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WebmasterWorld celebrates the new year.

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Handing your keys to a company like Microsoft fundamentally changes the security properties of a disk encryption system

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Microsoft wants to bring control from MiTM attacks back to the user control, and developers have until March 31, 2016 to comply.

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Reports indicate Google is working on a new mobile messenger service which may use AI chatbot technology.

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Join the fine folks at World IA Day on Feb 20, 2016 to celebrate advancing the practice of information architecture.

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Facebook officially moves away from Flash to HTML5.

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Patch your system now!

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WebmasterWorld Members discuss whether there greater significance in Google dropping "Web" in favor of "All" on its SERPs pages.

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According to Symantec it doesn't believe its customers of secure sites will be impacted by this removal.

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Relax smarter with your devices—wherever you are—with lap desks and bedside caddies from our sponsor, Padded Spaces.

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WebmasterWorld members discuss emerging trends in search, and their predictions for 2016 and beyond.

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More than 70,000 users took to Microsoft�s site to voice their displeasure, and their complaints didn�t go unheard. But you have to visit a special link to claim your storage.

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This potentially opens up millions of additional viewers of promoted tweets.

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Yahoo's board clarifies position over Alibaba stake, and will separate operating businesses.

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WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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Speed up your Wordpress sites with managed hosting and round the clock support from our sponsor, LiquidWeb.

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WebmasterWorld Members discuss what happened when a disavow file was updates in error and traffic seemed to have jumped. Was this traffic increase just a coincidence with a Google update, or something else?

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Mozilla has said it'll cease the advertising through the Firefox "Tiles" and will focus on content discovery.

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Microsoft has said it is to make Microsoft Edge browser JavaScript core components open source.

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According to reports, Google will not be updating the Penguin algorithm until 2016.

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Adobe says it will kill off Flash Professional and support Flash within "Adobe Animate CC" which is more focussed towards HTML5.

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I was never supposed to be doing the job that I do. Via a series of fortunate events and chance encounters, I’ve built a career in an industry I that love and that still interests me today.

When I was at school, the web didn’t exist. Like many web folk of my age I stumbled into my career of the past 19 years accidentally. I might never have discovered this career had a PC World salesperson not upsold me to a computer on interest-free credit. It was 1996, and my aim was to get a word processor so I could take in typing work while pregnant and taking care of my baby. The computer enabled me to earn money typing while it opened up for me this new world of the web. My journey from new computer owner to web developer is a story for another day, but that salesperson will never know what he started by making his targets that day!

It was by chance that I came to have access to the web at all, and I might have remained someone who liked to play around with computers, who built websites for fun, had it not been for people who asked me to build websites for them.

My first paid work as a web developer came via friends of friends who needed websites. I would talk about the things I had been teaching myself. I had my own site online and a couple of sites I had volunteered to build for charities I was involved with. One by one, little jobs arrived, always because someone had mentioned to a friend of mine that they needed a website. All the things I learned building those small sites—learning Perl to add functionality, learning Linux so I could install a web server locally—enabled me to find a full-time job, and then leave again to set up on my own.

My husband and business partner Drew McLellan has similar stories. The first website he was paid to create came about while volunteering at the local amateur dramatics society. He met someone who was setting up a new business and needed a website. He was someone who she trusted who built websites.

I asked some fellow freelancers if anyone else had these stories of chance, or of the unusual ways we find work or contacts who are instrumental in our business success. Andrew Areoff had already written up a tale that spanned over 40 years, documenting how a man from Rhodesia is connected to the success of his business and that of his best client. Harry Llewelyn of Neat in Somerset, UK, told me how he made a friend in the USA via posting photography on Flickr. While staying with this friend he was introduced to another friend—a web designer who ultimately outsourced front-end work to Harry, bringing enough regular work for him to make the leap into full-time self-employment.

Jonathan Rawlins of Pixel Pixel Ltd had a story of how a Christmas Eve flood at home resulted in a painter and decorator being in the house while he was working from home. They chatted and Jonathan explained what he did, and discussed setting up a simple site for the decorator’s business. The site for the decorating business never materialized, but the two stayed in touch. Around two years later the decorator got back in touch about an idea for a much larger project. Jonathan is now working on this project in stages—helping to grow the application as the business grows.

Another freelancer had a lovely story of how a project he was working on with a friend failed due to the friend having personal issues and needing to get his life back on track. Despite the failed project, he supported his friend, who then introduced him to another contact. That contact has become a great client, and also brought interesting new possibilities.

There are common themes in all of these stories of chance and opportunity. They show that it is always worth talking about what it is that you do, even if the person you are speaking with doesn’t look like an obvious fit as a client. You then need to be ready to follow up leads that come from an unusual source. Even more than that, opportunity often comes to those who are willing to give freely. That giving might be in terms of your skills as a designer or developer, but might be in doing something else entirely. It might even be in terms of being supportive of a business partner or client when things don’t work out.

One thing I know for sure is that the more generous I am with my time and my knowledge, the more good fortune seems to come my way. This isn’t due to any mysterious karma at play, but simply that people talk to one another. As one of my contributors to this piece wisely pointed out, “it’s not the people you know, it’s the people they know!”

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Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan are to give away 99pct of their Facebook shares to the future of the young...

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Research indicates social logins significantly reduce ecommerce shopping cart abandonment.

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Google's AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is due to appear early 2016.

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Keep your projects on track and your clients up to date with intuitive project scheduling from our sponsor TeamGantt.

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Project Calypso from Automattic, the makers of WordPress, is changing WordPress and the new, pure JavaScript platform will shake it up entirely.

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Android Studio 2.0 ought to make development much faster.

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Google's Search Quality Rating Guidelines document is a 160-page PDF file, so get ready for some coffee-time reading.

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WebmasterWorld members discuss and help analyse the value of click through rate, page views and time on site from Google organic SERPs.

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YouTube has added some new translation tools for video publishers which are devised to help get to the International audience, which it claims can be over 60pct of the total audience.

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According to Google, in some cases there's no need to download the app as the content discovery will be in search.

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Catch Jeffrey Zeldman talking web infrastructure with Josh Koenig, co-founder of sponsor Pantheon, on The Big Web Show and when you’re ready to learn more about building scalable web infrastructure, don’t miss Pantheon’s weekly webinar.

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Google has decided to give Google+ a redesign, and says it's more mobile friendly, and now focusing on Communities and Collections.

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Google's latest Quality Rater's Guidelines published, now with great emphasis on mobile.

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On sites where you employ both Google AdSense and Analytics, here's one simple method to find out how often ads are blocked.

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WebmasterWorld Members discuss future strategies in a post Panda world.

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This fall, my team started a new project and for the first time in a long while, I was working with another developer as I started to write the styles for the interface. In fact, I started the styles, and then went on vacation while they took over.

This project has been an exercise in writing modular CSS, which I love, when working in a team. Having been a solo front-end developer for quite some time, this was a new challenge to me. When you want your CSS to be reusable, how do you have several people working in git branches on different pages without writing completely separate styles?

Surprise: it’s not really about how we write CSS, it’s about the process.

Communication

Communication is the biggest piece of making this work. As we work throughout the day, we talk about the styles we’re writing and where they might be used across the application, so the other person knows how work in progress could impact the parts of the application they’re focused on.

For example, if I change a wrapper to meet the new design spec and want to be consistent across the entire application, I mention that it’s been changed, what’s changed about it, and the branch where I’ve done this. When my coworker normalizes buttons in one branch, they let everyone know that this will be taken care of for the whole team when that branch gets merged into the master branch.

Code review

I’ve worked on teams that did code reviews, but my current team didn’t always do them as we worked. As the team grew, we decided to incorporate code reviews into our process. The best part of a code review is learning from each other. Maybe the way I’ve done a layout works, but could it be better? Are there styles I’m not familiar with that would make it better?

When we review code, we discuss our modules to ensure everyone agrees they’re going to be the best way to move forward. When talking through how to use SVGs in our code, for instance, we discuss when it’s appropriate to use them as background images as opposed to images, or inlining them by putting the SVG code right into the template.

Documentation

Finally, we came up with what’s important to our team when writing CSS and we documented that. We use the ideas from Jonathan Snook’s SMACSS to guide us, along with explaining features of Sass we want to stay away from (such as nesting), so the entire team has an easy reference.

By making this explicit, we can refer back to it for reminders as we review code. In the near future, we also hope to build a style guide to further document our work. That way, we’ll have documented how we want the code written, and we’ll have a more visual documentation of the styles we’re using to retain consistency as we continue working on the application.

As a team grows there are always bumps along the way, but it’s been a great challenge to start documenting our process, thinking about how we write CSS in a more formal way, and reviewing it together to make sure we’re all on the same page. For me, the challenge of going from being the only person writing everything, to adding new team members and working together, has been fantastic.

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Yahoo has announced new Product Ads for search and display across mobile, tablet and desktop.

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Microsoft has released its first major update for Windows 10 and it says it's got additional features for consumers and enterprise users.

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Sometimes, you don’t even know what you don’t know.

A few years ago around the Thanksgiving table, a family member was proudly telling us about the achievements of the young people he’s mentored through the years. Someone asked if he felt he always succeeded in helping. I can still see the sadness on his face as he told us about one person, technically competent and smart as can be, who never seemed to pick up on the social and teamwork skills that would help them truly go far.

It just goes to show, there are people who want to pass on everything they know—who care about your growth and want you to succeed. You’re part of the web family now: a far-flung clan with many aunties, uncles, and older cousins ready to share their insights and experience. There’s even a doctor in the family.

Jeffrey Zeldman started “Ask Dr. Web” 20 years ago to help “every web author and site designer be their best.” A lot of the early advice was technical stuff: if you were the one person who knew how to make a gif loop or how to shrink graphic assets to under 30k per page, you might be the office web hero. Today, the stuff that makes you shine is more subtle, and it’s not stuff you can get out of a step-by-step tutorial or a classroom.

At first, it’s easy to think that strong design or development skills and a willingness to work is all you really need. What Dr. Web shows you is that making business contacts, learning how to set realistic freelance rates (hint: higher than you think; higher than you’re comfortable with right now), and judging your job by its challenges and growth opportunities rather than the base pay aren’t extras—they’re the foundation of a great career.

Being columns editor has a little perk I love: getting an early peek at Jeffrey’s Ask Dr. Web columns. What blows me away is that in every column, he takes on one of those mysterious career/life skills that can take you from working a job to having a career and wraps it in his personal stories and warmth to explain how you can get over the invisible obstacles you may not even realize are in your path.

That’s why I’m so excited to tell you about our upcoming event, a live version of Ask Dr. Web on December 2. I hope you can join in, submit a question of your own, and learn how to create the career you absolutely deserve to have.

December 2 event: Ask Dr. Web—Live

Join Jeffrey Zeldman and his co-host, designer and entrepreneur Sarah Parmenter, for a live version of Jeffrey’s must-read column. Together, they’ll tackle topics like:

Presenting your skills with current and potential employers
Raising your profile and your rates as a freelancer
Selling your work
Creating side projects that are satisfying and career-enhancing

Register now, and then submit your career conundrums on Twitter with the hashtag #askdrweb, or directly in the Hangout (you’ll get the link when you register).

This event is free and everyone is welcome—just sign up to receive instructions. Here are the details:

Wednesday, December 2
1–2 p.m. EST
via Google Hangout and YouTube livestream
Register or get more details

Once you register, we’ll send you everything you need to join the event, participate in the Q&A, and then get updates on accessing the video and transcript afterward.

Join our email list to get updates when new events are announced.

Featuring

Jeffrey Zeldman: Founder, A List Apart and Happy Cog. Co-founder, A Book Apart and An Event Apart. Designer. Writer. The original Dr. Web.
Sarah Parmenter: Designer, entrepreneur, and jet-setting speaker. Owner of You Know Who, Blushbar, and Lovely.

Drupal and WordPress guides from Pantheon

Hosting and site management platforms do more than impact development teams—they tie into the entire business. These two free guides from our sponsor Pantheon will help you choose an infrastructure that’s efficient, effective, and within budget. Learn how to:

Explore platform options
Pick something that grows with your goals
Coordinate your resources, factor in total costs
Assess your security and compliance needs

Download the Drupal Website Platform Buyer’s Guide or the WordPress Website Platform Buyer’s Guide now.

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Build easy-to-use REST APIs with sponsor DreamFactory. Mash up multiple APIs and talk to different databases, all with solid API security.

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Google releases TensorFlow, its second generation machine learning system to open source.

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WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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WebmasterWorld Members discuss the new gTLD's.

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Facebook's announces new ad tools for local business campaigns.

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One of this column’s objectives is to take you traveling. Our destination today is the city-state of Singapore. During my voyages, I kept coming back to this small Asian nation, because Singapore is a hub for world travelers. But is it a hub for designers too? Here’s the answer from three Singapore designers—two expats and one local.

The Lion City

I first traveled to Singapore in 2010, my mind full of stereotypes: I expected to find a postage stamp-sized country—think Vatican—so aseptic that even chewing gum is illegal. But I quickly realized how wrong I was. Singapore is actually a 30-mile-wide island blessed with lush vegetation and home to a thriving city of 5 million inhabitants. Only 60 percent are Singaporean citizens, including Amalina Zakaria, a web designer “born and raised in Singapore” who represented her country at WorldSkills 2009.

The Lion City—Singapura in Malay—is also a hotspot for expatriates. Game designer Antoine Henry left the banks of the Seine for the shores of Malacca Strait in August 2014. In the growing expat community he met Perrine Lefeuvre, a creative director who has been working in Singapore since 2012 for luxury brands such as Guerlain and Hermés.

One of the notions I had about the city turned out to be true. Singapore is “Asia for dummies”—an easy city for first-time travelers to Asia: orderly, English-speaking, clean, well-connected. Easy doesn’t mean boring, though. The whole of Asia meets in the city-state.

View of traditional and modern architecture in Singapore.

A unique blend

“The cultural diversity here is one of my main sources of wonder. For a European like me, it is amazing to find yourself at the crossroads of Asian cultures like Chinese, Indian, Malay, and the whole diversity of South-East Asia in general,” says Antoine Henry. Perrine Lefeuvre also finds that the city-state is an exciting place to be a designer. “If you have experience, you will have access here to projects you will never work on in Europe.”

Even for those who are not new to this melting pot, like Amalina Zakaria, the diversity is mind-opening. “The different styles of each culture and how it is fused and integrated into modern design has always been an inspiration for me as a designer.”

With 75 percent of Singaporeans being ethnic Chinese, you might be tempted to imagine the Lion City as a microcosm of China, a tropical Hong Kong. “Don’t,” reply my three interlocutors as one. “Despite our large Chinese population,” says Amalina Zakaria, “we are ultimately a Singaporean audience, rather than a Chinese, Malay, or Indian audience.” Perrine Lefeuvre adds, “Singapore only feels like China during Chinese New Year, when everything is gold and red—the traditional colors.” She even believes there’s a Singaporean style of design: “Very preppy, gentle, clean—and a bit hipster.”

The right environment for creatives?

Many web, game, and design companies have chosen the city-state for their Asian headquarters, Perrine Lefeuvre told me. And startups are following suit. “With a growing entrepreneurial spirit among locals, this creates opportunities for creative professionals to work with startups on exciting new projects. There is a lot of financial support and backing in the form of grants if creative professionals want to start something,” says Amalina Zakaria. “Singapore is a booming industry for creatives,” she adds.

Singapore, a paradise for startups and web companies? Although Amalina Zakaria has found bureaucratic procedures stifling, Harvard Business Review calls Singapore “one of the easiest countries in the world in which to do business.”

But when it comes to recruiting creatives, most of the expats I met told me the process of fostering creative thinking needs more time. A tradition of putting the group in front of the individual has historically made local workers less comfortable displaying initiative and creativity. “After a few frustrating experiences, I had to hire a designer from the Philippines because I couldn’t find one from Singapore,” explains Perrine Lefeuvre. Antoine Henry, who leads a team of designers, also experienced the culture gap. “I was used to challenge and be challenged quite openly regardless of who’s managing who. This is happening a lot less here, and I had to change my work process to actively seek that kind of honest feedback.”

A genuine world city

Listening to Antoine Henry, I have the feeling Singapore is actually Asia’s biggest Western city. “From my colleagues’ gaming habits and the test sessions we conduct with Singaporeans, I tend to think that their video games consumption is closer to Western than Chinese.”

Singaporeans are “exposed to a lot of influences from the West right from the start,” explains Amalina Zakaria. “We may be struggling to inject more Eastern influences into our work!” she adds. Which means designers choosing the city-state for a deep dive into Asian cultures might be in for a disappointment. “It doesn’t have the hints of Asian tradition that you find elsewhere in South-East Asia, nor the eccentricity found in South Korea or Japan,” acknowledges Antoine Henry.

But Singapore is actively shaping its own culture. This could well be its best argument to attract foreign clients as well as creative workers. As Amalina Zakaria says, “designers in Singapore are so well-versed in Western media, culture and customs, that we’re able to communicate effectively with our global clients.”

Because it concentrates so much diversity, Singapore has always struck me as an “East meets West” kind of place. “It’s a more complex situation than just ‘East meets West’,” retorts Amalina Zakaria. “We do not have a long history that is unique to ourselves,” she says. “However, we are globally exposed with a lot of influences coming from outside, rather than inside—and that’s what makes us globally competitive.”

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Administrators for any site that uses vBulletin should drop whatever they're doing and immediately install Monday's patch

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Firefox 42 has raised the bar by adding Tracking Protection in Private browsing mode.

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Google says that a fine, potentially as much as $6.6 billion, would be "inappropriate."

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Rolling out today on most platforms, is the new heart symbol which replaces the "favorite" star and now becomes a "like."

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I went a little overboard for Halloween last year. And as you can tell from my the Halloween category on my blog, sometimes I get a little too excited about Halloween.

So this year I decided to go quick, easy, and lo-fi as a USB drive:

To make a thumb drive/USB key, I just took a cardboard box, spray painted it black, and glued on some gold-colored paper. Super simple and easy to do. Then I cut out a curve for my head.

I made the mask using digital plans I bought from wintercroft.com. Once I had the materials, it took me a couple hours and was lots of fun. It was like a super-simple version of this big head costume.

If you wanted easy freedom of movement, you could also just wear the USB part on your head:

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According to reports, Google plans to introduce its new, single operating system in 2017.

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Researchers (and hackers) are able to gain full administrative access to any vulnerable Joomla site

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AI Search with Google RankBrain.

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Microsoft's Bing search turns profitable.

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A strong performance from Google in Q3, with net income of $3.98bn, up from $2.74bn in the same quarter last year.

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Over at Perch we develop the product based on customer feedback. Our method of ordering features is to add the things that will make the most difference to the most people. We gather feedback from our interactions with customers (primarily this happens in our support forums) and try to shape a feature from the specific requests that will meet a more general use case. As we help customers to implement their websites we discover areas where we could do things in a better way, uncover requirements that we had not thought of. In addition, we have a feature requests area of the forum. We find that, directly or indirectly, the next thing we should be adding rises to the top. That might be due to a change in the industry, or that we have started attracting a certain subset of customers.

There is, however, a danger with this approach. In support, we typically hear from 25 percent of our active customers more than once. That leaves a lot of people whose ideas and needs may never be taken into account.

Experienced developers using our product also find places where a new feature or a refinement would have been helpful to a recent project. Rather than logging a request, they route around it and find a different way of achieving the end result. Sometimes they explain that they didn’t want to bother us as it “wasn’t a big deal. ” With the requirement solved they didn’t need support, so the fact that a useful feature had been identified never made it back to us.

In our own work, we try to use tools and services from other small companies. When we come up against something that a tool or service can’t do, our response is usually to build something on our side to route around the problem. Even as product owners ourselves we forget how valuable the feedback from other developers is. When we do remember to drop them a line with a feature request it is very well received. Sometimes we’ve had what we needed the very same day.

Our own hesitancy about interacting with developers of the products we use reminds us of how many of our customers we never hear from. It encourages us to find ways to make contact with the people who don’t readily contact us, to find out how we can better serve their needs even if they are happy with the product currently.

We try to make contact with the silent majority of our customers by a variety of means. We pose questions in our customer emails, directly contact specific groups of customers, run occasional surveys, and invite them onto beta programs for major revisions of the core product and addons. We’ve launched a Slack channel, and are seeing people show up to chat there who never turn up in our support forum. Nevertheless, we know that there are long term, committed customers who we simply never speak with.

There are lessons here for all of us. If you are a product owner, be aware that the feedback you get may not be completely representative of your customers. Be prepared to dig a little deeper and find ways to contact and speak to the silent majority. If you do not do this, you run the risk of moving the product in a direction biased towards the minority.

As for developers, next time you find yourself writing some code to route around an issue with a third party product or API, take the time to offer feedback to the product team. If you have had to write code to deal with an issue then you are in the perfect place to show a real use-case, something that we as product developers love to see. Never feel that you are bothering the product team with something you could solve yourself. We all want to make our products better, and we can only do that by having our attention brought to where the issues exist.

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The service launches on 28 October.

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Twitter has said it's rolling out a new polling capability to everyone.

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Spending more time scheduling than actually meeting with clients? Sponsor Acuity Scheduling is your website’s favorite way to schedule calls, appointments, and hangouts…without pulling your pixels out.

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Yahoo reaches a deal to optionally serve Google search and ads.

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The internet doesn’t exactly lack for advice on how to pick a CMS platform. Go for the one with the most impressive feature set, advises one expert. Consider the costs of ownership, charges back another. Make sure it produces SEO-optimized pages, warns every SEO consultant everywhere. Unfortunately, picking the right CMS by consulting generic criteria is as effective as studying census data to improve your writing skills.

Experts often readily admit the importance of considering organizational needs in the CMS selection process, but they’re rarely willing to talk about those needs specifically. Understanding the varied departmental interests, psychological trade-offs, and political realities of your organization, however, is key—your CMS selection criteria should emphasize factors that will directly impact the success of the people who will use it. In other words, stop worrying about having a CMS and start worrying about having a usable CMS.

The curse of enterprise software

A 2012 executive survey revealed that CMS projects are seven times more likely to fail because of internal politics and lack of cultural fit than from a lack of features. Anecdotal evidence further suggests that even projects that seem successful initially can quickly go off the rails if the CMS can’t accommodate how the organization works.

As Jason Fried and Karen McGrane have famously pointed out, these problems stem from the fact that the people who buy enterprise software aren’t the people who use it. Changing the sales process isn’t enough to truly overcome this problem, however; one also has to understand who will be using the CMS and what their key needs are.

Those users typically fall into three categories: developers customizing and running the software, editors producing actual content, and managers using online content to achieve specific business goals. To choose a CMS that can serve the organization, you need to understand how the CMS impacts their daily work and what challenges they have to contend with.

Tools maketh the developer

All developers know that no two CMSes are created equal. On one end of the spectrum, you will find publishing platforms that carefully separate application data, presentation, and business logic, making them easy to extend and customize. On the other (more crowded) end, you will bump into CMSes whose innards consist of spaghetti code—unnecessarily intricate and poorly structured. What hides under the hood of a CMS matters a great deal, because poorly architected code slows down, frustrates, and demoralizes even the most accomplished developers, turning any promising new initiative into an endless grind.

Unfortunately, the difference between properly designed and haphazardly thrown-together software might be obvious in hindsight, but there is no way of telling them apart when you are still shopping. Businesses often hedge this risk by betting on CMS vendors boasting a big developer community. Indeed, a vibrant community addresses many of the shortcomings of a slapdash architecture: technical mysteries are solved with a quick googling session; there is a smorgasbord of themes, plugins, and extensions to supplement the standard functionality; and one never runs out of experienced technical contractors to recruit.

But the rise of API-centric services and the new approaches to publishing they spawn—from headless CMS and content-as-a-service to mobile backends and static site generators—has added a new twist to the old story. Rather than requiring developers to slog through the quirks of internal architecture or master a hodgepodge of tools and frameworks, the new breed of CMSes hides the complexity behind an API layer. All a developer has to do to fetch the content is issue an API call, and, milliseconds later, a neatly formatted response is returned. As long as a developer is working in one of the popular programming languages, the costs of integrating content delivered this way are trivial.

This means that technical stakeholders have to make a strategic architectural decision in addition to thinking about security, deployment, and performance. Traditional vendors offer complex software that takes months to master, but has a large developer community to turn to. New upstarts provide lightweight services with no programming overhead, but it will take years before they catch up in terms of social proof.

Here are some questions to help weigh the pros and cons of these options:

How much specialization is required to master the CMS? Does the CMS expose data in a standard way? Is there a clear separation of concerns? How well-documented is the code? Is customizing the CMS supported by default? What developer tools are available?
How big is the developer community? Are there many technical contractors specializing in the product? How easy is it to troubleshoot bugs and find answers to technical questions? Is there a marketplace catering in extras?
Does the CMS ship with a native API? What type of data is accessible programmatically? How detailed and well-illustrated is API documentation? How difficult is it to customize API endpoints? How does the API perform against the benchmarks?

The editor’s fear of manuals

Developers usually find detailed software documentation a sign of quality. Busy editors take just the opposite view: the best publishing tools come free of manuals and are intuitive to use. Unfortunately, the generic interfaces they have to contend with today more often feel like a product of a violent database eruption rather than painstaking design. Some vendors have tried to address the problem by improving styles and layouts, adding descriptive labels, and tweaking interactions to take the friction out of using a CMS. But better interfaces alone won’t make a CMS intuitive—we need better authoring experiences (AX).

Getting AX right requires that software developers design the CMS around the way editors and content authors perform their tasks—for example, preparing and uploading responsive images, identifying stale content in need of refreshing, customizing field labels, or updating help text. A good AX comes from actively and carefully designing for those everyday workflows, so that editorial teams can define their content model and customize the authoring interfaces without touching the code.

This focus on AX dovetails with concerns about how to structure content inside the CMS. Traditional, page-centric tools store information in big blobs of data, where actual content is mixed with formatting styles and layout elements. Karen McGrane has illustrated the painful struggle to adopt such content to new mediums in all its gory details. The antidote to the majority of these problems is to disassemble undifferentiated content blobs into small, reusable chunks of data and keep this data strictly separate from the visual presentation.

The organization of content has a dramatic impact on the productivity of the team, because it provides editors with very distinct tools. Page-centric CMSes allow authors to assume the role of a designer and tinker with how things look in a desktop browser. Structured-content CMSes help authors act like architects, assembling individual pieces to fit the constraints of a specific medium. Editorial teams obsessing over the look of their content would feel sabotaged without a WYSIWYG editor, while teams working in multiple mediums expect content to come in LEGO-like chunks. The real question is, which use case is critical for your business?

When selecting a CMS, examine your use cases and editorial process, then consider these questions:

How customizable is the CMS? Can custom data types be defined without coding skills? What about UI? Can authoring experience be tailored to reflect the team’s workflows and culture? Can the CMS accommodate the needs of several user groups?
Does the CMS support high-fidelity presentation? Does the CMS include design templates? Can editors select layouts and style individual page elements? What preview options are there? Are assets auto-scaled for target viewports?
Does the CMS support structured content? Is content broken down into reusable chunks? Are inputs stored as specific data types? Are editors prevented from formatting and styling entries? Is it easy to define and maintain multiple content types?

Helping managers see the big picture

Managers are rarely mentioned in the context of CMS selection; when they are, it is usually to tell a cautionary tale about the dire consequences of listening to the HiPPO. This line of thinking tends to ignore very valid concerns that decision-makers like senior editors, marketing VPs, or product managers have.

Managers orchestrate individual contributors to produce content serving an organization’s needs. It’s a tricky process that requires strong planning skills, lots of empathy, and attention to details. While a CMS is a poor substitute for empathy, it gets its chance to shine by helping busy managers see the big picture: what content is live, which pieces are scheduled for publishing, and who on the team has fallen behind. Contextual information also comes in handy when working with individual pieces, where the ability to visualize recent changes, enforce validations, and track down whoever deleted the cover image helps streamline internal discussions.

Juggling roles and permissions is another source of managers’ anxiety, largely because access management is often the last item in a CMS vendor backlog. Organizational culture dictates very different needs in this area: managers charged with coordinating a constantly evolving network of contributors want a one-click approach to onboarding new contributors and waving goodbye to old ones. By contrast, those working with stable teams are more interested in capturing in-depth author info.

The same goes for workflows: flat organizations can get by without elaborate checks and balances, while those in regulated industries might look for a way to enforce triple sign-off before new material hits the homepage. All this just goes to show that the goals a team pursues profoundly shape their expectations about how different parts of CMS will work. Even when CMS vendors reassure you that their tool comes packaged with roles and permissions, remember to investigate whether the way access control works really fits your needs or requires a computer wiz to operate it on a daily basis.

How can one keep tabs on CMS activity? How does one follow organizational activities? Are there notifications? If yes, how do they work? What filtering and reporting options are there? Is contextual information available under individual entries?
How are roles and permissions implemented? What default roles are available? What does it take to add custom roles? Can one review current access details? How easy is it to add/remove collaborators?
Does the CMS support specific workflows? Can the publishing process be automated? Does the CMS provide template workflows? How easy is it to add custom steps and values? Are there built-in notifications?

The human bottleneck

CMS projects succeed or fail largely due to human factors. The CMS plays a different day-to-day role in different departments, necessitating strategic trade-offs. Some trade-offs are interrelated: an API-powered CMS is easy to combine with cloud-based analytics and A/B testing services; focusing on AX makes it a breeze for managers to set up custom workflows. But it is just as likely that in some situations, your organization will find itself at a crossroads, with key stakeholders opting for competing CMS vendors. How does one handle these sensitive situations?

In the past, a common way of resolving these differences of opinions was to defer to the IT department or gracefully accept the backroom deal engineered by the higher echelons of management. This approach incurs a lot of costs, with poor usability being the most obvious one.

Instead, it’s best to approach this problem by looking at your production process. Think of the steps performed by your different teams: developers doing custom development and providing daily support; editors creating, updating, and maintaining content; and managers overseeing processes and measuring how published content impacts the business.

Identify the weak links in the process, where risks abound and schedules get routinely delayed. These are your bottlenecks: they hold back organizational plans, drag down the bottom line, and put people under pressure.

The bottleneck is a relative concept: it always depends on a configuration of individual factors in a given situation. For a newly established business, it’s often the size of the IT bill that determines limitations; for a university department, the constraints may come down to the available time and technical savvy of the faculty members; and in a media company with evergreen content, the biggest productivity jump might come from removing the obstacles in the way of the marketing team.

Selecting a CMS with these obstacles in mind improves user productivity in a number of distinct ways—from eliminating mistakes and speeding up content creation to simplifying user onboarding and ensuring more enthusiastic reception. Helping the weakest teams unlock their potential goes far beyond eliminating the immediate bottlenecks—it also makes the entire organization more agile and resilient.

Setting up for success

For a long time, selecting a CMS platform was treated as a technical problem, to be solved by an IT department or a trusted technical advisor. Resist this view. As a tool that defines your online presence, imposes idiosyncratic editorial processes, and affects the productivity of your team, the choice of a CMS platform is too important to be decided on technical criteria or imposed by a single stakeholder.

Approaching the CMS selection as an organizational problem, on the other hand, yields many benefits: selection criteria that flow from functional requirements, work patterns, and cultural expectations of future users ensure focus on the job-to-be-done, not features-to-be-shipped. Visualizing content creation as an organization-wide process helps avoid internal turf wars and prioritizes high-impact solutions.

Start by identifying who in your organization will be impacted by the CMS: we talked about developers, editors, and managers, but the stakeholder list can include other roles too. Next, understand the big trade-offs involved: is the size of a developer community a deal-breaker? How should your content be structured? What is the role of managers? Working through these questions should help you articulate the needs and expectations of future users, which can then be translated into a checklist of technical requirements.

Equipped with this knowledge, you can now reengineer the vendor selection to put the true needs of your organization at the center of all discussions. And once you do, adopting new software will no longer breed uncertainty, risk, and anxiety, but—on the contrary—help your organization become more agile, focused, and resilient. Just like those sales folks have always promised you.

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WebmasterWorld Members analyse and observe Google Zombie traffic.

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Amazon says it's aiming to protect its customers from this "misconduct."

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L.E.A.N. stands for Light, Encrypted, Ad choice supported, Non-invasive ads.

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According to the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPeg) committee it is considering proposals to protect legacy images.

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WebmasterWorld Members discuss site layouts, heat maps, horizontal and vertical layouts, and improving user engagement.

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Gavin Belson, CEO of the fictitious tech juggernaut Hooli, is gazing out the floor-to-ceiling windows of his office.

Hordes of Hooli employees are migrating in groups across the fiber-optically rich pastures of its headquarters. Behind him stands his spiritual advisor: an Indian man, judging by his complexion and the kurta (but somewhat muddled by the collection of prayer beads around his neck). Arms crossed, brow furrowed in reflection, Belson observes, “It’s weeeeeeird. They always travel in groups of five, these programmers. There’s always a tall skinny white guy, short skinny Asian guy, fat guy… with a ponytail, some guy with crazy facial hair, and then… an east-Indian guy. It’s like they trade guys until they all have the right group.”

Like so many scenes in HBO’s excellent show “Silicon Valley,” this one has cult-classic potential on par with several scenes from Office Space. Packed into these thirty seconds is a lifetime’s worth of truth.

I write this acutely aware of the cliché that is writing about the life lessons that may be gleaned from [favorite_TV_show_or_really_anything]. But I’m also writing this as a software engineer wearing a hoodie and Warby Parker glasses, typing on a Mac from a small, fair trade, neighborhood coffee shop. When it comes to being a cliché, I have much bigger worries. So screw it, let’s indulge in cliché (because not indulging in cliché because it’s cliché is about as cliché as it can get OK I’ll stop now).

Where was I? Ah, yes, the scene and its truths.

First, there’s the environment itself: Belson’s expansive yet deliberately modest office, a hallmark of the modern, frugal, enlightened tech leader. In fact, thriftiness isn’t a signal reserved just for individuals; it’s for entire corporations too (which in legal terms are individuals, I guess). Take Amazon’s legendary door desks, for instance. I had one of these bad boys to my name from 2005 to 2007—adjusting the height required filing a maintenance ticket that brought a handyman to your door (desk) armed with a 4×4, a saw, and not much of a sense of humor.

There is nothing particularly offensive about valuing thriftiness and correlating it to your ability to revolutionize industries, synergize economies, and materialize innovation. On the contrary, one could argue (in press releases that nobody reads, and Medium posts that a few people read so long as the reading time is three minutes or less) that it is a good thing. Except of course when it’s just cheap signaling, which more often than not, it is.

Then there’s the uncomfortable juxtaposition of white guy with always-agreeable, non-white spiritual advisor guy standing behind white guy: a setup that masterfully draws out irony and discomfort. From the Beatles to Steve Jobs to the lady down the street that you can’t stand but “God, she’s so nice!” to even Zuckerberg, few things can warp your average spiritual person straight to self-actualized god-among-men like a visit to India.

But the writing here works on more planes than the “brown men are props in a white male tech culture” narrative. Last year, Anil Dash wrote a persuasive piece about how Asian-American men are in a position of privilege in the tech industry, and often complicit in the oppression of other minorities. That’s the nuance the scene nails: brown guy looking over leader white guy’s shoulders, as they both look down at the common folk.

The truthiest truth of this scene is the subject of the scene itself: Belson’s revelation that programmers sort themselves into groups of five by ethnicity, size, and facial hair. It’s hard not to sink a little deeper into your hoodie as you watch his revelation unfold. But it’s just as hard to put your finger on exactly what causes the discomfort.

Is it the Indian guru looking on with admiration, as he was paid to do? Is it Belson’s sociopathic callousness as exemplified by, well, every superficial observation he made? Is it that the group of five doesn’t include “non-model” minorities? Or that it excludes women entirely? Or, is it Belson making clear that humans are just pattern-matching monkeys fooled into thinking they aren’t by the accident that is consciousness?

Brace yourself for the cliché of clichés: life is a game—a game of identifying and navigating patterns. Every once in awhile, I forget this. I drop my guard, and start going about my day with the earnestness of a puppy play-bowing to a grumpy 11-year-old cat who’s seen it all and frankly, has had enough. And as you’d expect, with the swoosh of a claw, the overweight ball of fur and hate delivers a cut so surgical that my yelp comes out before the bleeding starts. And then I faint (because, as I learned all too well from the self-amputation finalé of 127 Hours or from simply walking around the hotel lobby during my last visit to India, things make me faint).

But when I come around, I am the better for it. Because as much as I loathe all these ugly patterns—and loathe having to see them, and turn them, and bend them, and fit them all together, and take them apart, and repeat, so that I may be able to see the picture more clearly—by accepting that it is what it is, I am in a much better position to make it what it isn’t.

Or even, what I want it to be.

As Belson gapes out the window, the camera’s focus shifts past him to the face of his spiritual advisor, like a homunculus perched on his shoulder to echo his self-congratulation. For one split second, the advisor’s face flashes a micro-expression of disbelief that almost betrays his inner eye-roll.

But then, with seasoned grace, it morphs into a picture of serenity. A knowing smile appears on his face, and without skipping a beat, he responds, “You clearly have a great understanding of humanity.”

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Matched to feeds and likes, "Canvas" gives mobile users a full screen, fast loading, product browsing capability before the users choose to go through to the retailers web site.

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Looking for great freelance designers and developers to grow your team? Sponsor Toptal is here to help.

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NPAPI plugins get death date of Christmas 2016

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Facebook test on new "like" button will give t a range of new data points.

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WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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Like many of you, I’m not 100 percent sure what it is that I do for a living.

Okay, hear me out. I spend around eight hours a day acting as an engine that converts caffeine to websites. I can cobble together a pretty mean media query, I don’t mind saying. I have whole swaths of the HTML5 specification committed to memory—hell, I wrote some of it. I’m no slouch with JavaScript, and I can put borders on a div with the best of ’em. By any measure, I figure I qualify as a front-end developer.

But as I write this, I’m sitting next to someone working on the test262 project—a massive and incredibly complex suite of tests, written in JavaScript, that ensure that JavaScript itself is functioning as expected. Mike is a front-end developer too—same job title and everything—but the work he does is worlds apart from mine.

Some of us are focused on the ever-expanding landscape of Angulars and Embers and Reacts, some of us are interested in learning more about design systems and style guides, and some of us aren’t quite sure which parts of front-end dev are right for us. That’s okay, though—because there’s room here for all of us, as long as we learn how the pieces fit together.

That’s where our next event comes in: It’s filled with smart folks who span the range of front-end work, and it’s designed to help you explore the technologies and career paths that make up today’s front-end teams.

Event details

This event is free and everyone is welcome—just sign up to receive the viewing instructions. Here are the details:

Wednesday, November 4
1–2 p.m. EDT
via Google Hangout or YouTube livestream
Register or get more details

We’ll have 30 minutes of conversation between our panelists, and then open things up to questions from none other than you. We’ll also share the full video and transcript after the live show ends.

Join our email list to get updates whenever new events are announced.

Panelists

Moderator: Chris Coyier
Panelists: Jina Bolton, Una Kravets, Rebecca Murphey, and Marco Rogers

Launch on time with Pantheon

Did you know that 60 percent of sites that fail to launch on time? It doesn’t have to be that way. The folks at Pantheon—who’ve generously sponsored our entire events program this year—have some help for you.

Download their latest ebook: The Perfect Website Launch—a guide for your next website project, from planning to deployment.

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Google explains how new algo changes will tackle hacked spam sites, and that it will eventually impact roughly 5pct of queries, and is language dependent.

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APM (Accelerated Mobile Web) is devised to speed content delivery to mobile devices with AMP HTML for the production of light-weight web pages.

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Released today were the new Surface Book, Surface Pro 4, new Lumia Phones and the Microsoft Band 2.

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The court said that Safe Harbor flawed because it allowed American government authorities to gain routine access to Europeans� online information

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Google AdSense Publishers should take note.

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At a conference I attended several years ago, one of the speakers talked about needing to hire someone to step in and substitute for another designer who had fallen quite ill. The speaker found his new designer from reading their blog. Because that designer wrote and shared his thoughts on the web, he got a job.

I went home from that conference and started writing. I started a blog with a basic WordPress theme that I got for free. I shared my thoughts and ideas. I can say, without a doubt, writing has led to many wonderful things.

It was through writing that I connected virtually with many of the people in the industry that I’ve gone on to meet in-person at conferences. It all started by taking notes at a Mobile Portland meeting and publishing them on my site. I continued to think more about mobile and shared my thoughts on my blog. Those posts were the beginning for me, they were how I realized that I had a voice, that my thoughts mattered, and that sharing them was a way to start a conversation with others who were thinking about the same topics.

Through writing, I solidified my ideas on style guides. When I went to write up a rough post for the company blog about how I created the style guide we were using, it pushed me to think about how I define these tools. That rough post never ended up on the company blog, but it did get published as an A List Apart article. As I worked with an editor to shape that piece, my thoughts on style guides morphed and changed until I knew what I wanted to say about them.

The publication of that article led to speaking about style guides at conferences, giving me some amazing (and nerve wracking) opportunities to talk about them more.

As I’ve continued to write, on my own site and others, it’s led to more opportunities. I believe it was through my writing that I got to work with an amazing team, at an amazing startup that is no longer. As I wrote quick pieces on my site, some of them grew and went on to become more somewhere else, such as my article on CSS audits here on A List Apart.

It can be hard and intimidating to put yourself out there, but you should write. You should take the ideas that you get, and see what happens with them. Submit to publications you think may be interested in your topic (hint, hint) and see what they think. Writing can lead to more than you can imagine.

Often, the pieces I have the most doubts about turn out to be the words that people read and relate to most. So in those moments where you wonder if you should share something, I say do it, publish it. Treat your blog like your drafts folder. When I’ve done that, great things have happened.

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Google may be working on a mobile index.

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According to this report, twitter may be looking at ways to extend the 140 character limit for tweets, in a similar way to its DMs.

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For web platform enthusiasts, the developing ServiceWorker is a wunderkind among APIs. It’s taking a lot on: offline-first control over assets, performance improvements via network interception and cache management, background process enhancements.

It’s cool and I want to use it right away. I want to ride the offline-first wave. But ServiceWorker is in that awkward phase of partial adoption and implementation that raises the question I’ve asked myself before: how do I use this beautiful future thing, now?

ServiceWorker, valiant in shining armor

Briefly, ServiceWorker provides a proxy, letting you make decisions about how to handle and respond to network requests coming from your (client-side) app.

Want to respond to requests for gif files differently if the browser is offline? ServiceWorker can do that. Want to explicitly retrieve assets from the browser cache for certain requests? ServiceWorker in conjunction with its pal the cache API can do that, too. Neat-o.

ServiceWorker is, in part, a do-over for the API devs love to hate: Application Cache, a.k.a AppCache (though, I should point out, ServiceWorker is considerably more functional than AppCache).

The waning antagonist: AppCache

It’s rare that I say “this is really just how it is” about anything to do with web technology but, okay, I’m going to be straight with you: AppCache is awful to work with.

With AppCache, you (ostensibly) create a manifest file of the stuff you want the browser to cache locally. In practice, there are so many ways to get this wrong.

It’s confusing to debug and difficult (sometimes nearly impossible) to rectify if you make a boo-boo—which you will, because it is a cruel master. And it just doesn’t give you fine-tuned control.

Ideals vs. present reality

AppCache is a beast, but it’s been around for several years and is supported by the majority of modern browsers.

ServiceWorker is partially implemented in about 45 percent of the world’s browsers—newer Chrome, Android, Opera browsers. That seems substantial; however, there is no official word that Safari will ever implement it.

Another wrinkle is that ServiceWorker is partially re-implementing something that already exists. There is no straightforward progressive enhancement from AppCache to ServiceWorker. Supporting both probably means writing certain functionality twice.

That means for real-world project architecture, I have several options, each unsatisfying on some level:

Treat offline-first as an enhancement that works in under half of the browsers out there
Write an offline approach using AppCache and then also write it in ServiceWorker for browsers that support it
Write an offline approach in AppCache and leave it at that

Option 1 won’t fly right now if you have a need to support a broad set of users. Option 2 is technically possible, but requires logic duplication and budget-straining extra time. Option 3 is functional but unappetizing.

So now what?

We’re caught in the limbo between the web as it is and the web as we hope it will be soon. My heart is in the future; our reality is in the less full-featured now.

There is an ongoing conflict between what we want to believe is immediately doable and what is, in fact, feasible. I don’t want to suggest an academia-industry divide, because we’re all on the same side here. But we sometimes get wrapped up in the promise and energy of new standards and are blind to their growing pains.

Every new standard has to pass through the shadows of doubt as it makes its way to the light of day. We’ll always need to choose which questing API heroes to throw in with, knowing not every contender can be victorious.

The web demands risks and, dare I say it, courage. Its democracy leads to uncertainty—no one’s entirely in control of this crazy thing. Which is why forward-looking web thinking is considered future-friendly, not future-proof.

I’m not clamoring to put the brakes on the pace of change. We are getting what we asked for, for the most part: accelerating invention and improvement of the web.

But I’d like us to recognize that making decisions about fledgling platform APIs and the changing web is another expertise we have, though we may take it for granted.

And that building the web every day is a leap of faith.

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Google has updated its First Click Free policy over subscriber content behind a pay wall.

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Help your developers and writers manage dynamic content on the web (and in apps!) with our sponsor Contentful’s API-first CMS.

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Google's new "Customer Match" in AdWords allows advertisers to target ads on e-mail address database, and "Universal App Campaigns" lets developers promote their apps across search, Play, YouTube, and Google's display network.

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On 24 September 2015, ARIN issued the final IPv4 addresses in its free pool.

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Everyone involved in the ad business, including Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and advertisers big and small.

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Recently I’ve seen several interesting conversations about ad blocking, and I wanted to remind people about a great offering called Google Contributor. With Google Contributor, you contribute a certain amount of money each month. That subscription means that you see fewer ads on the web, and you support the sites that you visit with your money.

You get to decide how much to contribute (I do $10/month, but for example you can do $2/month if you prefer). The more you contribute, the fewer ads you see. The handwave-y explanation that when you go to a website, your monthly subscription actually bids on your behalf in ad auctions. So you end up buying the ad yourself rather than someone else. This is cool for several reasons:

1. You support the sites you visit without expending any energy.
2. You see fewer ads.
3. (And this is the cool part) you get to decide what to show in that ad space instead of ads.

That’s right: you can pick a custom URL to show to yourself instead of ads. It’s like buying space on a billboard and showing nature scenes instead of ads. Personally, I like to show a dynamically generated Mondrian-like pattern:

But here’s the part I love: when you sign in, click the gear icon and then “Advanced settings,” and at the bottom of the page you can provide any custom URL you want (it does have to serve over https). You could replace ads with pictures of kittens, or your family. Or make ads your todo list, or a reminder to get back to work. Think outside the box, like Paul Ford. It’s the open web–you can have all kinds of fun with your HTML.

Here are some common misconceptions about Google Contributor:

Q: I thought Google Contributor only worked with ten websites or so?
A: No, it works with millions of websites. Contributor launched with a small set of websites initially, but if a website runs Google ads like AdSense or DoubleClick for Publishers, it’s likely to be compatible with Contributor.

Q: Isn’t there a waitlist to join? Or I need an invite or something?
A: Not anymore! You can sign up immediately and support tons of websites with one monthly payment.

Q: Can I see which websites I’m supporting?
A: Yes! You get a report that looks like this:

If you like the web and use it as much as I do, why not support some of your favorite websites while reducing the number of ads you see? Give Google Contributor a try now.

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As part of Microsoft's move to get Windows 10 into China, Microsoft is to drop Bing as the default search on Edge browser and replace it with Baidu.

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If you’ve been paying attention to the CMS scene lately, you’ve probably heard the terms “headless” and “decoupled.” These terms describe websites and applications where the CMS is not used to render the actual site or application. For instance, it could be a website where the front-end is a JavaScript framework like AngularJS or React, and the CMS supplies the content via a JSON API. A List Apart recently hosted a very timely and informative ALA On Air panel titled “Love Your CMS,” which touched on the topic and sparked good discussion around the pros and cons of the approach. I recommend watching the archived video (or reading the provided transcript). I found it instructive to hear Ryan Irelan talk about the difference between “headless” and “decoupled,” and why he considers them to be related but not exactly the same.

At Bluecadet, we didn’t set out to do headless CMS development for its own sake. We were curious about it and could see the potential benefits, but we only ended up doing it when it solved specific problems we faced on two very different projects.

The first was a website for Haruki Murakami. We wanted to create as seamless an experience as possible, which meant experimenting with different animated transitions between sections on the site. We eventually settled on AngularJS to support those transitions, so the challenge was how to merge AngularJS with WordPress, the CMS we were using. There are a few themes that do this, but after some testing and much research we decided to use the JSON API plugin. The client got a familiar CMS to work with, but also a very tightly-orchestrated front-end layer that captured their creative vision for the project.

The second project wasn’t a website—it was a Cinder (C++) touchscreen application for the Art Institute of Chicago that helps visitors learn more about James Ensor’s multi-piece drawing, “The Temptation of Saint Anthony.” Prior to this project, we had completed another touchscreen project with the content managed via XML, and we felt that we (and our clients) could benefit from a CMS instead of hand-editing XML files. Since we have a lot of experience with CMSes for websites, the challenge was how to connect a CMS to a touchscreen application. Again, JSON was the glue—we had done some research into serving up JSON from WordPress, and once we found a JSON parsing library for C++/Cinder the two big pieces came together. We were able to quickly build the CMS in WordPress, giving content authors a familiar interface, as well as reducing potential data errors. This had a profound impact, bridging two sides of our agency’s practice that had previously operated in fairly separate spheres. Once we finished this first headless CMS, the rest came along quickly. We now use them with JavaScript applications, iOS/Android applications, and touchscreens.

Why do I tell these stories? The key lesson for us was that a headless CMS helped solve a problem. We didn’t dive into headless CMSes because it was trendy, we did it because we needed to solve specific problems (in the first case an aesthetic/creative one, and in the second a data-management one). The other important outcome was that we could let each piece of the project do what it does best—by letting the CMS simply manage content, we could use better tools for rendering the presentation layer. We were also able to let our team members focus on what they did best: with the James Ensor touchscreen, our CMS developers were able to take care of the data management problem while our Cinder developers could focus on the touchscreen application.

Use your existing CMS

So let’s say that you’ve got some very good reasons to go headless. Maybe you want to have control over the front-end markup and animation in a way that stretches past what your CMS’s theming layer can support. Perhaps you want cleaner separation of front-end and content-management tasks—it can be easier to staff multiple projects when the responsibility for building a site doesn’t require everyone to know both the front-end rendering layer in addition to the backend of the CMS. Or perhaps you’re not building a website at all. Maybe you’re building a native iOS or Android application, but you need a familiar, yet robust, way to provide data for it.

The good news is that your preferred CMS likely already has what you need. WordPress and Drupal both have modules and plugins to enable a RESTful API, which I’ve found to be the most straightforward way to provide data in a headless architecture. For WordPress there’s the aforementioned JSON API plugin, as well as WP-API (which is being developed with the goal of eventual inclusion in WordPress core). Drupal has the Services module and Services Views, which allows developers to turn Drupal output created with Views into API endpoints.

If you’re interested in the WordPress side of things, WPEngine’s Torque magazine has a number of posts that cover the basics. For Drupal, this is a very handy video tutorial covering Services Views.

One to many (even if it’s just one)

So far, the examples I’ve described are headless with a one-to-one relationship between the CMS and the front-end rendering application. A useful thing resulted from our work on those applications, however: my teammates and I started to decouple our expectations on the CMS side as well. For all the talk of dividing content from presentation, it’s still absurdly easy to build assumptions into your CMS for a single form of delivery. You start out knowing that the CMS will be used for a website, so everything from the order of the fields to the name of your fields is influenced by the form that it will take on the site. But what if your CMS later needs to support different products besides that initial website? This is something that Jeff Eaton and others on the ALA on Air panel addressed quite well, by drawing a distinction between the intertwined content management and web publishing responsibilities of most CMSes.

I’ve found that having to build CMSes that serve many individual products has made me focus more on flexibility. So even if I’m building something that is only being used for a website right now, in the back of my mind I’m wondering what would be required if we had to support a native iOS or Android application using the same CMS. I’ve started thinking of these as nearly-headless (or headless-ready) CMSes.

That relates back to one of the key tenets of the web: separating content from presentation. It’s why we have CSS separate from our markup, and rely on class hooks so that we can style things in ways that do not affect the semantics of the content.

Right now I’m at the very beginning of a CMS project that has to serve multiple products: multiple different touchscreen applications, iOS/Android apps, and a responsive website. If we hadn’t had the initial experience creating headless CMSes for those individual product types, we’d be nervous. But right now we’ve got confidence that we’ve done all of the separate pieces before, even if we’ve never tried to do everything using one CMS.

Downsides

There are a few potential downsides: it increases the number of variables in the system, for one. So not only do you have to deal with Drupal or WordPress, you also have to deal with AngularJS, React, or whatever renders your front-end. (I should interject here that I’m wary of using JavaScript frameworks purely for convenience, especially if the CMS could readily handle the front-end rendering requirements of the project. But that’s a subject for another time.)

This is less an issue for native mobile applications, because those are always going to be separate from the CMS anyway. Still, simply having multiple software systems can be tricky, because each piece comes with its own assumptions and opinions on how things can/should be done. It also means that your team’s expertise has to cover different codebases. (Although that’s potentially an upside, if your team already has that expertise in both camps.)

My litmus test is pretty simple: does going headless with the CMS solve a key problem, and is it enough to outweigh the complexity added to the project?

Try it out

I hope you come away from this thinking that this subject is not as mysterious as it might appear—you can use popular, well-supported CMSes to do this today. If you’ve been wondering how to get complex data into a JavaScript (or native) application, the tools you need are likely available for your CMS of choice. That means that you or someone on your team already has the skills and experience, and the question then shifts from whether you can, to when the time is right to do it.

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Accelerate your career with a 12-week immersion course from our sponsor MakerSquare. They’re enrolling soon in SF, ATX, and LA, so prepare your application today!

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Google has announced Brotli, a new, open source compression algorithm for the Internet.

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The new collaboration features look interesting...

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France has rejected Google's appeal and says it must apply the "Right to be Forgotten" on a global basis.

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A malicious program dubbed XcodeGhost was embedded in hundreds of legitimate apps.

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A large number of sites are getting infected with the aim of driving malware onto site visitors' computers. Google is already blacklisting infected sites.

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Bing is to retire one of it's really useful tools from Webmaster Tools, Link Explorer, on October 1, 2015.

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Facebook will likely launch a freemium version of its workplace product Facebook at Work by the end of the year in attempt to compete with Slack, Yammer

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Big news from our sponsor MailChimp: new MailChimp Pro, with multivariate testing, comparative reports, and priority support.

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WebmasterWorld Members debate the topic of retiring keywords from site architecture.

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You know those moments when you’re shown a new feature to build, a description that needs to be written, or a design that needs to be translated to code, and you just freeze? When you aren’t sure where to go or how to begin?

This happened to me recently; the designer I was working with wanted to include a small animation on the homepage. I’ve taken an animation workshop, and I’ve done very small things on sites before, but I’ve never done something quite like what he asked for. At first I thought it was completely unnecessary, why bother? But as I worked through it, Googling madly and using Mozilla Developer Network a lot, I learned. When I got it working, or at least got it started, it was fun to see.

We’ve all had those moments when we’ve been asked to do something in our work, and cringe. I get it, some days you just want to coast, use the knowledge you have, get the job done. But on those same days, you may be thrown a new idea or concept that you need to make happen. How we handle these moments, can make a difference in how our days go.

Lately, instead of cringing, I’m pausing to think of the task differently when something new is thrown my way. Instead of feeling like I can’t do it, or searching for an argument for why we shouldn’t do it, I’m trying to look at these moments as a possible way to learn.

I can be old fashioned at times; I like the code that I know works, and sometimes I’m slow to warm up to new things. But, I’ve found when I keep an open mind to the possibilities and try something out, I learn and sometimes I even have fun.

We have so many tools at our finger tips that can help us learn quickly, and I know when I learn something on the job, the new ideas stick with me longer. Truth be told, I’ve gotten fond of reading the drier specs and documentation—it’s a way I’ve found I can learn on my own in these moments of uncertainty.

So now, instead of cringing when the new idea is presented to me, I’m pausing to think through what a plan of action could be. Can I figure out how to make it happen? When I get something to work, like I did recently with that animation, it’s a gratifying feeling, knowing that I pushed through the fear and learned. Truth be told, this is often how we grow, by pushing through those moments, we realize that we’re capable of figuring it out and getting it done.

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Tuesday’s article on animations and vestibular disorders may have left you wondering what else you can do to make your animations accessible. Here are a few resources to start learning more about how animation and accessibility can work together:

WCAG recommendations

This is a good place to start for the basics of accessible animations. In a nutshell, the WCAG has two recommendations that specifically apply to animation. The first is to provide pause controls for any animation that starts automatically and plays for more than 5 seconds. Auto-updating content and animated carousels could likely fall under this category.

The second is to not have any part of the screen flashing more than three times a second. Flashing any part of the page above this threshold can risk potentially triggering seizures.

Providing alternate content

Just like static content, there are times when providing alternate content for an animation is a smart thing to do. Webacessibility.com’s best practices for animation offers suggestions on when to provide alternate content and limiting the number of times or duration of animations for assistive technology.

Making your SVGs accessible

More web animation is being done with SVG—and that’s great news for accessibility. If you include SVG inline in your web page, it’s inherently more accessible than canvas: whereas canvas is simply a drawing area, the content and text inside your SVG elements can be access directly by the browser.

Dudley Storey and Léonie Watson have both published useful lists on how to make SVGs accessible in a variety of contexts. You can also assign ARIA roles to SVG elements for more descriptive power. The a11y project has a helpful primer on ARIA roles to get you started.

More on vestibular disorders

Marissa Christina does a wonderful job describing what it’s like to live with a vestibular disorder in her interview on The Big Web Show. Her site, Abledis, is full of great insights and information as well. (The section on motion warnings hasn’t been updated in awhile, but a lot of insight can be gleaned from the comments.)

Also, Greg Tarnoff has proposed using specific Twitter hashtags to warn others of potentially triggering links.

These are all useful resources to check along the way to be sure you’re making your animations accessible. If you have any similar resources that you use, please share them in the comments!

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WebmasterWorld members discuss Google Contributor: An experiment to find new ways to fund the web, instead of purely advertising. Can Google Contributor ever work?

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Back in June, our friend Khoi Vinh launched a survey of tools used by designers over on Subtraction.com. Today, he shares the results from 4,000 designers working in some 200 countries. The findings contained a few surprises for our team:

Interface design

As anecdotal experience may already have suggested, Sketch has pulled into the lead for interface design, edging out Photoshop by 5% among survey respondents. Clearly Photoshop is not dead. And the results might skew differently if the survey had been limited to design studios and agencies, where Sketch weighed in at 27-28% (depending on size of studio). Still, there was a time before responsive web design when no one could have imagined Photoshop winning anything less than the whopping majority of designer desktops.

Version control and file management

No surprise here: Dropbox leads the field for version control and file management, followed respectably closely by Github. As you’d expect, Github fares best at startups, but it even does respectably well at small design studios.

Some classics are tough to beat

When it comes to brainstorming, the industry overwhelmingly favors that lo-fi classic: pencil and paper. The usual suspects in other areas of the survey (Sketch, Illustrator, and Photoshop) lagged further behind here than you might expect.

Check out the full results (beautifully designed by the fine folks at Hyperakt and powered by Typeform), and let us know what surprised you in the comments.

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Google AdSense is running a Sticky Ad Unit Beta test.

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WebmasterWorld's monthly look at Google's SERPs changes.

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Over the past 12 years, I’ve been in a lot of training sessions; some were company mandated, others were ones I designed and ran myself, still others were sessions I paid money to attend. For a number of years, I’ve been in charge of a design team, and that means being responsible for training and development for my team members. While they are, of course, active participants, it’s important to acknowledge that training is about the transfer of information and the building of skills. The junior members of your team do not spontaneously gain skills. Instead, you need a clear process in place to train and mentor them.

There are a number of things to consider when talking about training designers. My experience has been on an in-house team, so I’ll speak to that type of training and mentorship, but this applies to all kinds of design and development teams. OK, onward.

Your weekly or monthly check-ins with your design team are a time to catch up on how current projects are going, but you should also find out what they need help doing and what new things they want to learn. I try to match designers yearly performance and development goals with shorter-term goals, scaffolding them so that we constantly build toward more complex abilities and tasks.

But how to find out these things? A simple exercise often helps. As you do a wrap-up on one project, ask the designer to complete the following sentences:

One thing I can do now is ______.
One thing I’m still unsure about is ______.
One thing I’d like to learn is ______.

You learn:

They now have a fresh new skill that needs to be practiced and embedded in their workflow.
They are not clear on a task or technique and need your help to understand it.
After doing this project, they have an idea of where they fell short.

The second and third answers are where you can focus your training plans.

For many people, there is a temptation to just assign a big new task and “let them get on with it.” But this is only effective for the most motivated people, and actually assumes they already have the skills to complete the task. That’s not really learning anything new, is it? So, let’s look at this in a slightly different light. Assigning tasks means looking at someone’s current abilities and tailoring the assignment to match. I think of this in four levels of difficulty.

Imagine the task is to develop a pattern library for a new web app the company is working on. The development goal is for the designer to learn how to design UIs based on components, code, and systems, not full PSD layouts.

Level one

“I’d like you to develop a pattern library for our new web app. You should base it off the corporate pattern library, and build it in Sketch. We need type, button, and menu styles, and it needs to be completed by the end of the month.”

This is the lowest level, and has very little autonomy. All the variables are controlled, from the content, to the references, to the timeline. This is good for a designer who needs to get the basics down.

Level two

“I’d like you to develop a pattern library for our new web app. You should base it off the corporate pattern library, and build it in Sketch. It needs to be completed by the end of the month.”

There is still very little autonomy here, but fewer variables are controlled. The designer has the freedom to decide what UI elements will be in the pattern library. You would use this level when someone have their sea legs, and needs experience deciding what is important in their projects.

Level three

“I’d like you to develop a pattern library for our new web app. You should base it off the corporate pattern library, and it needs to be completed by the end of the month.”

Here you can see there is much more freedom to design independently. As the design lead, though, you are still controlling important factors like deadlines. The design tool, in this case Sketch, is no longer important, as the designer already has knowledge of what the project will need, and can plan accordingly.

Level four

“I’d like you to develop a pattern library for our new web app. Let me know if you have any questions.”

Wow—almost complete freedom. The company goals are still defined, but the designer is given freedom to deliver whatever they think will meet the project goals.

Whatever the designer has identified as a skill they would like to learn, or a project they would like to try, you can use these different levels to assign that project. By offering direction that acknowledges the gaps in their knowledge, you will challenge them without making it an impossible experience.

So, you have assigned a project that will develop new skills for them. They have started on their way. Regular check-ins, especially during team meetings, gives them a chance to share their progress, not only with you, but their teammates. After all, as a senior designer, it’s your job to make sure they are able to complete the task and learn specific new skills. By reviewing both the controlled factors, like deadlines and project goals, and the more creative factors, like tools and visual design, your check-ins create a measurable, achievable pathway through the project. Everyone likes pathways!

I encourage you to use a process like this to build up the skill levels of your more junior teammates. Looking out for the health of your team, and the projects you launch, means also looking out for the learning and development of your team members. This process starts with senior and junior designers working together to identify training needs. It continues with assigned work that builds, not crushes, your teammates. And finally, because few people can just spontaneously learn on their own, you act as a constant mentor through the assignment. The process standardizes the transfer of information and techniques from senior to junior designers, in a clear and understandable way, so that your team members gain the skills they need to grow as designers.

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Instagram is to launch its advertising programs in 30 countries from September 30, and it's for large through to small advertisers.

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When an organisation such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) starts monitoring the effect closely, you know ad blocking is becoming a major concern.

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Facebook continues its tests of mobile adverts as it, and many others try to find ways to make mobile ads work for its customers.

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Microsoft is trying to discourage users from switching away from its Edge browser when searching in Bing...

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When it's quite obviously a parody, it seems that a lawsuit may not go anywhere,...

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Memory-saving, Flash pausing, power-saving, and tab restore enhancements all in Chrome 45.

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The Android version of the app for advertisers wanting to manage their campaigns while mobile.

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Google's Street View app for Android and iOS now include 360-degree imagery.

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Mozilla has said the preview is being released in only one country right now.

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TrueView now in core AdWords interface, along with new columns.

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Make beautiful websites with help from our sponsor Squarespace. You can keep it simple, or customize HTML, CSS and JavaScript with their Developer Platform.

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Make beautiful websites with help from our sponsor Squarespace. You can keep it simple, or customize HTML, CSS and JavaScript with their Developer Platform.

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"After November 1, mobile web pages that show an app install interstitial that hides a significant amount of content on the transition from the search result page will no longer be considered mobile-friendly."

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Google's new logo is not just for the desktop anymore

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jeudi 31 décembre 2015

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mardi 24 novembre 2015

lundi 23 novembre 2015

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jeudi 19 novembre 2015

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Communication

Code review

Documentation

jeudi 12 novembre 2015

December 2 event: Ask Dr. Web—Live

Featuring

Drupal and WordPress guides from Pantheon

mercredi 11 novembre 2015

mardi 10 novembre 2015

lundi 9 novembre 2015

vendredi 6 novembre 2015

jeudi 5 novembre 2015

The Lion City

A unique blend

The right environment for creatives?

A genuine world city

mercredi 4 novembre 2015

mardi 3 novembre 2015

samedi 31 octobre 2015

vendredi 30 octobre 2015

mercredi 28 octobre 2015

lundi 26 octobre 2015

samedi 24 octobre 2015

vendredi 23 octobre 2015

jeudi 22 octobre 2015

mercredi 21 octobre 2015

mardi 20 octobre 2015

The curse of enterprise software

Tools maketh the developer

The editor’s fear of manuals

Helping managers see the big picture

The human bottleneck

Setting up for success

lundi 19 octobre 2015

vendredi 16 octobre 2015

mercredi 14 octobre 2015