technology. It boosts productivity, creativity, and personalization in content creation. Care management can increase personal spending in a custom way. But, it has some issues worth discussing. Companies with AI solutions must also find solutions to ethical questions that may arise. By cautiously using generative AI, we can develop more vibrant digital communities and expand the possibilities of content creation.
A whole bunch of years ago, we posted on this idea here on CSS-Tricks. We figured it was time to update that and do the subject justice.
Imagine a scenario where you need to split a layout in half. Content on the left and content on the right. Basically two equal height columns are needed inside of a container. Each side takes up exactly half of the container, creating a distinct break between one. Like many things in CSS, there are a number of ways to go about this and we’re going to go over many of them right now!
One simple way we can create the appearance of a changing background is to use gradients. Half of the background is set to one color and the other half another color. Rather than fade from one color to another, a zero-space color stop is set in the middle.
This works with a single container element. However, that also means that it will take working with floats or possibly some other layout method if content needs to fill both sides of the container.
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Using Absolute Positioning
Another route might be to set up two containers inside of a parent container, position them absolutely, split them up in halves using percentages, then apply the backgrounds. The benefit here is that now we have two separate containers that can hold their own content.
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Absolute positioning is sometimes a perfect solution, and sometimes untenable. The parent container here will need to have a set height, and setting heights is often bad news for content (content changes!). Not to mention absolute positioned elements are out of the document flow. So it would be hard to get this to work while, say, pushing down other content below it.
Using (fake) Tables
Yeah, yeah, tables are so old school (not to mention fraught with accessibility issues and layout inflexibility). Well, using the display: table-cell; property can actually be a handy way to create this layout without writing table markup in HTML. In short, we turn our semantic parent container into a table, then the child containers into cells inside the table — all in CSS!
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You could even change the display properties at breakpoints pretty easily here, making the sides stack on smaller screens. display: table; (and friends) is supported as far back as IE 8 and even old Android, so it’s pretty safe!
Using Floats
We can use our good friend the float to arrange the containers beside each other. The benefit here is that it avoids absolute positioning (which as we noted, can be messy).
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In this example, we’re explicitly setting heights to get them to be even. But you don’t really get that ability with floats by default. You could use the background gradient trick we already covered so they just look even. Or look at fancy negative margin tricks and the like.
Also, remember you may need to clear the floats on the parent element to keep the document flow happy.
Using Inline-Block
If clearing elements after floats seems like a burden, then using display: inline-block is another option. The trick here is to make sure that the elements for the individual sides have no breaks or whitespace in between them in the HTML. Otherwise, that space will be rendered as a literal space and the second half will break and fall.
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Again there is nothing about inline-block that helps us equalize the heights of the sides, so you’ll have to be explicit about that.
There are also other potential ways to deal with that spacing problem described above.
Using this method, we turn our parent container into a flexible box with the child containers taking up an equal share of the space. No need to set widths or heights! Flexbox just knows what to do, because the defaults are set up perfectly for this. For instance, flex-direction: row; and align-items: stretch; is what we’re after, but those are the defaults so we don’t have to set them. To make sure they are even though, setting flex: 1; on the sides is a good plan. That forces them to take up equal shares of the space.
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In this demo we’re making the side flex containers as well, just for fun, to handle the vertical and horizontal centering.
Using Grid Layout
For those living on the bleeding edge, the CSS Grid Layout technique is like the Flexbox and Table methods merged into one. In other words, a container is defined, then split into columns and cells which can be filled flexibly with child elements.
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CSS Anchor Positioning
This started rolling out in 2024 and we’re still waiting for full browser support. But we can use CSS Anchor Positioning to “attach” one element to another — even if those two elements are completely unrelated in the markup.
The idea is that we have one element that’s registered as an “anchor” and another element that’s the “target” of that anchor. It’s like the target element is pinned to the anchor. And we get to control where we pin it!
This sets up an .anchor and establishes a relationship with a .target element. From here, we can tell the target which side of the anchor it should pin to.
Terence Eden on using text-wrap: balance for more than headings:
But the name is, I think, slightly misleading. It doesn’t only work on text. It will work on any content. For example – I have a row of icons at the bottom of this page. If the viewport is too narrow, a single icon might drop to the next line. That can look a bit weird.
Heck yeah. I may have reached for some sort of auto-fitting grid approach, but hey, may as well go with a one-liner if you can! And while we’re on the topic, I just wanna mention that, yes, text-wrap: balance will work on any content. — just know that the spec is a little opinionated on this and make sure that the content is fewer than five lines.
Suggestion for value space is match-indent | | (with Xch given as an example to make that use case clear). Alternately could actually count the characters.
When it comes to choosing AI SEO tools, the sheer variety of options can be overwhelming. The popular ones may not always be the best fit for your specific SEO workflow and processes. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution for finding the perfect AI tool for SEO automation.
The right choice depends on your unique objectives, budget, and processes. This guide explores the 8 best SEO tools for AI automation and provides insights on how to use them effectively to help you make an informed decision.
You will gain an understanding of each tool’s core features, which will help you identify the ones that align with your goals.
What is SEO Automation?
SEO automation is the process of using software tools to streamline and simplify various search engine optimization tasks. By automating repetitive activities, marketers can save time and reduce manual work. This allows them to focus on more strategic aspects of the campaign, ultimately improving efficiency and effectiveness in boosting the website’s visibility on search engines.
What SEO Tasks Can You Do With Automation Tools?
Here are some key SEO tasks you can perform with automation tools.
1. Site Monitoring
Track your website’s health automatically, including uptime, load speed, and broken links. This helps you identify issues quickly.
2. Rank Tracking
Monitor your website’s ranking for specific keywords over time. This allows you to see how your SEO efforts are paying off.
3. Backlink Analysis
Analyze your backlinks to understand their quality and identify new link-building opportunities. This is crucial for improving your site’s authority.
4. Competitor Monitoring
Monitor your competitors’ strategies, including their rankings and backlink profiles. This information can help you adjust your tactics.
5. Report Creation
Generate automated reports summarizing your SEO performance, including traffic trends and keyword rankings. These reports save time and provide valuable insights.
6. Error Tracking
Automatically detect technical errors on your site, such as 404 pages or server issues, allowing you to fix them promptly.
8 Best AI Tools for SEO Automation
1. Jasper
Price: Starts at $49 per month
Useful For: Streamlining content creation and marketing strategies
Features:
Brand voice customization allows you to tailor content to reflect your unique style.
Access to over 50 AI-powered templates for various writing needs.
Create unique images with its image generation tool to complement your text content.
Jasper is an AI writing assistant designed to help marketers and content creators produce high-quality content quickly. Its ability to customize brand voice and provide a wide range of templates makes it easy to generate engaging copy for blogs, social media, and more. Additionally, its image generation feature allows users to create visuals that enhance their written content, making it a versatile tool for anyone looking to boost their marketing efforts efficiently.
2. ChatGPT
Price: Starts at $20 per month
Useful For: Generating human-like text for various applications
Features:
Contextual understanding that provides relevant responses based on previous messages.
Multilingual support allows efficient communication across different cultures and breaks language barriers.
Creative text generation to produce engaging content, including stories, poems, and marketing copy.
ChatGPT is a powerful AI tool designed to assist users in generating natural language responses. It can be used for a variety of tasks, such as answering questions, creating content, and even translating languages. Its ability to understand context and produce coherent text makes it valuable for marketers and a digital marketing agencylooking for quick, high-quality writing. With its user-friendly interface, ChatGPT simplifies complex tasks and enhances productivity across different fields.
3. Link Whisper
Price: Starts at $77 per year
Useful For: Enhancing internal linking strategies for better SEO
Features:
Get automated internal link recommendations while writing content.
Detect orphan pages lacking internal links and easily add connections.
Manage multiple links effortlessly by adding, editing, or removing them from a centralized dashboard.
LinkWhisper is an AI-powered tool designed to optimize your website’s internal linking structure. It simplifies the process of adding internal links by suggesting relevant options while you write, saving time and effort. With features like orphan page detection, you can ensure all your content is interconnected, improving your site’s SEO performance. The bulk link management feature allows for efficient updates, making it a valuable asset for bloggers and marketers looking to enhance their online presence.
4. Alli AI
Price: Starts at $299 per month
Useful For: Optimizing website experience for SERPs
Features:
Bulk on-page optimization is ideal for setting up SEO rules for the entire website.
Automated SEO A/B testing that uses user behavior data to boost traffic and optimize pages
Real-time deployment allows easy application of code changes across your site.
Alli AI offers a comprehensive platform that helps users manage their SEO strategies efficiently. Its user-friendly interface and powerful features allow for bulk optimization, competitor analysis, and performance tracking. This tool not only saves time but also enhances the effectiveness of your SEO efforts, making it a valuable asset for anyone looking to improve their search engine rankings.
5. Frase
Price: Starts at $15 per month
Useful For: Streamlining content creation and improving search engine rankings.
Features:
Content briefs generate detailed outlines based on top-ranking articles for your target keywords.
Get real-time suggestions to improve your content’s SEO performance as you write.
Find answers to common questions in your niche, enhancing your content’s relevance.
Frase simplifies the content creation process by providing valuable insights and suggestions that help writers produce engaging and optimized articles. Its ability to generate content briefs ensures you cover essential topics, while real-time SEO optimization aligns your writing with best practices. This makes Frase a powerful tool for marketers, bloggers, and businesses looking to boost their online visibility and attract more traffic.
6. SE Ranking
Price: Starts at $65 per month
Useful For: Automating various SEO tasks for improved website performance
Features:
Schedule regular automated audits to detect technical SEO issues.
Track keyword rankings across major search engines and devices regularly.
Monitor and analyze backlinks to boost your site’s authority.
SE Ranking is a comprehensive SEO automation tool that simplifies the optimization process for businesses and agencies. It provides features like automatic website audits, which help identify and resolve technical issues efficiently. With its rank-tracking capabilities, users can monitor their keyword performance in real-time. Additionally, the backlink monitoring feature allows for effective analysis of link profiles, enhancing overall SEO strategies. This makes SE Ranking a valuable resource for anyone looking to boost their online visibility and streamline their SEO efforts.
7. PopupSmart
Price: Starts at $29 per month
Useful For: Boosting conversions through effective pop-up strategies
Features:
Design customizable pop-ups that align with your brand style and messaging.
Set targeted triggers to control when and where pop-ups appear on your site.
Use A/B testing to find the most effective pop-up designs and messages.
This AI tool enhances user engagement and increases conversions through effective pop-up strategies. It allows users to create customizable pop-ups that align with their brand, ensuring a seamless experience for visitors. You can control when and where pop-ups appear with targeted triggers, maximizing their effectiveness. The A/B testing feature helps you experiment with different designs and messages, enabling you to refine your approach based on real results. This makes PopupSmart a valuable tool for businesses looking to improve their website’s performance and user experience.
8. SurferSEO
Price: $219 per month
Useful For: Streamlining content creation and optimization for SEO
Features:
Leverage AI-powered content generation to craft fully optimized articles based on top-ranking pages.
Conduct real-time SERP analysis to refine your content strategy.
Create customizable, SEO-friendly outlines tailored to your target keywords and audience.
SurferSEO is an AI SEO tool designed to enhance your content creation process by providing data-driven insights for SEO optimization. With its AI-powered content generation, users can quickly produce articles that align with search intent and rank well on search engines. The real-time SERP analysis feature helps you understand what works for competitors, while customizable outlines ensure that your content is structured effectively. This makes SurferSEO a valuable asset for marketers and content creators aiming to improve their online visibility and engagement.
Bonus Tool: Perplexity AI
Price: Starts at $10 per month
Useful For: Automating various SEO tasks to improve website performance
Features:
Automate keyword research by quickly generating ideas based on current trends.
Produce SEO-optimized articles tailored to specific target keywords.
Verify the accuracy of AI-generated content with real-time, reliable fact-checking.
Perplexity is an AI tool designed to streamline SEO automation for businesses and content creators. It helps users efficiently conduct keyword research and generate high-quality content that ranks well on search engines. With real-time fact-checking, you can trust the information provided, reducing errors in your content. Perplexity is valuable for anyone looking to enhance their SEO strategies and improve their online visibility.
Benefits of Using AI Tools for SEO Automation
Using AI tools for SEO can offer you the following benefits:
Time-Saving
AI tools automate repetitive tasks like keyword research and performance tracking, allowing marketers to focus on more strategic activities instead of manual work.
Improved Accuracy
By minimizing human error, AI tools ensure that data analysis and optimization processes are more precise, leading to better decision-making in SEO strategies.
Enhanced Keyword Research
AI can quickly analyze search trends and user intent, helping identify the most relevant keywords to target for improved visibility and traffic.
Real-Time Performance Monitoring
AI tools continuously track website performance, providing instant feedback and insights that help you adapt your strategies promptly to changing conditions.
Content Optimization
AI can analyze existing content and suggest improvements, such as better keyword placement and structure, ensuring your content remains engaging and aligned with SEO best practices.
Enhance Your Marketing with AI SEO Tools
AI SEO tools offer incredible power to supercharge your SEO strategy but remember, they’re here to complement your expertise, not replace it. Finding the right balance between leveraging AI capabilities and applying your strategic insight and creativity.
How will you blend these tools with your unique approach to maximize your SEO potential? Consider partnering with a reliable and experienced agency for unmatched outcomes. Are you ready to explore how advanced AI tools and your smart planning can work together? Start with SEO automation today!
Typography is a core element of web design that impacts how easily people can read and engage with your content.
Your message and brand identity stand out when you have a font that draws the eye in.
When you know how to use web typography principles to grab attention, you can transform a good-looking website into one that is captivating.
Let’s take a closer look at why your website typography matters — and how you can use it to enhance readability and brand identity.
Understanding typography
Web typography best practices focus on how text looks and feels on a screen. Unlike print typography, where the final product is static, web typography must adapt to various screen sizes and resolutions.
This means you’ll need to choose fonts that are both aesthetic and function properly on different devices.
But before youdive into choosing fonts, you need to understand a few basic terms.
Fundamental typography terms
Here are some basics to know:
Typeface vs. font: A typeface is an overall design, like Helvetica. A font is a specific style within that typeface, such as Helvetica Bold or Helvetica Light.
So, when you choose Helvetica, you’re picking a typeface. When you choose Helvetica Bold, you’re selecting a font.
Serif vs. sans-serif fonts: Serif fonts have small lines at the end of characters (like Times New Roman), enhancing print readability. *Sans-serif fonts (like Helvetica) are cleaner and generally easier to read on screens, making them a popular choice for web design.
Kerning, tracking, leading, and hierarchy: Kerning adjusts the space between individual letters, tracking adjusts the space across a block of text, and leading is the space between lines of text. Hierarchy is how you use different sizes and styles to guide readers through content.
Here’s how to select the best fonts for your website:
Consider readability and brand identity
Choose a font that aligns with your brand’s personality. For instance, Helvetica’s clean lines suit professional sites like Beaches of Normandy Tours, where its articles, such as the Liberation of Paris, must clearly convey historical information. On the other hand, a playful font might suit a creative agency.
Use web-safe and standard fonts
Stick to fonts that are widely supported across modern browsers. Fonts like Arial, Verdana, and Georgia are safe choices.
Implement font stacks
If you prefer unique fonts, use font stacks. This means listing several fallback fonts in your CSS, so if one isn’t available, it’ll use another one of your choices.
This helps make sure that your text looks good across different devices. For example, you might use “Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif” in your CSS. If Helvetica isn’t available, Arial or a generic sans-serif will take its place.
Designing for readability
Readability is key to a successful website.
Here’s how to make sure your text is easy to read:
Text size and line length: Aim for a base font size of 16px. For line length, keep lines between 40 and 80 characters to avoid reader fatigue. Larger fonts are easier to read on smaller screens, so adjust sizes for mobile devices.
Spacing and alignment: Make sure there’s enough space between lines and paragraphs. This vertical spacing, or leading, should generally be 1.5 times the font size for body text.
Use white space strategically to make your content more digestible and visually appealing.
Color contrast: High contrast between text and background color is essential. Use tools like a contrast checker to make sure your color choices meet accessibility standards. For example, black text on a white background is typically a safe bet.
Advanced typography considerations
Adapt your typography to various screen sizes and settings.
Consider:
Screen size and resolution
Text may look different on various devices. Responsive design helps adjust typography based on screen size. (Test your designs on different devices to promote consistent readability.)
Adjustments
Experiment with typography settings.
Compare how changes to line height, letter spacing, and other aspects affect readability.
X-height and counter-openness
The x-height is the height of lowercase letters, which affects readability. Fonts with larger x-heights are generally easier to read. Counter-openness refers to the space inside letters like “e” and “a” and should be ample for legibility.
Enhancing brand identity through typography
Choose fonts that reflect your brand’s character and values.
For instance, Henry Meds uses clean, sans-serif fonts to establish a modern, professional image. This aligns with its commitment to clear and accessible health information. It also uses consistent formatting, clear headings for navigation — and white space around text blocks to make the content more engaging and digestible.
This look is congruent across its blog, which helps readers more easily digest its medical topics, such as the following one about semaglutide costs without insurance.
Other successful brands, like Nike and Coca-Cola, also demonstrate how typography can strengthen brand identity.
Nike uses bold fonts that communicate strength and innovation. This perfectly aligns with its dynamic and forward-thinking brand image. On the other hand, Coca-Cola uses a script font that evokes a sense of nostalgia and tradition. This reinforces its classic and beloved brand persona. (Who could ever forget its beloved polar bears and Christmas-themed branding?)
Long story short: Choose fonts that resonate with your core message to leave a lasting impression and connect deeper with your audience.
Wrap up
Mastering web typography means ensuring that your text is readable, your brand identity is clear, and your content effectively engages your audience.
Understand typography basics, choose the right fonts, and continuously test and optimize your website to create a web experience that looks great and performs well. Remember, great typography enhances readability and strengthens brand identity. So, take the time to perfect it and watch your website thrive.
