Articles

There are loads of analytics platforms to help you track visitor and usage data on your sites. Perhaps most notably Google Analytics, which is widely used (including on this site), probably due to it's ease of integration, feature-richness, and the fact that it's free (until you need to jump up to the enterprise tier which is some crazy six-figure jump).

I don't take any particular issue with Google Analytics. In fact I quite like it, especially as I've learned … Read article

With the wonderful world of JAMstack getting big, all the categories of services and tools that help it along are as important as ever. There are static site generators, headless CMSs, and static file hosts.

I think those classifications are handy, and help conversations along. But there is a point where nuance is necessary and these classification buckets get a little leaky. … Read article

In this week's roundup: multi-column layouts gain wide support, the ADA means more A11y for retailers, and Google is doing something about all the empty image alt attributes in the wild.… Read article

There is an HTML attribute that does exactly what you think it should do:

<div>I'm visible</div>
<div hidden>I'm hidden</div>

It even has great browser support. Is it useful? Uhm. Maybe. Not really. … Read article

There are all these sites out there that want to help you with your images. They do things like optimize your images and help you serve them performantly.

That's a very good thing. By any metric, images are a major slice of the resources on websites, and we're notoriously bad at optimizing them and doing all the things we could to lower the performance hit from them. So you use some service to help you deliver images better. Smart. Many of them will make managing and optimizing images a lot easier. But I don't consider them a no-brainer. There is a lot to think about, like making choices that don't paint you into a corner.

At a recent conference talk (sorry, I forget which one), there was a quick example of poor web performance in the form of a third-party widget. The example showed a site that installed the widget in order to add a "email us" button fixed to the bottom right of the viewport. Not even a live-chat widget — just an email thing. It weighed in at something like 470KB, which is straight bananas.

Just in case you are someone who feels … Read article

It’s pretty common to see a loading state on sites these days, particularly as progressive web apps and reactive sites are on the rise. It’s one way to improve "perceived" performance — that is, making it feel as though the site is loading faster than it actually is.

There’s no shortage of ways to make a loader — all it takes is a quick search on CodePen to see oodles of examples, from animated GIFs to complex animations. While it’s … Read article