#305: A Thorough Guide to Building Layouts with CSS Grid

Frontend Focus Issue 305 — August 30, 2017 A Thorough Guide to Building Layouts with CSS Grid A helpful guide to CSS Grid, including a free visual grid builder tool. CoffeeCup Improve Web Typography with CSS Font Size Adjust Gajendar Singh introduces you to the font-size-adjust CSS property and explains why it’s important and how you can use it to enhance your web typography. SitePoint A Gulp Workflow for Frontend Development Automation A thorough beginner-level guide to setting up a frontend workflow using Gulp. Andrew Welch Choose the ideal JavaScript framework for your team with the GrapeCity SPEC App. SPEC stands for Speed, Productivity, Ecosystem, and Compatibility. Click to learn more about our JavaScript framework application and let us help you find the best framework for you and your team. GrapeCity Wijmo   Sponsor Accessibility Testing with pa11y Pally, is a set of free and open-source tools that aims to make designing and developing accessibility easier. Here’s how to use it. Ire Aderinokun Managing CSS and JS in an HTTP/2 World A look at some practices that tie in with the different way HTTP/2 operates to regular HTTP. Trevor Davis Revolutionize Your Page: Real Art Direction on the Web [video] Jen Simmons, designer advocate at Mozilla, introduces new ways of thinking about page layout on the web. An Event Apart Building Offline-Friendly Forms Forms on the web don’t often play nice with bad connections, but here’s an approach to making them more robust. Max Böck Push 1.0: A JavaScript Notification Framework A versatile cross-browser way to work with desktop notifications from JavaScript. Tyler Nickerson Jobs Front-end Developers at Devhouse Spindle (Groningen, The Netherlands)Ride your bike to work. Develop awesome projects. We are a holacracy and push each other to develop ourselves as well as our code. Devhouse Spindle Front-End Developer (London) Neverbland Front-End Developer (Portland, Oregon) Cloud Four Can't find the right job? Want companies to apply to you? Try Hired.com. In Brief Polymer 3.0 Preview: Moving to npm and ES6 Modules news Polymer Project Building a simple To Do web app with Stitch, React, and MongoDB tutorial This short tutorial will get you started with MongoDB Stitch. MONGODB  Sponsor Breaking Down a CSS Grid Layout tutorial Tim Wright The Best Way to Implement a 'Wrapper' in CSS tutorial How best to implement an element that wraps around everything else on a page. Kaloyan Kosev Solve Your Specificity Headaches With CSS Modules tutorial Louie Rootfield An Approach To Structuring SCSS with Bootstrap 4 tutorial Mirijam B. How to Combine Flexbox and CSS Grids for Efficient Layouts tutorial Abbey Fitzgerald Fancy Web Animations Made Easy with GreenSock Plugins tutorial SitePoint A Super Quick Way to Try Out CSS Grid tutorial Jen Simmons How to Run a Front-End Infrastructure Team opinion The human aspects of collaborative front-end projects. Jyri Tuulos It’s easy to version control your database alongside your application  Connect your database to your version control system with SQL Source Control and keep track of every change. Redgate  Sponsor Introducing the Extension Compatibility Tester tools A tool for testing if extensions you’ve built/are building will work with Firefox. Mozilla Hacks Essential WebVR Resources tools A collection of useful resources for WebVR development. Mozilla Hacks Rendertron: A Dockerized, Headless Chrome Rendering Solution code Google Chrome Team Reframe.js: Make Unresponsive Elements Responsive code Dollar Shave Club Baffle: A Tiny Library for Obfuscating and Revealing Text in DOM Elements code Cam Wiegert Vivify: A Simple CSS Animation Library code Martin Kníže

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Debunking 3 Common WordPress Myths

As the largest and most widely used content management system (CMS) on the internet, it should come as no surprise that people are constantly trying to bring WordPress down. Naturally, a number of WordPress myths have been conjured up over the years. In order to be properly informed, you have to make sure you know how to separate fact from fiction.

WordPress: The Leading CMS Platform on the Web

WordPress isn’t the only CMS around, but it certainly blows the competition out of the water in terms of adoption and appeal. Just consider the popularity of the platform:

• As of last count, WordPress powers more than 26 percent of the web and has a whopping 59.4 percent market share, which makes it the most used CMS platform.
• More than 500 sites a day are created on the WordPress platform.
• There are 44,225 WordPress plugins, which have been downloaded more than 1.25 billion times.
• WordPress is translated into 56 different languages worldwide.

These are just a few of the striking data points. When you dig into the nitty gritty of WordPress, it becomes clear that this is one of the most superior CMS platforms on the web. But along with this title comes a target. When you’re the best, people want to tear you down. And when they can’t tear you down, they resort to bending the truth or making things up altogether.

Don’t Fall for These 3 WordPress Myths

In order to be an informed website developer, entrepreneur, or business owner, you need to be cognizant of the fact that the internet is filled with myths regarding WordPress.

Here are three of the most common myths about WordPress:

Myth #1: WordPress Isn’t Scalable

Somewhere along the line, a myth has been perpetuated that WordPress isn’t scalable. Some people believe that it’s a platform that’s only suited for small blogs and tiny business websites. However, this simply isn’t true. If you look at the facts, you’ll see that WordPress is anything but a CMS designed exclusively for small sites. Just ask celebrities and businesses who regularly rely on WordPress for their websites.

Musicians like Beyonce, Justin Bieber, Snoop Dogg, Katy Perry, and The Rolling Stones all use WordPress. From the business side of things, companies like Bacardi, Sony Music, Mercedes Benz, The Rotary Club, and the New Yorker Magazine are all WordPress users.

One of the primary reasons why large businesses and brands use WordPress is that it is scalable. Not only are the search, caching, and content delivery capabilities top-notch, but there’s also true horizontal scalability. This allows websites with high traffic demands to always have sufficient architecture on-demand if they need it.

Put simply, the idea that WordPress isn’t scalable is ridiculous. "With the right infrastructure, services and resources, WordPress is highly scalable," Pragmatic explains. "It can serve tens of thousands of logged in users at a time and deliver hundreds of millions of monthly page views. It can process page requests immediately and can produce lightning-quick results to search queries. It is flexible, upgradeable and ultimately can power all manner of websites, right up to the largest and most visited."

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by Larry Alton via SitePoint

40 Social Media Video Marketing Stats for 2017

Social media video marketing continues to be an uptrend in any and all industry commerce. In the last 30 days, more online video content has been uploaded to the web than in the past 30 years of TV content. Marketers who have been used to the forced audience captivation of commercials now need to...

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by Irfan Ahmad via Digital Information World

6 Best New Android Launchers 2017! [video]

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by Web Desk via Digital Information World

UX Lessons from Amazon: 4 Hacks Guaranteed to Boost Conversions

I’ll admit, Amazon’s visual design is awful and kind of outdated. I’m sure a lot of UX experts will agree with me on that, so naturally, an article sharing UX lessons from Amazon might raise some eyebrows at first.

However, while Amazon still has a lot of work to do on their visual design (it’s 2017 after all, users care about aesthetics!), we can still learn a lot from Amazon in regards to user experience. In fact, Amazon has an amazingly-effective UX system, where research shows that they were responsible for 53% of ALL online retail sales growth in the U.S. in 2016 alone. Yes, read that again.

One single company was responsible for 53% of retail sales growth in a country as big and diverse as the U.S.

How did Amazon do it? Let's take a look.

1. Having a Well-Oiled "Recommendations Engine"

If there's something Amazon has mastered, it's the subtle art of reading their users’ mind (or, rather, putting things into their users’ mind?). If you shop on Amazon, as soon as you order something, before you even realize that you need something to complement it, complementary options are staring you right in the face.

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by John Stevens via SitePoint

React Crash Course for Beginners, Part 2

React Crash Course for Beginners, Part 1