Design & Development
The web performance impact of third-party libraries
August 3, 2016, by ronan
In many ways the ease with which one can include third-party libraries in a web page is a testament to both the design of the web and extraordinarily rich and open ecosystem around it. With a few third-party services you can transform a static HTML page into a rich interactive experience with comments, media, analytics,... Read More
How to build an animated loading spinner
July 5, 2016, by Stephen Delaney
Loading spinners are a great way to provide user feedback during waiting periods. This can signal to a user that your website has not crashed and is processing information. The original way to create loading spinners for the web was by using animated GIFs. Animated GIFs can have weight issues. This is due to the... Read More
Mobile-friendliness 101: How to build a fixed navigation bar
June 24, 2016, by Ruadhán O'Donoghue
Fixed navigation bars, or “sticky” navbars, are a very common design pattern. They allow the visitor to access the main site features very quickly since they are always visible, wherever the user is on the site or page. On the other hand, some would argue that they can take up too much space unnecessarily on... Read More
A page weight reference for the web – the 1 MB website
June 1, 2016, by ronan
“Every line is the perfect length if you don’t measure it.” — Marty Rubin In engineering disciplines it’s very important to have fixed frames of reference to enable easy comparison of results. In the web developer community we already have many page weight measuring tools such as our own mobiReady and WebPagetest.org. So we have the weighing... Read More
Eddystone beacon technology and the Physical Web
March 25, 2016, by Tomas Trnka
With more players supporting Eddystone bluetooth beacon technology it’s important to look at it from the web developer perspective. This article will reveal how it all works behind the scenes, show how to optimize a website for Physical Web beacons across different implementations, and discuss its caveats... Read More
