When it comes to displaying shipping and inventory alerts on an e-commerce website, you have to be very careful about inciting panic in your shoppers.

“Item is out of stock.”

“Expect shipping delays.”

“Page does not exist.”

These words alone are enough to turn a pleasant shopping experience into a panicked and frustrating one.

You have to be very careful about how you design these notices on your site, too. You obviously want to inform visitors of changes that impact their shopping experience, but you don’t want panic to be the resulting emotion when your alert is seen.

Better Search UX

For large-scale and e-commerce sites, the search experience is an increasingly critical tool. You can vastly improve the experience for users with thoughtful microcopy and the right contextualization. Read a related article →

Technology makes our lives better, not just users, but also creators (developers and designers). In this article, I’ll introduce you to Tauri. This article will be useful to you if:

• you have been building applications on the web with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and you want to use the same technologies to create apps targeted at Windows, macOS, or Linux platforms;
• you are already building cross-platform desktop apps with technologies like Electron, and you want to check out alternatives;
• you want to build apps with web technologies for Linux distributions, such as PureOS;
• you are a Rust enthusiast, and you’d like to apply it to build native cross-platform applications.

We will look at how to build a native cross-platform application from an existing web project. Let’s get to it!

Note: This article assumes you are comfortable with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Vue.js.

What Is Tauri?

The official website sums up Tauri well:

Things move a lot faster than they used to in terms of the implementation of Web Platform features, and this post is a round-up of news about CSS features that are making their way into the platform. If you are the sort of person who doesn’t like reading about things if you can’t use them now, then this article probably isn’t for you — we have many others for you to enjoy instead! However, if you like to know what is on the way and read more about the things you can play with in a beta version of a browser, read on!

Flexbox Gaps

Let’s start with something that is implemented in the shipping version of one browser, and in beta in another. In CSS Grid, we can use the gap, column-gap and row-gap properties to define the gaps between rows and columns or both at the same time. The column-gap feature also appears in the Multi-column layout to create gaps between columns.

Gatsby is a React-based static-site generator that has overhauled how websites and blogs are created. It supports the use of plugins to create custom functionality that is not available in the standard installation.

In this post, I will introduce Gatsby plugins, discuss the types of Gatsby plugins that exist, differentiate between the forms of Gatsby plugins, and, finally, create a comment plugin that can be used on any Gatsby website, one of which we will install by the end of the tutorial.

What Is A Gatsby Plugin?

Gatsby, as a static-site generator, has limits on what it can do. Plugins are means to extend Gatsby with any feature not provided out of the box. We can achieve tasks like creating a manifest.json file for a progressive web app (PWA), embedding tweets on a page, logging page views, and much more on a Gatsby website using plugins.

Earlier this year, the Chrome team announced the Web Vitals initiative to provide unified guidance, metrics, and tools to help developers deliver great user experiences on the web. The Google Search team also recently announced that they will be evaluating page experience as a ranking criteria, and will include Core Web Vitals metrics as its foundation.

The three pillars of 2020 Core Web Vitals are loading, interactivity, and visual stability of page content, which are captured by the following metrics:

Today, we’ll briefly discuss why it’s important to write automated tests for any software project, and shed light on some of the common types of automated testing. We’ll build a to-do list app by following the Test-Driven Development (TDD) approach. I’ll show you how to write both unit and functional tests, and in the process, explain what code mocks are by mocking a few libraries. I’ll be using a combination of RTL and Jest — both of which come pre-installed in any new project created with Create-React-App (CRA).

To follow along, you need to know how to set up and navigate a new React project and how to work with the yarn package manager (or npm). Familiarities with Axios and React-Router are also required.

JavaScript currently has three types of applications that you can build with: Single Page Applications (SPAs), pre-rendering/static generated sites and server-side rendered applications. SPAs come with many challenges, one of which is Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Possible solutions are to make use of Static Site Generators or Server-Side Rendering (SSR).

In this article, I’m going to explain them alongside listing their pros and cons so you have a balanced view. We’re going to look at what static generated/pre-rendering is as well as frameworks such as Gatsby and VuePress that help in creating statically generated sites. We’re also going to look at what server-side rendered (SSR) applications are as well as frameworks like Nextjs and Nuxtjs that can help you create SSR applications. Finally, we’re going to cover the differences between these two methods and which of them you should use when building your next application.

We are living in a world exploding with information, but how do we find what is relevant to us at the time that we need it? I believe that good information architecture is key to helping us navigate through the mountains of data and information we have created for ourselves. 

In this article, we will first describe what information architecture is, why it’s important, and approaches to effective implementation. Then we explore ideas around the broader view of the information age, how we use information, and how it impacts our world and our lives. These insights are designed to help you to understand the bigger picture, which enables us to grasp the value that good information architecture delivers to help our information-overloaded lives.

What Is Information Architecture And Why Is It Important?

“Information architecture is the practice of deciding how to arrange the parts of something to be understandable.”

The smell of rain after a hot day, watching the moon rise on a summer night’s sky, going for a swim — often it’s the simple experiences that inspire us and that we treasure most. No matter what July will have in store for you this year, our new batch of wallpapers is bound to cater for some colorful inspiration along the way.

More than nine years ago, we started out on this wallpapers adventure to bring you beautiful and inspiring wallpapers every month. It’s a community effort, made possible by artists and designers from all across the globe who challenge their creative skills and contribute their artworks to it. Just like this month.

Today, we’re talking about CUBE CSS. What is it, and how does it differ from approaches such as BEM, SMACSS, and OOCSS? I spoke to its creator, Andy Bell, to find out.

Show Notes

• CUBE CSS
• Piccalilli
• Learn Eleventy From Scratch - save 40%!
• Andy Bell and Piccalilli on Twitter

Note: Listeners of the Smashing Podcast can save a whopping 40% on Andy’s Learn Eleventy From Scratch course using the code SMASHINGPOD.

Notifications have become a stable part of the web nowadays. It’s not uncommon to come across sites asking for permission to send notifications to your browser. Most modern web browsers implement the push API and are able to handle push notifications. A quick check on caniuse shows that the API enjoys wide support among modern chrome-based browsers and Firefox browser.

There are various services for implementing notifications on the web. Notable ones are Pusher and Firebase. In this article, we’ll implement push notifications with the Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM) service, which is “a cross-platform messaging solution that lets you reliably send messages at no cost”.

With one or two occasional exceptions, I’ve spent the past twenty-two years designing for countless clients. A few of these projects lasted a year, some several months, but the majority for no more than a few weeks.

Being completely absorbed for a few weeks or months in designing a product interface or a website can be a thrill. It often starts with the gratification which comes from winning the work. Gaining a new client’s confidence and trust can be addictive. During the seductive “getting to know you” phase, you learn about the client and what they expect from you and your work. Addictive personalities like mine crave the intensity of these feelings, but — just like some relationships — the initial excitement soon fades into the realities of working together.

Django websites involve a lot of files. It’s not just source code for the configuration, models, views, and templates, but also static assets: CSS and JavaScript, images, icons. As if that wasn’t enough already, sometimes users come along and want to upload their own files to your website. It’s enough to make any developer incredulous. Files everywhere!

Here’s where I wish I could say (without caveats): “Don’t worry, Django has your back!” But unfortunately, when dealing with static assets and media files, there are a lot of caveats to deal with.

Today, we’ll address storing and serving files for both single-server and scalable deployments while considering factors like compression, caching, and availability. We’ll also discuss the costs and benefits of CDNs and dedicated file storage solutions.

In this article, I’m going to introduce you to a React testing tool named Jest, along with the popular library Enzyme, which is designed to test React components. I’ll introduce you to Jest testing techniques, including: running tests, testing React components, snapshot testing, and mocking. If you are new to testing and wondering how to get started, you will find this tutorial helpful because we will start with an introduction to testing. By the end, you’ll be up and running, testing React applications using Jest and Enzyme. You should be familiar with React in order to follow this tutorial.

As much as I’ve always loved the experience of going out to eat and ordering in takeout, it’s very rare that I enjoy visiting a restaurant’s website. But I get it. The restaurant industry tends to run on very slim profit margins, so it’s hard to justify spending money on a professionally designed website when all they want it to do is list their hours of operation and menu.

However, I envision all that changing in 2020 (and beyond) as restaurants are forced to expand into digital in order to survive. Unlike a website that a novice might hack together with a cheap site builder, establishing a competitive digital presence isn’t something they’re going to be able to do on their own.

That’s why web designers should seriously start thinking about expanding into this niche.

SWR is a lightweight library created by Vercel (formerly ZEIT) that allows fetching, caching, or refetching data in realtime using React Hooks. It’s built with React Suspense which lets your components “wait” for something before they can render, including data. SWR ships also with great features such as dependent fetching, focus on revalidation, scroll position recovery, and so on. It’s also a very powerful tool since it’s backend agnostic and has good support for TypeScript. It’s a package that has a bright future.

The entire Smashing team has been doing its very best to bring you live sessions with real experts — people with practical experience who love to share what they have learned throughout their careers. We organized Smashing Meets on three days — events that were open to everyone in the web community. With sessions on performance, CSS, GraphQL, and creative courage, we made sure to leave plenty of time for Q&A, networking, competitions and prizes.

We’re overwhelmed with the feedback we’ve received since then; many of you seemed to mostly enjoy spending time with speakers, and asking questions directly. A huge thank you again to everyone who joined in — it was such an incredible experience to have shared with you all!

There’s no escaping the ancient masters. Their shadows loom large over philosophy, literature, architecture, warfare, and… web design? Believe it or not, yes. Although Plato infamously omitted CSS Grid from from the final draft of The Republic, there is nonetheless plenty the old heads can teach us about web development.

Today’s lecture is about architecture, and how some of its core tenets apply to the worldwide web. Architectural terms are not unusual in web development, and for good reason. In many ways, web developers are digital architects. This piece will focus on Vitruvius, a Roman architect, and how his principles can and should be applied to websites.

This will focus in particular on the Vitruvian triad, three qualities essential to any building: durability (firmitas) , usefulness (utilitas), and beauty (venustas). Familiarity with these terms — and what they mean in practice — will help make your website better.

I’ve seen a lot of confusion online regarding Web development with Flutter and, often, it’s sadly for the wrong reasons.

Specifically, people sometimes confuse it with the older Web-based mobile (and desktop) cross-platform frameworks, which basically were just Web pages running within browsers running within a wrapper app.

That was truly cross-platform in the sense that the interfaces were the same anyway because you only had access to the interfaces normally accessible on the Web.

Flutter isn’t that, though: it runs natively on each platform, and it means each app runs just like it would run if it were written in Java/Kotlin or Objective-C/Swift on Android and iOS, pretty much. You need to know that because this implies that you need to take care of the many differences between these very diverse platforms.

One of my favorite quotes about software testing is from the Flutter documentation. It says:

“How can you ensure that your app continues to work as you add more features or change existing functionality? By writing tests.”

On that note, this last part of the Mirage JS Deep Dive series will focus on using Mirage to test your JavaScript front-end application.

Note: This article assumes a Cypress environment. Cypress is a testing framework for UI testing. You can, however, transfer the knowledge here to whatever UI testing environment or framework you use.

Read Previous Parts Of The Series:

• Part 1: Understanding Mirage JS Models And Associations
• Part 2: Understanding Factories, Fixtures And Serializers
• Part 3: Understanding Timing, Response And Passthrough