The Web Design & Development Megathread

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LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

I always stuck the latest 1.X branch of jQuery into my custom-made WordPress themes, but now jQuery 3 is out. Should I worry about using that? The slider I usually used, bxslider, doesn't work in jQuery 3, so is it worth it to keep using what works?

# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 02:50

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 19:56

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

I've been teaching myself web design out of necessity over the past ten years. I hated it in college, but when I got out I realized how dire the world of print design was and kind of lucked into a web design job. Since I taught myself through trial and error, I'm worried some of my practices might be a little behind the times, mostly because I sometimes feel slightly embarrassed when I read this thread and have no clue what you are all talking about. It doesn't happen often, but when it does.... So, where's the best place to catch up and learn about new stuff?

I don't mean I use FONT tags and inline styles and stuff, I love HTML5, it might just be me worrying I'm not "cool" and "with it" anymore.

# ¿ Sep 6, 2016 23:13

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Maleh-Vor posted:

I'm modifying content on a Drupal site and goddamn. It might be the engineering behind the site which is a steaming pile of spaghetti, but Jesus, changing the displayed link text on one nav item with a dropdown is a logistical nightmare involving at least 4 dependencies I need to re-activate and replace.

This also sounds a lot like Joomla.

# ¿ Oct 1, 2016 22:43

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Biowarfare posted:

Are you loading fonts together (x|y|z) in a single request if it's googlefonts? Also, if you have some titles/logotype that only uses that font, you can restrict the font to only serve those letters, often resulting in a ~1-2KB file from fonts.googleapis.com

What? I had no idea about that, that's amazing. Thank you!

# ¿ Oct 16, 2016 21:22

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

When I did some older websites, I didn't realize that only (555) 555-5555 style numbers get auto-translated into click-to-call for mobile browsers, while things like 555-555-5555 or 555.555.5555 wouldn't. Is there some jQuery I can plug in that will translate those numbers into click-to-call links, or do I have to go in to all my old sites and manually code in the href="tel:" thing?

# ¿ Oct 18, 2016 06:19

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

When you're designing layouts to show to a client as a mock-up, what do you use? I've used Photoshop for years, but it's frustrating to do web-like things in it such as "floating" a picture in some text. I'm almost at the point where mocking something up in straight up HTML is easier than Photoshop.

# ¿ Nov 3, 2016 15:46

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Maleh-Vor posted:

I've been considering building a hackintosh because I'm on PC, and most modern workflows (mainly inVision plugins and Sketch) are Mac-only or at least seem to be. I tried running a VM but it was far too slow and inefficient.

As far as the design part, Adobe XD should come out for Windows in a few weeks and Affinity Designer came out today. I generally still just use Photoshop and Illustrator for most of my collaborative work though, since that's what the other designers at my company use.

Affinity Designer looks great from a quick glance. I occasionally need Illustrator for things (mostly interacting with logo files that clients send me, that is when they're not sending me a third-generation old cellphone photo of their business card at an angle no one would look at any object) but I'm put off by its $20/month price tag. Photoshop is a reasonable $10/month for something I use every day, but Illustrator would be twice that for something I need once a month.

# ¿ Nov 18, 2016 01:44

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Lumpy posted:

I bought Affinity Designer and used it a bit. I do NOT recommend it for app / web design work. You can use it, I guess, but there are so so so many little things that it was lacking or worked in just plain stupid ways that it was death by 1,000 paper cuts.

Like I said, I'm not using it for web design work, just for making simple changes to logos or even making simple logos. Is it good for that?

# ¿ Nov 18, 2016 02:26

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Is there a thread for the more business end of dealing with web design customers? Is this it even though people are mostly talking about back-end coding stuff here? I don't always know the best way to deal with clients who request odd things or resellers who tell me those requests second-hand.

For example: One reseller I work with sends me a lot of blue-collar type businesses such as exterminators, waste management, plumbers, etc. They all have trucks. They all love their trucks, no matter how dinged up and rusted they are, and always want a giant slideshow full on the homepage that includes their truck. I recently got an image to use that was 396x201px wide (inexplicably with a 5px white border on just the top and right edges). I cropped off the white edges and used it in the slideshow. Great, they don't complain, but how do I stop feeling dirty and disgusting that I've put up an image so blurry and pixelated that you can barely tell it's a truck? Is it when I get the final payment? That seems to help.

What's the best way to ask for a customer's logo and get a usable version? I keep getting sent crappy cellphone camera pictures of business cards taken at a weird angle.

# ¿ Nov 30, 2016 17:39

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

PT6A posted:

I just ignore ancient IE versions at this point -- I don't even mention them to clients. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, and so far I've had zero complaints in the past five years anyway.

It's been so nice to be able to use things in HTML5 and CSS3 without anyone complaining. I wonder how much of that is because more people are looking at sites on their phones and tablets, which bypass that whole outdated IE problem.

# ¿ Dec 13, 2016 17:53

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

I'm remaking my portfolio site, and last time I made it I got into a bit of trouble with linking to sites because my old employer said it "messed up their analytics". That was probably just an excuse for them to not allow me to use the sites I made for them on my portfolio, but I was wondering if there was a way to mask where the links are coming from so a client won't see my portfolio site as the one that directed to their site.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 15:42

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

I ignored them for months until they called me using a number I didn't recognize and I foolishly picked up, and my old boss threatened to sic a lawyer on me. At that point I'd already found a new job and didn't care enough to fight them, and had found a bunch of legal-looking things online that I thought said any work I did for them was their property and they could ask me to take it down. I did at one point sign a non-compete agreement that had already expired years beforehand. Now it's years later and my design skills have improved immensely, so I wouldn't even put those sites on my portfolio anymore. Besides, they've since lost almost all the clients they had from when I was working for them, whether I worked on the projects or not.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 20:43

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Has anyone ever had issues with a server where you'll download a CSS, PHP, etc. file to edit it, and there will be things changed in it? Such as an extra line break after each line, which is annoying but fixed with a find and replace of "\r\r" with "\r", or lines jumbled together? It's happening with Lithium Hosting and I can't figure out why. I know I had this issue many many years ago with another host, but I can't remember how it was resolved since it hasn't happened with any other host in like a decade.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 22:40

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Forgall posted:

Difference between windows and unix style line endings.

On my local computer, I have a PHP file that is 102 lines long. I upload it to my Lithium Hosting server using Wordpress's plugin installer (it's part of a plugin), then click view/edit in FileZilla to edit it, and it's somehow 203 lines long with extra line breaks on the server.

This doesn't happen when I repeat the exact same steps on a site I have hosted with Media Temple. What can I do to stop this from happening?

# ¿ Jan 5, 2017 17:29

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

I've gotten over the death of Firebug as my development tool, but one thing I can't get past is Firefox's inspector tool leaving a blue overlay on the page when I'm using the element inspector. Firebug was REALLY good at knowing that if I move my mouse off the page, it shouldn't keep the ghosted overlay over everything, but Firefox's Developer Tools often gets "stuck" and the only way to fix it is to refresh the page.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2017 20:21

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Grump posted:

Drupal seems to be/is becoming the industry standard, correct?

WordPress is so easy for me it's all I use for my 3-10 page sites. It's probably a bad habit I have to grow out of at some point, but I use WordPress as a barebones CMS to handle pages, trusted plugins for things like contact forms and photo galleries, and some widgets and hardcode most things into header.php or footer.php of my very minimalist theme that I've developed. Basically I code the site and let WordPress just handle basic database functions like spitting out any particular page. There are security plugins that do a good job of patching security holes.

It bugs the poo poo out of me when I have to update sites from other developers and have to use themes like ProPhoto that basically put another CMS into WordPress for some unknown reason. It's taken me up to an hour to figure out where a phone number on the contact page is stored because it's in theme settings > customize > site information or something dumb instead of just in the page that is labeled Contact, which is empty because everything from the map to the copy to the phone number is in various settings strewn about the back end.

I would like to learn Drupal, if that's where the industry is going. Does it have as robust a plugin database so I don't have to spend time on things like contact forms and photo galleries?

# ¿ Feb 27, 2017 22:22

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Scaramouche posted:

Head up WordPressers, NextGEN gallery plugin (over a million installs) has an SQL injection exploit.

Okay, so much for my "only trusted plugins" motto.

# ¿ Mar 1, 2017 03:50

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Grump posted:

Dang. I never knew there was so much of a stigma on JQuery now.

Granted, I've never really used it other than for simple DOM manipulation and other functional stuff, but I work with BigCommerce and their entire platform depends on it.

It doesn't sound like anyone's against it being used for simple DOM manipulation. If I need something to slide down when someone clicks on something, I'm using jQuery. I don't know what I'd use if I needed something more complex, because I'd probably try to find a plugin for it instead of coding it myself.

# ¿ Mar 8, 2017 16:14

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

What do you all use for mobile navs? I usually put my navs in with a styled basic unordered list structure, and it just clicked today that I've been using ShiftNav and shouldn't be needing to install a WordPress plugin for what could be done with some simple CSS and JavaScript. There's an overwhelming amount of plugins out there, and I'm looking for a lightweight one I can style myself.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2017 22:57

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

My client wants something like the car price calculator on Peddle.com, the one that shows when you click "Get your offer". I don't know what to tell him, because this seems very specific and Google is failing me. Does anyone know if there are any plugins I could use for this, or is this something I'd have to code myself? I could probably do the price calculator, but coding in the VIN lookup into the form as well as putting in every single make and model of car ever produced for the last 67 years is going to drive me up the wall and take forever if it's even possible. Can someone give me advice or point me in the right direction?

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 15:54

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

a witch posted:

If all you want is the year/make/model/trim, you can get it directly from the VIN.

Try looking for "VIN Decode" or "Vehicle Configurator". A commercial VIN decode service will turn a VIN into Year, Make, Model (easy, you can do it yourself), and then also options, as-built configuration, styles, categories, MSRP, etc (hard, you don't have that data catalog). Decode services like that power vehicle configuration builders, comparison services, etc.

The biggest service I know of is Chrome Data, but it's not cheap.

They want the VIN and the options as well. I don't know the calculations it's doing in the back-end to figure out the prices it spits out. Just your/anyone's estimation, how much would something like this cost to program? If I can't do it, I might have to tell them to hire someone.

# ¿ Mar 16, 2017 16:21

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Here's how I use Wordpress:

- Install my custom blank theme.
- Using mostly HTML but a little bit of PHP, plug some things into the homepage template. Anything I hard-code in to the homepage template are things that the client or people at the company aren't likely to change themselves. The slider is a very simple jQuery one.
- Pages are for pages, blog posts are for blog posts. Not too fancy because other people have to use this and make small edits, so it's basic HTML supported by CSS.
- I install two plugins: ShiftNav, a plugin that puts in a slide-out navigation on mobile views; and a form plugin such as NinjaForms (though its newest UI is god-awful in the way it takes over the admin) or Formidable (great, though anything more than a simple form requires a license).
- Once in a while I use Advanced Custom Fields. It's a plugin that adds custom fields to pages and/or posts which can be called and displayed via PHP.
- Sometimes I'll do things such as custom post categories. Like for a cat adoption place, I put in an admin option called "Cats" where they can go in and add/remove cats from the site.

Pretty simple, it's almost a static site but with a CMS to allow clients to go in and add text themselves with minimal fuss, and with Wordpress's massive library of plugins if I need anything custom that I can't code myself such as WooCommerce. I can churn out these sites for this retailer in a matter of days (of course it often takes weeks or months because of communication issues between the client and the sales people). My question is, would switching to a better CMS help me? I always feel like I'm falling behind by continuing to use Wordpress, PHP, and jQuery when there are supposedly better options out there.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2018 17:41

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Scaramouche posted:

Speaking personally but I regard my segue into Wordpress as something of a mistake, but I guess it depends where you're coming from and where you'd like to go. I was coming from an enterprise ecommerce/database background and got roped into a succession of WooCommerce projects, which was like the 10th ecommerce platform I'd used by that point not counting ones I wrote myself. There was lots of work around doing it, but it's lots of little work if that makes sense that you'd have to hustle for, whereas I'm more of a big project/big picture guy. I could see staying with Wordpress working out if you were on an agency model where you're not afraid to hustling to get an assortment of clients but the end game career wise doesn't seem that robust; where do you end up?

I went to Wordpress because the job I had for five years and got out of was using Joomla. Wordpress is so much easier than that mess. It's scary because I know Wordpress inside and out, but if I want to make websites for people other than resellers I'll probably need to branch out and learn some Python so I don't get left behind. I'm on that agency model right now, yeah.

rt4 posted:

Depends on what other Wordpress stuff you might depend on, but imo Bolt provides a user experience similar to Wordpress with internals that are much, much more sane. It also has stuff like custom post types and fields already built-in instead of using that hacky plugin. What it doesn't have is a vast library of plugins and tons of already answered questions on StackOverflow.

If I want a CMS to build off of that's similar to Wordpress in ease of use and availability of plugins plus a user-cultivated knowledgebase, should I install Drupal and try to use it for a personal project and see if I like it?

# ¿ Feb 21, 2018 23:08

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

The only time I hate WordPress is when I get hired to fix a site someone else made, and they have installed dozens of plugins to do things that WordPress already does by default. So I can't figure out where, for example, to change the phone number in a header.

(The answer is usually that it's a module in a page builder plugin that has to be set for every single page individually.)

# ¿ Mar 14, 2018 02:30

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

I noticed the idea of a big slider on the homepage is dying very rapidly and I couldn't be happier.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2018 20:51

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

The Merkinman posted:

You mean a carousel?

Yes, my resellers are obsessed with them. I'm going to pitch to the owner tomorrow that we should stop using them. They don't even have different CTAs on each slide, it's just "hey use these three stock images and/or badly taken iPhone photos behind a slogan".

# ¿ Mar 25, 2018 22:57

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Lumpy posted:

TFW you know where that link is going before you hover over it.

It's amazing. I'm going to show it to the owner of the main company I'm working with.

Speaking of moving away from bad trends I've stubbornly used out of familiarity, are there other sites like this on what not to do and reasons not to do it? I'm already planning on trying to use JavaScript instead of jQuery because of http://vanilla-js.com.

Edit: and http://youmightnotneedjquery.com

LifeLynx fucked around with this message at 01:34 on Mar 26, 2018

# ¿ Mar 26, 2018 01:32

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

What I see:

What my client sees:

They claim they're not zoomed in. I have media queries in place that should make it so this doesn't happen. Their screenshot says it's 1920x1080, and they just checked for me to confirm. Same resolution as my screen. To see what they're seeing on any browser on either of my computers, I have to resize the screen to about 1244x620. What's going on?

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 18:21

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

The Dave posted:

Could you give them directions on how to use an inspect tool and screenshot the computed size of the text so you can first weed out if it's a code issue or not?

What kind of code issue would cause this? They come back to me a lot saying my sites look broken like this. I imagine they'd notice if they were viewing all sites at 1280x720, so what could I be doing wrong?

I'll try the other stuff mentioned.

Putting this here just in case:

code:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 18:53

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Sereri posted:

Maybe it's windows 10 UI scaling set to 150%. Looking at the screenshot that seems about right .

That affects websites as well? Is there anything I can do about it on my end? I showed the site to a bunch of other people and no one had problems.

# ¿ Aug 7, 2018 21:21

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

darthbob88 posted:

It does indeed. My laptop is 1920x1080 nominal, but with 150% scaling the browser window is only 1280x720 according to the Chrome dev tool. I actually got a growler of booze for pointing out that a UX person was getting caught by the same issue, and it's one of the things I regularly catch as causing problems for bosses, along with malformed JSON.

I bet that's it, going to bring it up to them tomorrow. How common is this UI scaling problem? I guess I got complacent in not testing my preliminary designs for 1280x720 as much as I should because I figured no one used it anymore.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2018 05:02

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

The Dave posted:

You really should be making those decisions on analytics not gut instincts. 1366 is the most commonly used resolution genetically, and obviously you should be checking google analytics for your clients specific audience.

I know, I was using 1920x1080 as a baseline because I knew from going to my main client's office occasionally that their displays were all 1920x1080. So when I sent over my initial quick homepage designs, I didn't test them for 1280x720, and I couldn't figure out why sometimes they'd come back with "this is overlapping, and this looks weird," etc.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2018 13:54

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

McGlockenshire posted:

Hundreds of thousands of divs and the display: table family

Related, CSS grids are loving awesome to work with and everyone should check them out. Throw in media selectors and the ability to just put arbitrary grid elements in arbitrary places, and you can almost get away with not using a dedicated mobile-first CSS framework.

I've been developing my own pseudo framework for years, just a base template and responsive stuff. I've been redoing it as a mobile-first template the past few days, and I've been wondering if I should just use Bootstrap. I've been using my own code for three years now (and been in web design for ten) so adjusting to Bootstrap might have more trouble if I'm already familiar with what to do, or no? I like the grid system though, I might adapt that if anything.

I've also been hesitant to try CSS grids, but I guess they have enough support now. I just discovered the wonder of flexbox this year!

# ¿ Oct 19, 2018 23:12

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

I work a lot on an SEO company's platform, and they install Wordpress and give me FTP access to website.companydevelopmentserver.com so I can go to work making pretty websites for them. I've kind of assumed that anything like node.js is out of the question, every time I see a hot piece of web tech I want to try and it starts with "installation is easy! Just type npm install blahblahblah /r into your command line!" I figure I can't do it. Am I correct in that assumption? If I can, what would be the process for that?

The reason I'm asking is I tried using LESS for some simple variables, using less.js to compile it client-side since I don't know how to do it server-side (or even if I can). It works, but it has the terrible side effect of taking half a second to load, during which the site flashes its unstyled HTML. I'd love to use SASS or LESS, but unless I can compile server-side it's not going to work.

Also, I'm sure that FTP isn't the best way to interact with files on a server anymore, even if it's quick and easy and I'm comfortable with it. I open Filezilla, navigate to the folder, right click, and edit the file. Then when I hit save it asks if I want to upload. Is there something else I should be using?

# ¿ Oct 30, 2018 16:50

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Munkeymon posted:

Running npm on a production server is a good sign you've done something terribly wrong. You'd compile/build/hate the loving poo poo out of npm/etc locally and upload a bundle generated by whichever build tool you can get working. Probably webpack.

Ah so this stuff is meant to be run locally and then the final compiled files are uploaded to the webserver?

Tei posted:

Many servers that let you do SFTP also let you do rsync. With rsync the protocol is smart enough to only upload the changed files. A project with 9000 files and only 10 files changed will upload with rsync in about 3 seconds, but may take one minute+ with FTP.

This thread is a bit better for frontend questions:
https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3571035

These are small Wordpress sites, I'm not editing that many files. I didn't know whether to post in this thread, the small Javascript questions (since it was mostly about node.js) or the front end design thread. I assumed the front end thread would be more about graphics, styles, and UI/UX stuff, but we don't have a thread for that, or I can't find it.

Lumpy posted:

Many things to touch on here:

1. Using LESS (or SaSS) is good, but you should pre-transform it and try to avoid using less.js or other client-side options at all costs.

2. The process for doing the above, and using fancy npm packages and so on, as well as not using Filezilla to edit via FTP (please tell me you are using SFTP, not actual FTP!!) is for you to have your own development version of the site locally, possibly running in a virtual server (or Docker, I think that's what the cool kids use these days?) where you do all your work, and then when things are happy there, you can push compile / transformed / whatevered code up to the website.companydevelopmentserver.com box (preferably with rsync instead of (S)FTP. I'd also look into using some sort of source control, even if you can't use it on the dev / production servers.

That said, that is a heap-ton of effort, so you need to decide if setting all that up is worth it.

Yeah pre-transforming it and then uploading it sounds great, but many times I need to go back to a site I've worked on and make some minor CSS tweaks because they want new elements added such as a testimonial section or whatever and it's easier just to keep a plain CSS file on the server.

I'll have to look into rsync.

# ¿ Oct 30, 2018 17:55

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

I've been developing sites on a shared hosting platform, but it just popped in my head that it's an inefficient way of doing things, so I looked into alternatives. I want to set up a small server where I can develop some smaller Wordpress sites without the need to FTP into anything, and I think the best way might be to use something like Wampserver or Bitnami. I want to install it on my laptop, but what's the best way to access it on my desktop as well? Is Bitnami the better solution if I'm looking to use it exclusively to develop Wordpress sites?

Am I thinking about this the right way?

# ¿ Nov 4, 2018 04:15

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

kedo posted:

It sounds like you're describing Docker.

If I'm the only coder on a project, I tend to do all my work in a Digital Ocean droplet so that I have total control over the server settings, and the fact that it's online means that when I need to share the project with a client for review, I don't have to jump through any hoops to make it accessible to them. For group projects where I'm not the only person coding, I use something like Docker.

Digital Ocean seems good. I like the idea having something on my computer, but that makes it harder for me to share it with clients unless I bring my laptop to them physically.

Edit: It seems great, though how do you access files? I was imagining interacting with it the same way as I do in Windows... is it possible to sort of map it as a network drive?

LifeLynx fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Nov 4, 2018

# ¿ Nov 4, 2018 15:00

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

My sales guys are freaking out because they discovered GTMetrix and YSlow and are scared other agencies are going to swoop in and steal their clients by showing their clients a bad YSlow score.

A large part of the negative scores seems to be the Google Maps embed. They want a Google Map on the homepage of the site, but it seems to be drawing a lot of resources, e.g. HTTP requests, external stylesheets, external JS, etc. Taking away the Google Maps embed reduces the load time from 3.2s to 1.5s alone! Is there any way to improve this?

YSlow specifically is hitting hard on "Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)" - but that seems incredibly overkill if it's just some simple images that aren't on any other site also, right? Like should I be setting up a CDN for every single site that's going to have maybe a hundred visitors a month? They host on Media Temple, which appears to be in Virginia and/or California, and we deal with mostly small east coast companies. I don't know much about CDNs, but I thought they were for major things that are the same across hundreds of thousands of sites such as jQuery (which I don't use anymore) or Google Fonts.

And then there's "There are 10 static components without a far-future expiration date." - which are mostly things like one Google Fonts entry and some random stuff from a third party tracking plugin. There's no way to set an expiration date for those, right?

Also, while I'm typing this and remember - a Contact Us page is still important, right? I know it's the first thing I look for when I go to a website, but some sales people don't want me to include one and just stick a contact form on the bottom of the site. Anything I can see to show how much a Contact Us page captures leads, in general?

# ¿ Nov 20, 2018 06:16

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

Lumpy posted:

Load the page, then embed the map. Put in a placeholder (empty DIV or get fancy and make a very simplified static image of the map) and after the page is done loading, use JS to embed the map in that spot.

What's the best way to do that? I tried:

code:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.addEventListener('DOMContentLoaded', function() {
	var div = document.getElementById('google-map-target');

	div.innerHTML += '<iframe style="border: 0;" src="https://www.google.com/maps/embed?GOOGLEMAPSCODE" width="600" height="450" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>';
});
</script>

But it seems to load it with the page because GTMetrix picks it up.

# ¿ Nov 20, 2018 17:04

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 19:56

LifeLynx: Feb 27, 2001; Dang so this is like looking over his shoulder in real-time; Grimey Drawer

The Dave posted:

At my current job designers get rejected all the time because while they had gorgeous projects they worked on their storytelling and presentation of it was poo poo.

This is good to know. I wish I had good stories for my sites; I really don't know what to say about them. Most of my challenges involve telling clients they're requesting something that will actively hinder people using their website or looking professional, such as not making a badly pixelated cellphone photo of their van as the focus of their site or not making a box around each line of text of a sentence as it line-breaks on their screen. And the way I overcome those challenges is to do those things anyway because I get tired of arguing and just want the site launched. But now I'm trying to think of ways I can spin those.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2019 01:02

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > The Cavern of COBOL > The Web Design & Development Megathread

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