Doze Studio

What a pumping intro showreel video in this parallax scrolling One Pager for motion design outfit, Doze Studio. Scrolljacking aside, there is so much noteworthy attention to detail. They have reused the minimal DOZE logo throughout the site - favicon, preloader, section backgrounds and navigation states. Other highlights include the subtle page border appearing as you scroll, the mini animations under section headings, hover sensitive team carousel and the unique contact form select states. Excellent effort and stoked to see this built on WordPress too.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

6 of the Best Markdown Plugins for WordPress

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

Markdown is a fast and efficient way to write content for the web. We sang its praises and listed its benefits in our previous article, How Writers and Bloggers Can Make the Most of Markdown in WordPress This follow-up post is a quick reference of the best plugins that let you use Markdown from within WordPress.

By default, WordPress has no Markdown support. The awesome thing about WordPress is that you can add additional functionality with a plugin. The way these plugins handle Markdown is quite different, so choose carefully—you’ll need one that fits into your workflow and has the features that you need.

If you intend to use a separate Markdown app for writing, and you’re happy to convert your content to HTML before pasting into WordPress, then you won’t need any of these. WordPress will never see Markdown. Alternatively, you can use Markdown QuickTags and convert to HTML from within WordPress.

If you’d prefer to paste your Markdown into WordPress and leave it that way, you’ll need a plugin to render it into HTML on the fly, so it can be displayed in your visitors’ web browsers. Typewriter and Markdown for WordPress and bbPress are good choices. Just don’t deactivate the plugin, or your visitors will just see the Markdown version of the page!

But if you need to work extensively with Markdown within WordPress, then have a look at Jetpack, WP-Markdown and PrettyPress. Out of these, Jetpack is the most widely used and supported, and has the benefit that it not only converts your Markdown to HTML automatically, it also keeps the Markdown version for future editing. On the other hand, if you value a preview pane so you can see how your Markdown will be rendered on the fly, take a look at PrettyPress.

When writing with Markdown, always use the text editor and not the visual editor. You’ll avoid surprises with formatting that way.

Have we missed your favorite Markdown plugin? Let us know in the comments.

1. Jetpack

• Cost: Markdown is available in Jetpack’s free plugin, though paid plans are available with additional themes, security features and support
• Active installs: 3+ million
• Rating: 4.1 out of 5 stars (1,347 reviews)

Jetpack is probably the best way to work with Markdown in WordPress. Unlike many of the other plugins, it is well-supported, widely-used, and uses the Markdown Extra syntax by Michel Fortin which includes additional features like code blocks and tables. And it’s brought to you by Automattic, who bring you WordPress.

You can use Markdown on your Jetpack-powered blog for posts, pages and comments.

Your documents are saved in HTML format so your site will still look OK if the plugin is deactivated, but the Markdown copy is retained for future editing. This gives you the best of both worlds.

The original Markdown text you write will always remain in Markdown, this way you can go back and edit it using Markdown. Only the published document – the post or the page – will be converted. If you write a post in Markdown, it will be published as a fully formatted post on your blog, but when you go back and edit, it’ll still be in Markdown.

If you’re just installing Jetpack for the Markdown features, then have a look at JP Markdown.

Continue reading %6 of the Best Markdown Plugins for WordPress%

by Adrian Try via SitePoint

Drake Evans

Long scrolling One Pager for Art Director Drake Evans featuring snippets of his work that simply link out to Behance. Awesome to hear the move to One Page and the immediate client interest.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Chat Bots and the Future of Web Development

Since Facebook launched their annual F8 conference for bot developers in 2016 and Microsoft followed suit, there's been a lot of hype, excitement and speculation around chatbots. Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has stated that chatbots will "fundamentally revolutionize how computing is experienced", altering the way content and services are created and consumed on the web.

There are currently more than 100,000 bots and developers on the Messenger network alone. More than 10,000 businesses are already using or working on their own bots, and by 2020 80% businesses hope to have chatbots for interacting with customers.

In this article, I'll cover what chatbots are, the sudden boom in their popularity, how they are significantly changing the way we browse and interact with the web, why web developers and designers should care about this paradigm shift, and what they can specifically do to keep up.

What Chatbots Are

This Google Trends graph shows exponentially growing interest over time for "Chatbot" across Search:

By definition, chatbots are computer programs powered by machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) that anyone can interact with to get things done or find information and services. They primarily exists on messenger platforms like Facebook Messenger, Kik, Telegram, Slack, Skype and WeChat, which come with existing user bases.

Chatbots are smart, automated conversational identities that make tapping on drop-down menu buttons, opting for search functions and navigating through pages on websites redundant. They provide instant, specific results in a smooth-flowing conversational format.

How Bots Will Change Web Interactions

Current web interactions typically involve extensive Google searches, getting handed a bunch of search results, going through each till we find what we're looking for, and finally taking some kind of action.

With a bot, on the other hand, browsing and navigational elements get replaced by a straightforward Q&A-styled conversation.

For a better understanding of how exactly web interaction will change, let’s take any e-commerce website as an example.
Your end goal: you want to buy a nice blue shirt for a meeting but don’t want to spend more than $30.

Typically, you might go to an ecommerce website (say it's filledwithclothes.com): you hover over the categories on top, select men’s/women's shirts, and are led to another landing page … and that’s not even the half of it.

Now on the product listing page you’ll either set some filters to accommodate your budget and color preferences or you’ll skip that and start going through the shirts right away.

This is where you’ll need time and patience to go through all the options and arrive at one you like. You’ll check the size chart and maybe, just maybe, decide to make a purchase. After this, checkout and payment will lead you down another series of actions, until you’re finally done placing the order.

Replacing browsing and navigation with conversation

Now imagine that the same ecommerce website decides to get a chatbot (just as countless other brands like H&M, Tommy Hilfiger, Burberry and Sephora have done). Let's call it Clothes Bot. Ideally, they would place the bot where their audiences are, which would most likely be Facebook Messenger or their website landing pages.

Here's a mockup of an interaction with Clothes Bot:

As a user you, could talk to this bot to find products right from Facebook chat itself, almost like how you would message a friend.

Before I dive into explaining what developers and designers can do to be a part of the bot revolution, I’m going to go over why they should care in the first place, and what will specifically change in terms of development and design.

Why should developers and designers care about the bot era?

As of now, all the big players like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, IBM and Amazon have released numerous, open-source bot building tools and frameworks to help developers create bots. They’ve also formed an AI initiative with the likes of Amazon, Twitter, Apple, Intel and Baidu to address ethical and privacy issues that might arise in the development and scaling stages.

Between 1.2 billion people use Facebook Messenger on a daily basis, and introducing bots to help businesses interact, market and sell to customers inside the same window presents a scope greater than apps did when they came around for the first time.

Users don’t need to download an app, but instead can use one umbrella app like Facebook, Kik, Telegram or any other independent chat-based platform, where there exist countless bots for people to search and talk to.

Kik hosts a Bot Shop with a variety of bots for its user base to search for and talk to. Slack provides a Brilliant Bots list to all its corporate accounts to increase productivity and get tasks done faster. The list goes on.

In essence, general web users can just search for the brand/company/service from their native messenger apps or the web and start chatting with their bot just like how they would chat with a friend on Messenger.

Early adopters in the tech space are backing the bot revolution. It's worth considering what this means for developers and designers. What will the web look like in the years to come, and how will bots shape it?

Could this be Web 3.0?

From mobile apps to addictive social networks, "Web 2.0" saw quite a few iconic developments such as video sharing sites (YouTube), blogs, wikis and RSS feeds (Feedly), collaborative consumption platforms (Craigslist, Uber). Currently, however, two intersecting trends have made the rise of chatbots a plausible next stage for the web:

• Mobile app fatigue. A large number of smartphone users download few or no apps per month. And with more than three million apps available on the two app stores, it’s getting harder for businesses to build unique apps and even harder to stand out midst the noise.

• Popularity of messenger platforms. For the first time ever, the big 4 messenger apps are seeing more MAUs (monthly active users) than the big 4 social networking platforms:

  

  Users are clearly preferring instant and interactive interfaces. For businesses looking to target customers where they are, it makes sense to be active on a chat-based platform. And instead of asking a customer to jump from one landing page to another, they can bring all essential functions into the chat environment itself.

Here’s an overview of how conversation as a platform will change the different elements of an end-user interface:

Design implications

Web Applications in 2017	Web Applications in 2020
Web pages	Bot URLs
Graphical User Interfaces (GUI)	Conversational User Interfaces(CUI)
Websites organized into sections for easier navigation	Q&A layout providing user-specific results, making navigation redundant
Drop-down menus	Suggestions or recommended buttons integrated into chat
Pop-ups and live chat services	All-in-one bot widget
Web Content and blog posts	Rich micro-content cards
E-commerce product pages	Product catalogue carousels in conversation

Development implications

Web Applications in 2017	Web Applications in 2020
JavaScript, HTML, CSS, back end	Natural Language Processing, Natural Language Understanding and Artificial Intelligence principles. Understanding of neural networks and regression patterns
Keyword based search	Context based interactions
Standalone app development	Integration with multiple messaging platforms
Static user experiences	Real-time experience

Continue reading %Chat Bots and the Future of Web Development%

by Abhimanyu Godara via SitePoint

5-11 Lavington Street

Parallax scrolling One Pager that assembles as you scroll for 5-11 Lavington Street - an office space located in London's South Bank.

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Why Net Neutrality Matters to Web Professionals

This article is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.

What is Net Neutrality

Net neutrality is now a buzzword-quality term, bandied about by many, but perhaps not paid any real attention by more than a few. The concept of net neutrality is a fairly simple one at its core. It's the idea that the governments who create rules and regulations for Internet access within a given country, or the companies providing Internet services, will not discriminate Internet traffic.

That is, your provider will not charge you differently for access to Netflix, fore example, or throttle your bandwidth to slow your speeds when accessing Hulu. They won't discriminate in cost, speed, or in any way limit your Internet browsing experience. Some people are staunchly for net neutrality as a principle; others are against it. Those for it are often ISPs and companies that might benefit from it, and they often use false flag arguments (we could give you faster streaming, we could help protect the Internet from bad actors, etc) to sell their point.

Note that this isn't theory - prior to the 2015 rulings, Netfli was forced into paying multiple communications providers to not have throttled traffic on their networks.

The reality is that an Internet completely without Net Neutrality rules is one that only favors the large communications providers, and select other corporations. Imagine the money that could be made by extorting large corporations into deals to favor their network traffic, or the fees that might have to be paid by small businesses to make it past a bandwidth limitation. The possibilities are endless for the broadband providers, and endlessly frustrating to the consumer - the everyday citizen of the Internet, who will have no say in this matter.

The History of Net Neutrality

Net Neutrality has been, for the most part, the status quo in the United States, with the 2015 FCC rules declaring that broadband Internet providers fall under Title II of the Communications Act. This means that ISPs are now able to be governed as common carriers, and FCC rules could stop those ISPs from throttling or favoring traffic in their lines - forcing ISPs to treat users' broadband connections as "dumb pipes" through which data flows, rather than attempting to regulate what does and does not appear on your device, and how quickly.

These moves by the FCC have been seen as excessive government regulation by some, especially by those ISPs in question, but the majority of the public on either end of the political spectrum, when the issue is explained, seem to favor net neutrality.

Recent Events Involving Net Neutrality

The new leadership of the FCC, however, has voted to begin the process of ending the FCC net neutrality rules and declassifying ISPs as common carriers. This move will end the principles of net neutrality that have kept the large broadband providers in check in recent years. You can read the FCC's public stance here.

There is now a public comment period, where individuals and organizations alike may submit comments, questions, and essentially drum up support, but in the end, a decision will be made, and it seems dubious that the current FCC leadership will protect net neutrality.

The Importance of the Discussion

So what does it matter for you? Web professionals of all walks of life - developers, designers, copywriters, server administrators, marketers, and many more niches will be affected by the lack of net neutrality rules. What will happen when you build an application, and pour your (and perhaps your team's) blood, sweat, and tears into it, draining savings, credit, hawking for funding perhaps, and you finally launch your app, only to find that some of your users or potential users cannot reach your app?

What if your users must deal with slower speeds when using your app, and you lose some because of it? What if they have to pay fees? If your app competes with an app created by some subsidiary of a big communications company and it is throttled or denied traffic? You can do very little to nothing about your users' access to the Internet.

These are troubles that you would never have to deal with, if your users had access to an open pipe, without discrimination.

What Can You Do

Comments on the issue are due to the FCC by July 17, 2017. This will be a slow process either way, but if you want your voice to be heard, you can contact members of Congress or the FCC. Here are a few options for making your voice heard:

• Reach out. Here's an organization bent on helping people reach their representatives
• Put your money where your mouth is. Ensure that, when possible, the vendors you choose to work with are pro net neutrality (like our partner, SiteGround) or at minimum, that the places you shop and services you use are not part of the opposition.
• If you are part of a larger website or app, you can take part in the July 12 2017 Day of Action, when sites around the world will spread the word about net neutrality to their users.

And don't think that these efforts are just for Americans. Those who don't live in the U.S. will still deal with the ripple effects of the battle there, and many countries are already grappling with the same issues, if they haven't already lost the fight. Have any thoughts? Let us know in the comments.

Continue reading %Why Net Neutrality Matters to Web Professionals%

by Jeff Smith via SitePoint

New Course: Easy Mobile Apps With Ionic Creator