The Web Design & Development Megathread

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lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Oh My Science posted:

Portfolio Examples
If you're involved in the hiring process and review portfolios please (if you can) provide examples of good portfolio sites. A small write up of why they are good, and what they could improve would be nice if you have time. Common mistakes.

I'm very interested in this. I'm a frontend dev and I have no idea what to put on a portfolio. If I use thumbnails of previous work I'm just showing the web design. I can't always use links as some projects have disappeared or gone offline or were private. What's the best solution for this kind of thing?

# ¿ Jul 9, 2013 18:55

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 04:30

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Lumpy posted:

If you are a developer, you don't need a portfolio. You can showcase running bits of code maybe as "portfolio pieces", but a link to your bit bucket / github or a project you did all on your own with source is all you really need. You need to prove your are smart and can figure things out, not that you can knock my socks off visually.

That's another thing I'm struggling with, where do I find time to code my own projects (for github exposition) if I'm working full time (with a lot of overtime)? I feel like I'm kinda screwed if I ever want to get a new job. :v:

# ¿ Jul 10, 2013 00:44

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Winter is Cuming posted:

http://macaw.co/peek/

So this is loving impressive.

The beginning of the end of my job if it actually works as advertised. I guess I can always learn and go full stack. :gbsmith:

# ¿ Jul 24, 2013 15:02

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Lumpy posted:

Good news: nobody has been able to make a WYSWIG editor that works as advertised, and a lot of people have thrown lots and lots of time and money at the problem. Obviously we have to wait and see, but there's so many corner cases and oddities for developing something other than single-pages that while this might be a great tool for helping get a base layout up and running, I wouldn't get all depressed just yet.

Yeah, I was mostly exaggerating. But I do think that markup is one of the easiest 'problem' related to webdev and sooner or later someone is going to code something able to produce 'perfect' or at least serviceable code.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2013 16:53

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Munkeymon posted:

Do you guys set this on your new work?
code:
<meta name="viewport" content="user-scalable=no, width=device-width" />

Only if it's actually responsive, 'width=device-width" does weird things if the layout can't adjust to the device's width.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2013 23:47

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

I have had awful experiences with people claiming to be front-end developers with a subpar knowledge of HTML/CSS just because they can 'use' bootstrap. It's a great framework but it can be very easy to hide enormous holes in knowledge by using it and the resulting code can be awful.

This has reached the point where our junior front-end dev is not allowed to use bootstrap and I'm very suspicious of any developer that includes 'Bootstrap' in their resume.

# ¿ Aug 28, 2013 20:08

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Oh My Science posted:

...if you're willing to put in the time and effort using something like Bourbon & Neat will produce clean semantic code.

I haven't looked back since I started using Susy

# ¿ Aug 30, 2013 21:54

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Oh My Science posted:

I'm looking for the most economic and hassle free way to host and manage multiple wordpress sites. Right now a client of mine uses godaddy for everything and I would like to move away as many services as possible.

http://wpengine.com/ was one of the first sites that offered that kind of service and I remember it having great reviews.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2013 16:43

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

I recently discovered Dash and it has been an incredible boost to my productivity. Can't remember what a function does? Select and Ctrl-H from Sublime Text and boom, instant documentation. It also integrates with Alfred (and a bunch of other apps). It's really really cool for a idea so simple.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 15:18

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

fletcher posted:

What do you guys do to keep your CSS organized?

SASS + imports. It makes dividing the CSS by sections incredibly easy.

# ¿ Oct 22, 2013 19:09

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

kedo posted:

To me the first method seems preferable because it keeps all of an element's styles in one spot in the document, but it also clutters up your CSS with a slew of extra media query lines.

This one. I used to do it separately but it was a pain to update or make substantial changes as I had to jump around the document to update everything. In the end the extra media query lines bother no one and make my life much easier.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2013 01:29

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

I know the consensus is that Bower sucks (and it does... or actually, it's more that it's kinda useless) but Yeoman is nice. I installed it after seeing this presentation (after avoiding it for ages) and grunt serve (with livereload, compass, etc, all integrated) is nice.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2013 20:36

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Pollyanna posted:

What does Grunt have that CodeKit doesn't? What does it do better? In fact, what about Grunt in general makes it better than CodeKit or other programs? Isn't Grunt specifically for Javascript?

My grunt installation optimises images, minifies js/css/html, lints the html/js, compiles sass (compass), gives me livereload, concatenates my js and autoprefixes my css. That's the default behavior of Yeoman's webapp generator but there are plugins for a lot of other things.

# ¿ Nov 9, 2013 18:16

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

I remember being at a presentation called "Why designers should learn to program" and you would've thought the poor guy had insulted the mothers of the "real" programmers in the room. Because, apparently, it's not programming if it's for web dev.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2013 01:27

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

midnightclimax posted:

Some SEO-dude told me that Tumblr is actually bad, because Google treats their network like link-sharing or whatever it's called. That was some time ago and maybe it's obsolete now. Thanks though, I'll look at these two options.

If you're on Tumblr you don't really need Google or SEO as other tumblr users will be the ones that share and read your content.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2014 23:19

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

cbirdsong posted:

iosSlider has really nice touch support: https://iosscripts.com/iosslider/

Not sure how suited it is for more than a few images, though.

I like Swiper, it's free and responsive.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2014 21:03

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

SASS + Susy and you're done. Responsive, as semantic as you want it to be, etc.

However, grid-specific classes still have their use, mainly forms.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2014 21:09

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

fuf posted:

Is there a clever way of comparing my html files to my compiled main.css file to see which rules never get applied anywhere?

Try uncss.

# ¿ Jun 20, 2014 12:42

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

me your dad posted:

I give up and I'm desperate and I could really use some help

I created a simple email newsletter using the INK boilerplate but for some reason the two columns at the bottom just won't stack when tested for mobile viewing through Litmus. Instead of stacking they just cram together.

It stacks when viewed in Firefox when manually resizing the window. The original INK media query had a max-width of 600px and I changed it to 320px, thinking that was the problem but it's still not working.

Try this: http://jsfiddle.net/8gnK6/4/

# ¿ Jun 20, 2014 20:10

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

me your dad posted:

Thanks, but I'm getting the same result on mobile:

When viewing it in a browser and resizing the window the gap between columns is now seamless but the mobile part remains a problem. Also, the top of the columns are no longer even in mobile (right column is positioned higher). They look fine on desktop.

Did you add a viewport=device-width meta tag to the html?

# ¿ Jun 20, 2014 21:59

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

That looks like Modernizr's output so yes, they are there to help you fix problems caused by old browsers.

I'm not sure if Foundation actually uses them though considering they removed support for IE8.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2014 14:09

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Bastard posted:

It's monday, I come into the office, all fresh and roaring to go after a sunny weekend: "Hey Bastard, we need you to transform this design with extruding ribbons, custom fonts etc into an html email. Needs to work in pretty much all mail clients as well"

...

Now I know how deer feel when they see those headlights of impending doom barreling towards them.

Mailrox has saved my sanity more than once. Sure, I can do them by hand but ugh gently caress spending hours debugging tables.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2014 18:53

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

jackpot posted:

I've got a chunk of text (my name) that I want to stretch 100% across the screen, or whatever container it's in. There's a jquery plugin for this, right? I just can't remember the name.

http://www.zachleat.com/web/bigtext-makes-text-big/

# ¿ Jul 19, 2014 21:18

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

The Dave posted:

If you're really worried and there's no benefit to people finding your site organically, I'd suggest just password protecting it and including the credentials on your resume / where ever you share it.

I also suggest this. It's what I've been doing and have had no problems so far.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2014 17:24

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

What shopping cart doesn't suck? We need to choose one for a couple of projects. We could roll our own but the deadlines were made taking into account a ready-made solution with mostly templating work left.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2014 02:39

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Subjunctive posted:

Shopify?

It sadly needs to be self hosted because we're probably going to need to add some custom functions and also to be able to integrate our local online payment system.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2014 04:06

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

I had a weird problem today at work, some icons from a custom made web font refused to appear on Windows although it worked perfectly well in OSX. Has any of you seen this before?

# ¿ Sep 7, 2014 01:17

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

fuf posted:

anyone good with Compass, specifically transitions?

How come this works:
code:
element {
   transition: opacity 2s;
}
but this doesn't?
code:
@import 'compass/css3/transition';
element {
   @include transition-property('opacity');
   @include transition-duration(2);
}
What am I missing?

Other Compass mixins work fine.

a) Check out the compiled CSS.
b) Use Autoprefixer and forget about Compass' prefixing mixins.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2014 16:26

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

I haven't seen Treehouse's content but most of those interactive web courses are comparable to those lovely LEGO sets that came with instructions and no way to make anything else due to the lack of variety in the blocks.

In the end the only way to really learn a language is to choose a simple project and start hacking at it.

EDIT: And avoid Bootstrap like the plague if you want to learn HTML instead of, you know, Bootstrap.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2014 03:21

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Most of the reason to use Bootstrap and similar frameworks is the grid and you can get that on its own without all the other cruft.

# ¿ Nov 11, 2014 00:22

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Lumpy posted:

If you use gulp, and hate having gigs of disk space in node_modules folders, I wrote up how to use gulp with global packages: http://simblestudios.com/blog/development/gulp-saving-disk-space.html

This is bad and you should feel bad.

(You do address the problems in your post but still, there's a reason projects are self contained, sooner or later you'll update a gem or package and weeks later you'll notice because it introduced breaking changes in one of your projects. :v:

)

# ¿ Nov 14, 2014 13:47

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

caiman posted:

For low-medium traffic sites without any highly specialized requirements, there's no reason to NOT use Wordpress.

This. And for god's sake, don't make your own CMS.

# ¿ Dec 1, 2014 18:21

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

If any of you work in a web shop / agency, how do you deal with responsive design?

We are still having problems with that in my job, our designers design for a 1080p screen and then it's our job to make it work for everything else (which sucks, because then we get complaints from our clients that it looks different from the comps they looked at full screen).

There's a dev team and a design team so any 'design in the browser' plan would be doomed from the start.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2015 23:32

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Kobayashi posted:

As a designer, I can say that your designers suck. Sorry.

I kinda suspect this but the current reasoning (from one of the founders, developer) is "Well, most of them started working here fresh from college so we should teach them".

lunar detritus fucked around with this message at 23:48 on Jan 9, 2015

# ¿ Jan 9, 2015 23:43

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Kobayashi posted:

your organization should pick a few representative breakpoints and say that you need those to be part of the standard deliverables.

We tried to do this (it was mostly a mobile view and a desktop one, but it was more than the current standard) but all those designers left and the current excuse is "We don't have time!". Which sucks considering we have the same time constraints and we are still expected to deliver responsive sites.

quote:

If the design team insists on doing one design only make sure it's for a more standard screen resolution than 1920x1080 - maybe mention whilst they're all on 1080p Cinema displays or whatever the average screen size (let alone viewport size) is 1366x786.

We were able to achieve this, they still make their sites at 1080p buy at least they are using a grid for the content.

I'm mostly worried because we have been using Bootstrap lately and it seems the current thinking by the design team and even our boss is "well, let Bootstrap make it responsive".

# ¿ Jan 10, 2015 00:17

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Thanks everyone. I forwarded some of this to my boss and he told me "Yeah, that's basically what I want to implement this year but first we need to push the design team to be better at technical stuff" which I guess it's true, I'd love multiple PSDs for each breakpoint but we are currently having problems because sometimes colours don't match (red button in one page is a different red in the next), or titles are different sizes from one PSD to another (same site), etc. Have to start small I guess.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2015 17:51

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

hayden. posted:

I mean, I'm not writing operating systems or anything, but I've made sites with functionality similar to reddit, or ecommerce sites with shopping carts/checking out, and things of similar complexity and have never hated myself. I'm sure the code is terrible and my functions.php file is rather large and unorganized, but it's manageable. Worth noting I'm not selling my services/code, this is all just for my own projects.

If you are the only working in a project you can code however you want, but the second other people get involved poo poo is going to break apart, fast.

I work in one of those "drat, we over-promised and the deadline is tomorrow" agencies and even we managed to transition to OO.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2015 03:11

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

Do you guys pay for Creative Cloud? Is it worth it to pay for the entire suite (which includes Typekit) instead of only Photoshop?

# ¿ Jan 31, 2015 03:19

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

LookingGodIntheEye posted:

Is the job market for web developers reaching overcapacity?
If not, considering that templates are very popular in the industry, is it difficult to command good pay on the front-end?

As all things, it depends.

HTML/CSS are never going to change that much, at least the basics, so the market is already full of people that can code HTML/CSS and basic jQuery and the amount will continue to grow. So, there'll always be people for coding email newsletters and cutting up PSDs, the grunt work of webdev.

However, from what I've seen, most frontend job openings require knowledge of a javascript framework (Mostly Angular from what I've seen, sometimes React or backbone.js) and that seems to be enough of a barrier to avoid a market crash. Of course, give it a few years and everyone will be able to kinda use Angular but it won't be as desirable because the new shiny thing is something else.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2015 21:45

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# ¿ Apr 29, 2024 04:30

lunar detritus: May 6, 2009

LookingGodIntheEye posted:

What do you think that might be?

Lumpy posted:

I'm not sure but it will be written two weeks after the last shiny new thing.

Basically this. Frontend is moving very fast right now so it may be difficult to jump to the right framework at the right time. I'd recommend learning javascript really well and then check what framework is hot in the job market.

Or you could learn Angular and have a job for the next couple of years maintaining all the apps that won't be upgraded to Angular 2.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2015 02:41

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