Articles

HTML Forms

Forms are a handy way of making your website more interactive. They can be beneficial for both the visitor of the site, and the web designer. The basic premise behind a form is to collect data from the visitor via user input.

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Media Types

Nowadays, a website can be accessed through a variety of different media types. In the early 90s it was typical to access a website through a desktop computer, and while that's still the case, technology has progressed significantly in the context of ways we access websites. Screens can range drastically in size and resolution; smart watches, to mobile phones, to tablets, to laptop and desktop screens, to 50+ inch TVs.

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CSS Layouts

There are many ways of using CSS to create a layout comprised of many different sections of a website. Originally, HTML was used exclusively for both structure and design, but as HTML evolved came a reevaluation of semantic markup, and a discouragement of overexcessive usage <div> tags and unnecessary <br> tags

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Audio/Video

With HTML5 came the introduction of tags designed to free the web developer of their previous reliance on plugins and secondary websites. These elements are <audio> and <video>.

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Responsive Design

When considering a responsive website it is important to take advantage of media types. Media queries are also a great solution to a world saturated with an almost infinite number of devices with their own screen dimensions and resolutions. Sites are increasingly being designed with the perspective that font size shouldn't be imposed on the visitor, and a responsive site should cater to those who wish to increase or decrease font sizes without breaking elements or layouts.

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SASS

SASS is an interpreted language based on CSS and reliant on Ruby to compile into a CSS based format. SASS is used to widen the possibilities of CSS and contributes to a more streamlined working environment which can save a lot of time, while promoting structure and organisation which can be very beneficial as a project grows.

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SEO

SEO, or 'search engine optimisation', encompasses a variety of techniques and alterations that web designers implement to assist with appearing high on relevant search engine results. Successful SEO implementation can increase web traffic, that can lead to greater goals such as an increase in e-commerce sales, user registration, or educating the visitior via the content of the page.

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Accessibility

Accessibility in terms of web design is creating a well-structured site with relevant adjustments for those that would normally have issues with navigating around a website. An accessible website includes such things as the ability to navigate exclusively via keyboard, as well as high-contrast design, and making sure the site is structured semantically, with relevant HTML elements that can be used by screen-readers and such.

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Social Media

Social media is a hugely important part of how people interact in today's society. We can implement extra metadata in our code to help sites such as Facebook and Twitter generate rich objects on these same sites. Rich objects can incorporate additional information supplied via metadata to create user-friendly objects from links from other sites that don't look out of place in a typical social feed.

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Microdata

Microdata allows search engines to give a more accurate, relevant, and overall improved user experience. By implementing microdata (or other forms of structured data markup such as JSON-LD) we can further clarify what exactly sections of our web page is comprised of. Since everyone's code is different, search engines sometimes have problems with interpreting data, and by marking a breadcrumb list as such (instead of an additional navigation bar, for example), we can give additional information to the likes of Google and co.

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