I don't get paid by Font Awesome, but after I hype them up, they will at some point. Font Awesome has changed the way that I build websites since I began to use it earlier last year. You see, if you've been around the web development game for a while, then you know that icons aren't the most entertaining thing to work with. You normally have to create some type of sprite sheet, and then in your CSS, you have to position everything accordingly and precisely. It's normally a somewhat time-consuming task and I personally save it for last on most projects.

If you are looking to add a splash of design to your existing websites, then CSS animations are a simple and quick way to do so, and they have a few benefits over the traditional use of JavaScript animations. For one, and the most important I think, you don't have to worry about math and geometry as the browser will take care of that for you. Many are put off by adding animations because for sure they are not simple. Even just sliding a text paragraph into focus on page load can be a bit tricky in the traditional JavaScript way. You'll have to worry about managing timers and setting coordinates yourself with plenty more room for error. Whereas with Animations, it is just a few style rules away.

CSS transitions have been out for a bit now, but many websites still don't make full use of them, unfortunately. And they should, as they provide a clean mechanism for creating smoother animations and better-looking sites. This works in guiding users and giving them subtle queues on how a site works. Fading out an element for example. Or moving an item on a certain action. All important queues. And also, they just look nice. It gives a website a more fluid feel overall.

The beloved HTML table is one of the oldest elements on the web and one of the most used elements. It's incredibly important, for a number of reason which I'll cover down below. And sadly, it doesn't get the attention it deserves and I think it's a bit outdated by today's mobile-first standards.

The little guy that helps us decide whether we should click again, or wait it out for another 2 minutes. It's a love hate relationship with me and the loading icon. I love seeing it on a website. But I hate adding it on a website and I'm not sure why. No, scratch that. I know exactly why I hate adding it.

If you're looking to make a change on your website but are worried that your users might not like it, then you're probably overthinking things. Nevertheless, if you have a fair amount of traffic, then you can never be too careful. At least for ones own peace of mind.

A while back I did a Google PageSpeed audit on my website, and documented the process of how I went about fixing some of those issues that came up. 2 years later, and I'm back in the red it looks like. It comes with the territory. What was fast and amazing at one point, is slow and historic the next. If your website is in the red, feel free to follow along and maybe we can resolve some of those issues by the end of this post.

The language of the internet is and always will be HTML. And this HTML is standardized by the W3C, or the World Wide Web Consortium. The W3C is made up of organizations and a full time staff and their job is to come up with the rules that everyone should follow, in order to get websites to work pretty much. And a long time ago, most websites abided by these rules. Web pages were simple, and browsers were less forgiving. If you missed a closing tag somewhere, you were gonna know it. Nowadays however, the web has turned into a much more complex structure, and this validation is both more difficult and more of a nuisance to web developers. S . . .

Every now and then I'll run a page audit on one of my websites and then immediately become depressed when I see the results. It's hard to keep up with the speed needs of the people online nowadays. And it's even harder to keep up with Google's standards for good speed. People like videos and images and higher quality, and all of these things tend to affect the speed of your sites. And what may be fast today, might be crawling in 6 months. So needless today, speed is a tough nut to crack.

People like videos and images and higher quality

For many reasons. Sometimes we add heavy content to our webpages, and sometimes we update the code and usually ignore th . . .

Google just unveiled Material Design Lite out into the wild for all to use, and so I'm going to be trying it out on a few of my websites this week. Google's material design principles are the design rules that bring simplicity, cleanliness, and overall ease on some of Google's sites. They make for responsive and future proof layouts that degrade gracefully. MDL doesn't rely on any third party JavaScript frameworks, but the components are created with vanilla CSS, JavaScript and HTML. It definitely offers enough features to build entire websites from scratch. It includes templates, basic components, more complex components, icon sets and more. And for someone like me, who . . .