The post Product Grid Style 11 appeared first on Best jQuery.
by Admin via Best jQuery
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Highway : JavaScript library for AJAX-based Website Transitions
Highway is a lightweight (2.2ko gzipped), robust, modern and flexible library that will let us create AJAX navigations with beautiful transitions on our websites. It’s been a while we were trying to build this kind of library to fits our needs at Dogstudio and we now finally released it!
The post Highway : JavaScript library for AJAX-based Website Transitions appeared first on Best jQuery.
by Admin via Best jQuery
Ask the UXperts: Living in Information — with Jorge Arango
Living with information is an inherent part of life these days. Sites like Facebook, Wikipedia or your bank’s website are more than products or tools – they create contexts that change the way we interact, think, understand, and behave. In many ways, they function like places.
Thinking about them like this gives designers of these information environments some conceptual tools to help them create products and services that better serve our needs.
In our next Ask the UXperts session we’re going to examine this idea with a guy that literally wrote the book on it. Introducing Jorge Arango.
The Details
- Where: Our dedicated ‘Ask the UXperts’ Slack channel (You’ll need to request an invitation if you haven’t yet joined our Slack channel)
- When: 3pm Thursday 18 October PST or 9am Friday 19 October AEDT (or find out what time that is for you)
Meet Jorge Arango
Jorge Arango is an information architect and strategic designer. He partners with product, design, and innovation leaders to create digital places that make people smarter. In addition to his consulting practice, Jorge also teaches, writes, and speaks at global design conferences.
Jorge is the author of Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places. You can find it on Rosenfeld Media or Amazon.
Some Questions to Inspire You
- Can software UIs create contexts that influence how our users think and act?
- If yes, do we have more responsibility as designers of these kinds of systems?
- Are there wider implications of our work that we might not consider?
How to Ask Your Questions
If you can’t make the live session but have questions, we’d love to collect them ahead of time and we’ll ask Jorge on your behalf. You can ask them in the comments below. We’ll publish the responses (along with the full transcript) in the days following the session.
How does Ask the UXperts work?
These sessions run for approximately an hour and best of all, they don’t cost a cent. We use a dedicated public Slack channel. That means that there is no audio or video, but a full transcript will be posted up on here in the days following the session.
The post Ask the UXperts: Living in Information — with Jorge Arango appeared first on UX Mastery.
by Sarah Hawk via UX Mastery
10 Steps for Optimizing WordPress Site Performance
This article on WordPress site performance is part of a series created in partnership with SiteGround. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
You don’t want a slow website. Potential visitors may leave before your page even finishes loading. And you’ll be penalized in search results, meaning even less traffic.
You want your web pages to load in two seconds or less. How do you achieve that? One step at a time.
In this article, we cover a list of items you can optimize to speed up your WordPress site.
Just How Slow Is My Site?
Your site may not feel slow to you. Most likely your browser has already cached it, so you won’t be experiencing it the same way as a new visitor.
Here are some services that will inform you how long your page takes to load and tell you the overall file size of your page:
Check the speed of your sites before and after tweaking them for performance. If you can get your pages loading in two seconds, you’re doing well.
Keep a record of how much difference each step you take makes. What made the most difference?
#1. Choose a Good Web Host
It’s impossible to speed up a website that’s being hosted on a slow server. Choosing the right hosting provider is the first important step towards having a fast-loading website.
How do you choose a company that makes speed a priority? Check out our Performance Checklist in The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Hosting Provider.
SitePoint recently partnered with SiteGround as our official recommended host. With servers on multiple continents and the use of the latest SSD hardware, an in-house caching tool, and a free CDN service, SiteGround provides and invests heavily in speed acceleration. Their flexible servers support PHP7 and HTTP/2 and they have ongoing software and hardware updates.
#2. Optimize Your Theme
First, use a fast theme. Themes with a lot of options make your job easier, but at the expense of making the web server and browser work harder. Some WordPress themes are megabytes in size, adding seconds to your page loading time.
Every feature you don’t use slows your site down for no reason. If you’re comfortable tweaking code, choose a theme with fewer options to speed up your site.
- The default WordPress themes are easy to tweak, lightweight, and well-coded. Consider using one and either tweaking the code yourself, or hiring a developer.
- Thesis and Schema are two more themes that prioritize performance.
Further reading:
- What is the Best WordPress Theme?
- 9 of the Most Popular Free WordPress Themes
- How to Design a Complete WordPress Website With Base Theme & Elementor
Second, use a responsive design. These load less resources for mobile devices, or specify high-res images for desktop displays. Mobile users don’t have to download huge images, while desktop users don’t have to squint at tiny ones.
Responsive sites are also preferred by Google, so expect a slight boost in SEO once you switch.
#3. Monitor Your Plugins
First, minimize the number of plugins you use. Before you install any plugin, ask if it’s really necessary. Having a large number of plugins installed won’t make a huge difference to the speed of your site, but it increases the risk of installing badly behaved plugins.
Second, make sure your plugins are optimized for the current version of WordPress. Perform some research before installing a plugin, especially if it’s rated three stars or less. It may be poorly developed, or use inappropriate hooks. This will slow down your site, and may also adversely affect WordPress and your other plugins. It's also important to keep plugins updated to ensure you have the latest performance improvements, security patches, and features.
#4. Optimize Your Widgets
Your widgets should be as light and easy to load as possible. Some load external JavaScript or CSS while being rendered. This is common for social network widgets for Facebook, Twitter and Google+.
If a widget is unlikely to be updated often, upload it directly to your server. By not having to rely on external servers, you’ll improve your site’s loading time.
#5. Optimize Your Static Content
First, compress static content with gzip. Compressed files are smaller, so will obviously load faster.
- The best option is to enable gzip compression straight from cPanel (if your host offers you that) if you’re on a shared server.
- You can enable gzip compression using a plugin like W3 Total Cache. We’ll cover plugins in our next article.
Second, take the load off your web server with a CDN. Your static resources (like images, scripts and CSS files) will be served from optimized content delivery network servers all over the world — generally the closest server to your visitor. And your web server will be freed up to serve the rest of your site, improving performance.
Ideally, look for a web host that offers a CDN in its hosting plans, like SiteGround. There are also lots of CDN networks out there:
These work with the caching plugins we’ll cover next time.
Here’s some further reading about CloudFront:
The post 10 Steps for Optimizing WordPress Site Performance appeared first on SitePoint.
by Adrian Try via SitePoint
How Blinkist Powers Millions of Users on MongoDB Atlas
This article was originally published on MongoDB. Thank you for supporting the partners who make SitePoint possible.
Not unlike other startups, Blinkist grew its roots in a college dorm. Only, its creators didn’t know it at the time. It took years before the founders decided to build a business on their college study tricks. Blinkist condenses nonfiction books into pithy, but accessible 15-minute summaries which you can read or listen to via its app.
“It all started with four friends,” says Sebastian Schleicher, Director of Engineering at Blinkist. “After leaving university, they found jobs and built lifestyles that kept them fully occupied—but they were pretty frustrated because their packed schedules left them no time for reading and learning new things.”
Rather than resign themselves to a life without learning, they racked their brains as to how they could find a way to satisfy their craving for knowledge. They decided to revive their old study habits from university where they would write up key ideas from material that they’d read and then share it with each other. It didn’t take long for them to realise that they could build a business on this model of creating valuable easily accessible content to inspire people to keep learning. In 2012, Blinkist was born.
Six years later, the Berlin-based outfit has nearly 100 employees, but instead of writers and editors, they have Tea Masters and Content Ninjas. Blinkist has no formal hierarchical management structure, having replaced bosses with BOS, the Blinkist Operating System. The app has over five million users and, at its foundation, it has MongoDB Atlas, the fully managed service for MongoDB, running on AWS. But it didn’t always.
“In four years, we had a million users and 2,500 books,” says Schleicher. “We’d introduced audiobooks and seen them become the most important delivery channel. We tripled our revenue, doubled our team, moved into a larger, open-plan office, and even got a dog. Things were good.”
Running into trouble with 3rd party MongoDB as a Service
Then came an unwelcome plot twist. Blinkist had built its service on Compose, a third-party database as a service, based on MongoDB. MongoDB had been an obvious choice as the document model provided Blinkist with the flexibility needed to iterate quickly, but the team was too lean to spend time on infrastructure management
In 2016, Compose unexpectedly decided to change the architecture of its database, creating major obstacles for Blinkist as they would become locked in to an old version of MongoDB. “They left us alone,” says Schleicher. “They said, ‘Here’s a tool, migrate your data.’ I asked if they’d help. No dice. I offered them money. Not interested, no support. After being a customer for all those years? I said goodbye.”
The post How Blinkist Powers Millions of Users on MongoDB Atlas appeared first on SitePoint.
by Jesse Krasnostein via SitePoint
An Introduction to Web Payments
|
by via Frontend Focus
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)