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I recently had the pleasure of joining Dave Rupert, Chris Coyier, and Chris Ferdinandi on the Shop Talk Show to talk about the upcoming ARTIFACT Conference (Austin, TX on Sept. 30 – Oct. 1, 2019). ARTIFACT is an intimate gathering of web designers and developers where we discuss ways to build web sites that work for everyone.

This isn’t our first rodeo! I started ARTIFACT back in 2013 with Christopher Schmitt and Ari Stiles (the team behind the legendary In … Read article

The irony of web performance is that the average page weight of a site continues to go up year after year, despite us being more aware of the problem and having more tools at our disposal to fight it than ever.

To paraphrase Seinfeld, "we know how to fight page weight issues; we just don't use the tools we have to fight page weight issues."… Read article

We’ve looked at React Hooks before, around here at CSS-Tricks. I have an article that introduces them as well that illustrates how to use them to create components through functions. Both articles are good high-level overviews about the way they work, but they open up a lot of possibilities, too.

So, that’s what we’re going to do in this article. We’re going to see how hooks make our development process easier and faster by building a chat application.… Read article

Zach Leatherman worked closely with Chris to figure out the font loading strategy for this very website you're reading. Zach walks us through the design in this write-up and shares techniques that can be applied to other projects.

Spoiler alert: Font loading is a complex and important part of a project.

The really interesting part of this post is the way that Zach talks about changing the design based on what’s best for the codebase — or as Harry Roberts … Read article

Welcome to an incredibly controversial topic in the land of front-end development! I’m sure that a majority of you reading this have encountered your fair share of #hotdrama surrounding how CSS should be handled within a JavaScript application.

I want to preface this post with a disclaimer: There is no hard and fast rule that establishes one method of handling CSS in a React, or Vue, or Angular application as superior. Every project is different, and every method has … Read article

In the world of likes and social statistics, reviews are very important method for leaving feedback. Users often like to know the opinions of others before deciding on items to purchase themselves, or even articles to read, movies to see, or restaurants to dine.

Developers often struggle with with reviews — it is common to see inaccessible and over-complicated implementations. Hey, CSS-Tricks has a snippet for one that’s now bordering on a decade.

Let’s walk through new, accessible and maintainable … Read article

I first heard of Flywheel through their product Local, which is a native app for working on WordPress sites. If you ask around for what people use for that kind of work, you'll get all sorts of answers, but an awful lot of very strong recommendations for Local. I've become one of them! We ultimately did a sponsored post for Local, but that's based on the fact that now 100% of my local WordPress development work is done using … Read article

You may have heard (or even issued the call) that “we can just use lazy loading!” when looking for a way to slim down a particularly heavy web page.

Lazy loading is a popular technique for gradually requesting images as they come into view, rather than all at once after the HTML of the page has been parsed. It can reduce the initial page weight, and help us hit our performance budgets by requesting images when they're needed.

It can … Read article

What we don’t have are enough articles showing you how to increase your page size. In fact, the only article I could find was this one from the Geek Squad which ended up being about making the font size bigger. This is a good start, but I think we can do better.

Greek mythology tells the story of Zeus creating the cloud nymph, Nephele. Like other Greek myths, this tale gets pretty bizarre and X-rated. Here’s a very abridged, polite version.

Nephele, we are told, was created by Zeus in the image of his own beautiful wife. A mortal meets Nephele, falls in love with her and, together, they take an adult nap™. Finally, in a strange twist, the cloud gives birth to half-human half-horse Centaur babies.

Weird, right? Personally, I … Read article