Author: Tom (Page 296 of 429)

The CSS Single Responsibility Principle

December 5, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

In software development, there’s this set of principles called the SOLID principles. As with most things in computer science, it’s yet another acronym in which each letter stands for the following:

Single-Responsibility
Open/Closed
Liskov Substitution
Interface Segregation
Dependency Inversion

Though these ideas are geared towards software engineering and object-oriented design, there’s one principle that I think is relevant to front-end web development (well, actually a few but I digress for now).

Specifically, I think the idea of the single-responsibility principle is applicable to CSS – namely, within the popular LESS and Sass preprocessors.

On Open Source Entitlements: Users

December 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

This post is part two of two on a series of open source entitlement.

In the previous post, I mentioned that working in the world of open source has the potential for others to feel a sense of entitlement. The thing is, I don’t believe that this isn’t limited just to contributors.

Granted, I don’t think those who end up using free and open source software aim to present themselves as being entitled – I mean, they are taking advantage of the software that contributors have made available, right?

But the flip side of this is that users who find themselves working with open source software set expectations that may far exceed the amount for which they paid for the software.

On Open Source Entitlements: Contributors

December 4, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

This post is part one of two on a series of open source entitlement.

One of the challenges that comes with working with and using open source is the danger for it breed a sense of entitlement.

For the most part, I don’t think those get who involved in open source software aim to become entitled – after all, building open source projects is a labor of love, right?

We spend our time that could be spent doing other things volunteering to work on something that we’re passionate about, and that we believe will help to make the world (or at least a few people’s lives) a bit better.

But the underbelly of this is that people who find themselves involved in open source either as contributors or as users end up acting entitled from time-to-time.

Should There Be Consistency in Product Landing Page Design?

December 3, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

I’d venture to say that most anyone you ask will say that a product’s landing page design plays one of the most important roles in generating conversions. After all, why else would we have tools and products dedicated solely to studying visitor analytics, data tracking, a/b testing, and so on?

Common sense, right?

Granted, there are certain things that are known to work when building landing pages. That is to say that there are principles that are tried, true, and proven as it relates to creating landing pages for working to sell products to users.

The thing is, all of these principles can be dressed up differently depending on the color scheme, company branding, culture, verbiage, and so on.

With that said – and I’m sure there’s an answer for those of you who are designers, marketers, and/or usability experts who are reading along – how much, if at all, does the consistency of landing page design matter for products that belong to a single brand?

Add a Custom Wrapper To The WordPress More Tag

December 2, 2013 / Tom / 0 Comments

Most of the popular CSS frameworks that are available today offer some sort of grid system for us to use such that we can arrange our content in rows and columns. This is advantageous for a number of reasons, the least of which is not for aiding responsive design.

When it comes to WordPress, one of the most common elements that authors will use is the `more` tag.

Just as there are times where we may want to indicate that a class has (or doesn’t have) a `more` tag, we may also want to wrap the tag in a row with columns on either side of the tag.

This gives us flexibility in styling the tag not only by helping to place the text by using columns and/or offsets, but also by taking advantage of a grid in the context of responsive design.