The portfolio of Digital Design Lead James Holledge, showcasing examples of digital and web design, UX and UI work across a variety of industries.
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Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
The portfolio of Digital Design Lead James Holledge, showcasing examples of digital and web design, UX and UI work across a variety of industries.
The post James Holledge Portfolio appeared first on WeLoveWP.
We’ve always provided free versions of our most popular pro plugins on WordPress.org, but recently we’ve been stepping that up. So even if you’re not a member, you should check them out and let us know what you think :)
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth reiterating: the more you help the community and the better the quality and functionality of your freely available GPL plugins, the more the community, WordPress as a whole, and, well, everyone, wins.
I’ve linked above the dedicated page we put up covering our core offerings (alternately, you can go to the plugins section of our WordPress.org page), so I figured it was about time that we gave you a quick guide as to what they do, how they differ from the pro versions (very little!) and talk about a couple of upcoming free offerings. Hey, don’t turn that page, this ain’t no simple listicle.
And one last thing, just so I don’t have to put ‘free’ in every heading, all of the below are exactly that ― freeeeeeee. Enjoy!
So let’s start with the obvious one, our award-winning image compression plugin, Smush.
She’s particularly special as adopting her was when we discovered that something done *just right* could be a huge hit. It turns out that when you take care of 99.9% of all users, 0.1% are more than happy to come over and try out a membership. Smush is particularly notable for having the 3rd most 5-star ratings of any plugin on WordPress.org!
If you’d like Super Smush lossy compression, fast CDN image delivery, WebP conversion, automatic resizing, the ability to optimize images up to 32MB, bulk smush optimization for all your images in just one-click, auto-convert PNG to JPEG, the ability to Smush and make a copy of your full-sized images (to restore them at any point), you can always take the next step with WP Smush Pro.
Quickly moving up in the ranks is our our site speed optimizing, caching, minifying and generally speed-up-everything stellar plugin that is Hummingbird.
Now I know you’re not supposed to have favorite children, but sadly here I have to make an exception. I absolutely love Hummingbird. This isn’t just because she’s amazingly useful, but because her growing pains were pretty severe. Turns out compressing files, minification and trying to cover every single base in making your site extremely fast is, erm, quite hard. Who’d have thought it lol?
Right now the experience of setting up and using Hummingbird is really, well, exceptional. I reckon it’s the best UX work we’ve done and the outcomes aren’t bad either. And it’s free! (I know I said I wouldn’t say that again, but hey, it’s pretty cool). And this is born out by the fact that she’s the fastest-growing of our newer offerings. Honestly, give her a try if you haven’t already.
This was something we thought about long and hard and figured we’d give it a crack.
Basically our thinking is that Yoast & All In One SEO have pared back their functionality in the way that Facebook has pulled back your page views (unless you pay for premium, or get a boost) and we think that sucks.
SmartCrawl is designed from the bottom up to provide you with most, if not all, of the premium features that you’re used to paying for. Plus a good helping of that gorgeous and easy-to-use UX that I mentioned above. That’s why we think it’s the best free WordPress SEO plugin out there (dammit I said that word again). So why not take her for a spin.
OK, I’ve given up not saying free now, sorry. But do bear with me because you’re not going to want to miss this one – especially if you either don’t have a security plugin :scream: or are paying for one that doesn’t stack up to this chap.
We set out to make Defender as easy to use as possible – but also to provide as much critical security functionality as possible without giving everything away, lol. In fact, I’d go as far as stating specifically, there is no other security plugin with the same level of functionality available on wordpress.org.
And here’s why…
Now for the coolest cat on the WordPress plugin block. He’s got the looks, the style, and the features that make OptIn Monster, Sumo and every other premium and paid plugin look like a gawky teen.
And what’s more, he’s the only one of this bunch of five to have morphed from a simple pop-up plugin to your complete marketing suite for WordPress.
Essentially if you are looking to capture email addresses, offer free downloads to get leads or promote your services in any way he’s going to do it for you. From pop-ups to slide-ins to slide-ups and in-copy content Hustle allows you to not only set a vast array of different (beautiful) stylings but also targets visitors based on all sorts of different conditions. You’ll actually be amazed you don’t have to pay for him.
Forminator is the form, quiz, survey, poll builder you can’t live without… and don’t have to live without, because we are giving him away!
Forms are the Holy Grail for WordPress sites and now there is an option that won’t cost you your life savings. Forminator’s drag and drop builder is by far the easiest tool for setting up forms in WordPress (I’m not biased…promise). Quickly add a simple contact form or complex registration forms.
We didn’t stop there. Forminator includes polls with real-time chart and graph results, no wrong answer quizzes (think Buzzfeed) and knowledge tests.
But perhaps the real surprise is the included developer API. Because Forminator is now open to millions of users on WordPress.org any developer can build and sell integrations or custom apps.
I could go on and on about the included Gutenberg block, GDPR-friendly settings, and included spam protection, but that’s another post for another day… and trust me… I will.
White label your dashboard, customize system emails, maintenance mode and coming soon landing pages – Branda is everything you need to rebrand WordPress.
Customize every aspect of WordPress to fit your brand with Branda, the only premium and 100% free white label plugin for WordPress.
Transform your dashboard, customize system (default) emails, quickly toggle maintenance mode and coming soon landing pages, change every aspect of your login screen, remove or replace logos, create color schemes, and much, much more.
Even the best WordPress theme builders leave WordPress branding all over your site.
On your personal blog it is not a huge problem, but for a small business, design and development agency, or any professional site, a finished look with a complete brand package is important. That’s where Branda comes in! Turn WordPress into your own white-label solution.
Branda lets you make all the brand customizations your theme doesn’t include. A must-have, best-in-class WordPress admin plugin.
This last plugin is fully functional, feature rich, and there is absolutely zero difference between the Free and Pro versions.
Originally released as premium-only in 2009, Beehive has consistently ranked in the top 10 WPMU DEV premium plugins for total downloads and active installs. To celebrate her decade plus analytics, we made one of the best Google Analytics WordPress Plugins on the market free for everyone.
Set up with Beehive is as easy as connecting your Google profile and verifying your site. No more hunting through code files or manually adding tracking links. Beehive makes it easy to get valuable statistics for bloggers, small business websites, eCommerce sites, enterprise networks and more.
Beehive takes your user’s privacy seriously. Toggle IP Anonymization to anonymize your visitor IPs, stop demographic reports, protect user IDs and more.
Activate analytics for every site across an entire Multisite network with one tracking code. Pick and choose what sites have access. Beehive grabs all the information and makes user tracking, statistics reporting, and site management simple.
Beehive puts your Google Analytics overview, stats, and graphs right in your WordPress dashboard. Save time and get a better picture of the most important content on your sites.
If you’re running a business website or eCommerce store Beehive provides information you need to convert more leads into sales and increase your bottom line.
I can see the pitchforks and torches in the distance, and I can hear the questions ― “Why pay if everything is free?”.
I’m confident that the real value of your membership is found in automation, and the time saving, money making machine that is the Hub.
If you’re managing more than one site, consider that our well stocked pantry of super servers, white label reporting, safe upgrades, uptime monitoring, and 24/7 support for all things WordPress, is hard to beat.
Our free offerings are totally fine for hobbyists and single site owners, but freelancers, development agencies, and basically anyone earning income with WordPress get incredible value. Don’t take my word for it – try all the pro features for the next 30 days – on me. :)
Last year we asked our members (and visitors) what they’d like us to make for them to the same standard as our other offerings and, well, we listened.
The Hub and The Hub Client have exciting rollouts coming this year. If you’re not familiar, The Hub is our streamlined site management tool. From its smart and crisp UI, you can quickly handle a myriad of top level tasks, such as: managing updates; optimizing performance; monitoring uptime; staying on top of SEO; scanning analytics; tightening security; scheduling and implementing backups; generating white label reports; collaborating with clients and colleagues. All this and more… using any host!
Click here to read all about the Hub & Hub client.
Here is a peek at the top Hub & Hub Client features heading your way soon:
The Hub:
The Hub Client:
And naturally, we’re not stopping there. If you think the plugins I’ve featured here are lacking in any specific way, have any particular requests for them, or just wanna let us know what’s on your mind, hit us up in the comments section below.
Plus, if you’ve got a burning desire for any other really good WordPress.org plugin that you think WPMU DEV could roll out for you in the future, let us know that too.
So there you go. It may have taken a while to figure out, but striving to better the quality and functionality of your freely available GPL plugins is by far the best way to go about your WordPress business, and the best way to operate as an open-source company.
We sincerely hope you enjoy our free plugins, whether or not you ever fancy giving our free trial at WPMU DEV a run.
Over to you :)
Editor’s Note: This post has been updated for accuracy and relevancy. [Originally Published: September 2018 / Revised: July 2021]
The concept of a progressive webapp (PWA) is simple. Developers create websites that behave like native applications for all environments. These work like hybrid site-app combos where you have “webapps” that can run natively on a mobile device and just as well on a desktop web browser.
If you’re looking for some examples of PWAs then this collection is sure to please.
The English Accents Map site is one of the strangest yet most interesting progressive webapps I’ve found. It features pin markers for different accents in regions across the UK and the US.
Each marker links to a set of videos from YouTube. These videos have been created by people with that local accent, so you can listen and study how certain areas of the world speak English.
Really cool PWA and definitely one of the coolest concepts I’ve seen for a website.
The React.js craze isn’t slowing down anytime soon and it’s certainly a staple for building any progressive webapp.
One example is the React HN site that pulls data from Hacker News and loads it all into a neat React.js webapp.
This is designed just like the HN homepage but it can operate like a native app on mobile devices. It doesn’t support account logins but you can do pretty much everything else, and it’s got a real snappy interface to boot.
Looking for a free currency exchange rate app for your iPhone? Currency-X has you covered.
This free PWA works around a handful of currencies and runs with live data from APIs. This way the currency conversion rates are accurate and you can test them against pretty much every country from Kenya to Vietnam.
I do think the UX is lacking a bit and could be improved for mobile. But on the whole, this is one of the more impressive apps considering how much data it pulls.
All you Pokemon fans are gonna love Pokedex.org for its simplicity and ease of use.
This webapp behaves like a literal Pokedex where you can search for monsters and get all their stats quickly. Data comes from the Pokeapi along with Wiki pages to ensure total accuracy.
And while this doesn’t distinguish between the different games it’s still an impressive webapp for the amazing price of free. Perfect for Pokemon players who want quick access to quick data.
Web developers love GitHub for its massive curation of free resources. The site has become a go-to resource for code snippets and now with GitHub Explorer you can dig into those code samples yourself.
The site is still a work in progress but it lets you browse through two methods: users and repos.
You can search by username or by repo name and pull up data fast. This includes the full readme file, all directories, and recent updates. However the search feature doesn’t include every repo so it’s more like a demo app showcasing what PWAs can offer.
Believe it or not there are entire eCommerce shops that support PWA features. Flipkart is the only one I know of but their website is absolutely massive.
This India-based eCommerce site offers complete support as a native mobile application. You can search, browse products, and use your account to purchase items all with a native feel.
I’d argue this is the most complex PWA on the web and it deserves an award as one of the best UX’s I’ve seen all year.
If you want to track some quick expenses on your phone then the Expense Manager app is a nice place to start.
This thing behaves more like a simple calculator but it can save data for the long term. The demo account clears data after one hour but you can try the Vaadin framework yourself if you want a longterm solution.
The Expense Manager is mostly used to help sell this framework and bring attention to the company. And for that I’d say it gets the job done with plenty of “wow” factor to go around.
Here’s another cool demo app that I think should actually be built into the core of Wikipedia.
Offline Wikipedia is a PWA site created by Jake Archibald. It’s fully compliant with all the ideas of progressive webapps so it works on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops alike.
The interface is also pretty snappy so it’s easy searching and finding Wiki articles. Probably one of the few PWAs that I think really could add value to the main site.
Never worry about splitting the bill again with Splittypie.
This app is fantastic and for the price of free you can’t beat it. You just visit the site in your browser and you create new “events” for tracking prices.
Whether you’re splitting a meal or the price of a ball game this app works for any device at the click (or tap) of a button.
Also the source code is freely available on GitHub if you want to use this as a base for your own PWA.
The massive publishing giant Financial Times surprisingly has their own PWA and it works really well.
Their app runs just like a news site except it’s fully responsive to touch. This means it behaves exactly like a native application where you don’t see new pages load, they just slide into view.
I’d like to think the future of publishing is full of websites like this. We’re already seeing this with Google AMP but that’s only a small step towards full PWAs.
Last but certainly not least is the Get Kana app. What’s cool is this site actually has a full application in the Android and iOS app stores.
But this progressive webapp is the next best thing for anyone who wants to try it out in their browser. It’s a Japanese learning app where you can learn the syllabaries for katakana & hiragana through flash cards.
Not something that everyone will find useful but absolutely one of the cleanest PWAs I’ve used. And best of all their code is freely available on GitHub if you want to dig into that too.
In these mixed galleries we’ll be bringing you guys inspiration from a wide variety of creative fields. Ranging from graphic and web design to more rarely updated categories like photography, illustration & product design.
Design Inspiration Roundup 06/2018 was originally published in From up North on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
According to statistics between November 2016 to January 2017, people have a rather high degree of trust (36%) towards online healthcare resources recommended by their own physicians or well-known providers of healthcare services. Given the rapid growth of IT and, in particular, the complex diagnosis of some diseases, we can affirm that such sites will […]
The post How to Design the Best Medical Website appeared first on designrfix.com.
We’re back with a new roundup with more nice UI animations that we’ve come across recently. Everything from subtle micro-animations to more majestic content loaders.
Great UI/UX Animations was originally published in From up North on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Screen space is a precious resource on mobile. To meet the challenge of small screen space while still making navigation accessible, designers often rely on hiding navigation behind the hamburger icon, a prime example of hidden navigation. In this article, we’ll see why hidden navigation creates bad UX and what alternatives are available for designers.
On mobile, visible navigation is used 1.5x more than hamburger
If you’re working on digital products, you’ve probably already read dozens of articles describing how the hamburger menu on mobile hurts UX metrics. The main downside is its low discoverability, and this is backed up by actual numbers. In qualitative studies, NNGroup found that hidden navigation is less discoverable than visible or partially visible navigation. This means that when navigation is hidden, users are less likely to use navigation. Hamburger menus drive engagement down, slow down exploration and confuse people.
While there is no hard-and-fast rule for mobile apps and websites, a general recommendation is to use either visible—the main navigation options are shown in a visible navigation bar—or combo navigation, where some of the main navigation options are visible and some are hidden under an interactive element.
If you have a limited number of top-level destinations in your website or app, a tabbed navigation might be the solution. When a menu is visible at the top or bottom, it’s basically advertising that a navigation is there and people are able to see the navigation options right from the start.
Tabs seem to be the simplest navigation pattern. However, a few things should be considered when designing this type of navigation:
Tip: In order to save screen space, the navigation bar could be hidden/revealed on downward and upward scrolling.
When you have more than 5 top-level destinations, a practical solution might be to show the 4 prioritized sections and have a 5th element as a list of remaining options.
The design principles for this solution are basically the same as for Tab bar. There’s just one exception: the last element is the ‘more’ item.
The ‘more’ item can work as a dropdown menu or even link to a separate navigation page with the remaining sections. From the first glance this solution isn’t much better than the hamburger menu, since it also hides content and its label doesn’t say too much about what’s hidden behind it. If you correctly prioritize navigation options, however, a majority of your users will have 4 or 5 visible top-priority navigation options on the screen all the time so the navigation experience for them will be improved.
Progressively collapsing menu, also known as the “Priority+” pattern, is a menu that adapts to the screen width. It shows as much of the navigation as possible and puts everything else under a “more” button. Basically, this pattern is a sophisticated version of the ‘Tab bar + more’ navigation where the number of navigation options hidden behind the “more” menu depends on the available screen space. The flexibility of this solution provides a better user experience than a ‘static’ ‘Tab bar + more’.
Image Credit: Brad Frost
Similar to the previous two patterns, this is another approach for longer lists. If you have a number of navigation options without a big distinction in priorities, for example music genres, you can list all the items in a scrollable view. By making the list scrollable you allow users to move from side-to-side.
The downside of this solution is that still only the top few items are visible without scrolling and all the remaining ones are out of the sight. This is, however, an acceptable solution when the users are expected to explore the content, for example news categories, music categories or in an online store.
While with other patterns mentioned in this article, the struggle is to minimize the space that the navigation systems take up, the full-screen pattern takes the exact opposite approach. This approach usually devotes the home page exclusively to navigation. Users incrementally tap or swipe to reveal additional menu options as they scroll up and down.
This pattern works well in task-based and direction-based websites and apps, especially when users tend to limit themselves to only one branch of the navigation hierarchy during a single session. Funnelling users from broad overview pages to detail pages helps them to home in on what they’re looking for and to focus on content within an individual section.
Full-screen navigation in Yelp
Using full-screen navigation, designers can organize large chunks of information in a coherent manner and reveal information without overwhelming the user. Once the user makes their decision about where to go, then you can dedicate the entire screen space to content.
With navigation patterns for mobile, there isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution; it always depends on your product, on your users, and on the context. However, the foundation of every well-designed navigation is information architecture: clear structure, priorities, and labels based on your users’ needs. Helping users navigate should be a top priority for every app designer. Both first-time and returning users should be able to figure out how to move through your app with ease.
LAST DAY: Zelda – A Beautiful and Classy Script Font – only $7! |
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“Get out of the deliverables business” has become quite a mantra in the lean startup and UX movements. There’s much to love in that sentiment — after all, for every wireframe you make, you’re not shipping code to customers.
But I’m worried that, just like with the concept of a minimum viable product, we’ve taken this sound advice to an extreme that’s actually hurtful to the creation of good products. What follows is an account of my own journey in navigating these stormy design seas together with the community.
The post Getting Back Into The (Right) Deliverables Business appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
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Every now and then we see discussions proclaiming a profound change in the way we design and build websites. Be it progressive enhancement1, the role of CSS2 or, most recently, web design itself being dead3. All these articles raise valid points, but I’d argue that they often lack objectivity and balance, preferring one side of the argument over another one.
These discussions are great for testing the boundaries of what we think is (or is not) possible, and they challenge how we approach our craft, but they don’t help us as a community to evolve together. They divide us into groups and sometimes even isolate us in small camps. Chris Coyier has published a fantastic post4 recently covering the debate on the role of CSS in light of growing popularity of React.js, extensively and objectively. That’s the quality discussions we need, and that’s what keeps us evolving as a growing and maturing community.
Web technologies are fantastic — we all agree on this. Our tools, libraries, techniques and methodologies are quite fantastic, too. Sometimes they are very different and even contradictory, but they are created with the best intentions in mind, and often serve their purpose well in the specific situations they were designed for. Sometimes they contain mistakes, but we can fix them due to the nature of open source. We can submit a patch or point out solutions. It’s more difficult, but it’s much more effective.
There are a lot of unknowns to design and build for, but if we embrace unpredictability5 and if we pick a strategy to create more cohesive, consistent design systems6, we can tackle any level of complexity — in fact, we do it every single day. We solve complex problems by seeking solutions, and as we do, we make hundreds of decisions along the way. Yet sometimes we fall into the trap of choosing a solution based on our subjective preferences, not objective reasoning.
We tend to put things into buckets, and we tend to think in absolutes. Pro carousels or anti carousels; pro React.js or anti-React.js; for progressive enhancement or against it. But the web isn’t black and white — it’s diverse, versatile, tangled, and it requires pragmatism. We are forced to find reasonable compromises within given constraints, coming from both business and UX perspectives.
Tools aren’t good or evil; they just either fit a context or they don’t. Carousels can have their place when providing enough context to engage users (as Amazon does). React.js modules can be lazy-loaded for better performance, and progressive enhancement is foundational for making responsive websites really8, really9 fast. And even if you have extremely heavy, rich imagery, more weight doesn’t have to mean more wait10; it’s a matter of setting the right priorities, or loading priorities, to be precise.
No, web design isn’t dead. Generic solutions are dead.11 Soulless theming and quick skinning are dead. Our solutions have to be better and smarter. Fewer templates, frameworks and trends, and more storytelling, personality and character. Users crave good stories and good photography; they’re eager for good visuals and interesting layouts; they can’t wait for distinctive and remarkably delightful user experiences. This exactly should be our strategy to create websites that stand out.
There are far too many badly designed experiences out there, and there is so much work for us to do. No wonder that we are so busy with our ongoing and upcoming projects. Proclaiming our craft to be dead is counter-productive, because we’ve shown ourselves and everybody out there what we are capable of. The last fifteen years of web design were nothing if not outstanding in innovation and experimentation. And it’s not about to stop; that’s just not who we are.
If we can’t produce anything but generic work, other creatives will. The web will get better and it’s our job to make it better. It won’t be easy, but if we don’t adapt our practices and techniques, we’ll have to give way to people who can get it done better than we can — but web design itself isn’t going anywhere any time soon.
It’s up to us to decide whether we keep separating ourselves into small camps, or build the web together, seeking pragmatic solutions that work well within given contexts. We might not end up with a perfect solution every time, but we’ll have a great solution still; and more often than not it’ll be much, much better than the solution our client came to us for in the first place.
(og, ms)
The post “Web Design Is Dead.” No, It Isn’t. appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
“Web Design Is Dead.” No, It Isn’t.
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Hear, hear! SmashingConf NYC 2016 is coming! A spectacular performance about failures, successes and superpowers in front-end and UX — now on Broadway! A flabbergasting show on fascinating endeavours in web design, with busted myths, horror design stories and wisdom gained from daunting real-life struggles! Don’t miss the most remarkable show of the year!
Can you dispel the truth from the lies? Honesty from deception? Myths from heartbreaking real-life experience? Have you figured out responsive design, mobile, pattern libraries, SVG, flexbox, performance, HTTP/2 — and all of the other mischievous, erratic facets of designing for the web today?
The post ★ “Busting Myths and Horror Stories Of Designing For The Web!” ★ appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
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There is no winner in the battle between iOS and Android, and we all know that. If a product succeeds on one platform, it will undoubtedly be ported to the other. Sometimes app developers don’t even bother waiting, and release apps for both platforms simultaneously. For designers this means only one thing — they will have to adapt an application’s UI and UX to another platform while ensuring a consistent design language across the product.
There are three different scenarios for UI multiplatform adaptation: retaining brand consistency; aligning with the conventions specific to the platform; and seeking a balance between the two. We decided to analyze these three approaches by looking at the most popular apps out there so that you get some insight into what method might work best for you.
The post Approaches For Multiplatform UI Design Adaptation: A Case Study appeared first on Smashing Magazine.
Approaches For Multiplatform UI Design Adaptation: A Case Study
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