At the end of April Backdrop CMS was graced with the addition of the Leaflet module which enables us Backdrop fans to do much of the mapping that we used to do in Drupal. Thanks for this go to the module’s maintainers, Wes Jones and Indigoxela. This is a huge step for the Backdropcommunity and the champagne corks deserve to be popped.
As we re-evaluate our lifestyles in the face of global climate change, it’s not just how we heat our homes, how we travel, work, rest, play and consume that needs a major re-think. Our websites also consume carbon, and we need to deal with this. As Tom Greenwood (see below) says, “If the internet were a country, it would be the sixth most polluting country in the world, with annual emissions similar to those of Germany”.
Can a web page have too much white space? It’s an innocent question and may even appear to be impertinent given how much white space is embraced, even revered, by web designers - myself included. White space is at the heart of the less is more design philosophy where a less-crowded page design promises to offer visitors a higher-quality user experience. So can its over-use lead to a less is much less result?
Scroll bars have been with us since the first GUI. They help us navigate content that is taller - or wider - than the window in which it is displayed. They come in various flavours, suitably modified as operating systems evolved, but invariably they consist of an arrow-shaped button at each end (top, bottom, left and right) and a ‘thumb’ that can be pulled along the vertical or horizontal slider-track.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s dictum that “Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” can be re-deployed most helpfully when discussing Reader View, a topic that touches on web page design and browser behaviour.
The perpetual churn of new technologies and techniques can sometimes blind-side us to some fundamental issues in web design that we need to keep in focus all the time. One of these is accessibility which - for me - has been sharpened up by the brief but high-value book on the subject by Laura Kalbag, Accessibility for Everyone, published last year (2017) by A Book Apart.
The business of building a website is sufficiently detailed. Anyone engaged in this detail comes to depend upon a wide range of resources. Amongst these, there are some on whose giant shoulders we alight almost routinely. They deserve mention.
This list is something that I should have posted long ago. So here it is, better late than never. Most are agnostic in the sense that they apply regardless of the technology that any one web developer or designer uses. All but one are free.
A web page usually has a menu link that gets you there, as does this blog post with its menu link in the vertical menu of blog posts, listed chronologically, newest at the top. When you are reading this post, that menu link will be styled bold. That bit is easy.
I usually build websites that my clients can work with themselves, enabling them to add, edit and delete content without their needing to come back to me for all of this sort of micro-management. Some of my clients like this facility and some don’t, preferring instead to have me work with their site’s content.
My workstation here in the Gers overlooks a magnificant horse-chestnut tree, aesculus hippocastanum (the conker variety, not the sweet chestnut one). It provides shade from the blasting sun and in April it transforms itself with countless bunches of pink-tinged white blossom. Bit by bit it etched itself on my imagination to the point where part of it had figuratively found purchase on the masthead on this website (in the 2010 and 2011 designs).