Archive for year: 2018

Original Source: https://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2018/06/20-best-new-portfolios-june-2018/

Welcome back, Readers. It’s June, and if I got paid extra for every instance of the word “minimalist” in this article, I could probably afford to vacation in Canada. Well, my point is that minimalism is the general theme of this month, because that’s what it has all come down to: various forms of minimalism.

Still, within that descriptor, there’s a fair amount of variety to be had here. Enjoy.

Note: I’m judging these sites by how good they look to me. If they’re creative and original, or classic but really well-done, it’s all good to me. Sometimes, UX and accessibility suffer. For example, many of these sites depend on JavaScript to display their content at all; this is a Bad Idea, kids. If you find an idea you like and want to adapt to your own site, remember to implement it responsibly.

Bruno Ferdinand

Bruno Ferdinand is a designer with strong type skills and the nearly-obligatory hipsterish tendencies we see a lot of nowadays. The guy does simple, beautiful, and kind of rustic design rather well.

Platform: JS app

Yumpic

Yumpic is a portfolio site featuring — and you might have guessed this — photos and videos of food. They specialize in food-related digital content for anyone who wants to make the perfect Instagram account, and also (read: actually mostly) for people who make money off their food. The actual portfolio work is artfully interspersed with illustration and playful touches, which definitely sets the right mood,in my opinion.

Platform: WordPress

Duane Dalton

Duane Dalton’s portfolio pretty strongly reflects his print-focused work, being minimalist and asymmetrical. It’s one of the simpler sites on this list, but no less visually pleasing for that.

Platform: Static Site

Kenta Toshikura

Kenta Toshikura’s website is one of those minimalist-looking presentation-style sites. As is par for the course in cases like these, I’d not look too closely at the usability, but the visuals and general aesthetic style are just plain pretty, darnit. In particular, there’s this touch of 3D-feeling typography that catches my eye.

Platform: Static Site

Ellen Mandemaker

I’m not precisely sure what Ellen Mandemaker makes, precisely, but my best guess is art. And art is what you get from the get go: you’ll see a collage of it to begin with, and then a simple and orderly portfolio that promptly and efficiently throws you into the deep end. It’s one of those portfolios that made me think “I’m not entirely sure what I’m looking at, but I like it.”

Platform: Static Site

No Plans

No Plans is a one-page portfolio that keeps things fairly simple, preferring a clean design and a decidedly serif-friendly way of doing things. Also, they indent some of their paragraphs. I know, right? You hardly ever see that these days.

Platform: WordPress

Lab101

I’ll never be a fan of sites that change your cursor, but everything else about Lab101 is pretty solid. The overall aesthetic is minimalist and modern, with some interesting touches of 3D animation on the “Contact” page.

Platform: WordPress

Studio Bjørk

Studio Bjørk has a thing for monochromatic palettes, diagonal lines, and horizontal layouts. And you know what? It works out pretty darned well for them. There’s also a significant bit of animation, great type, and some background video here and there, all combining to make a site that a marketer would call dynamic. Oh,

[Sighs.] Fine, I’ll call it dynamic, too. It just sounds so much like marketer-speak that I didn’t want to say it.

Platform: Static Site

Juul Hondius

I often make reference to magazine-style designs ion this article series, but Juul Hondius’ portfolio is one of the more interesting examples I’ve seen lately. It looks like an old, ooold magazine, complete with small spacing issues and slightly cramped text, combined with beautiful and striking photography.

Those might technically be “issues”, but the design as a whole hits me with a very specific sense of nostalgia that just sells the imagery to me. Besides, it’s a photographer’s site. How badly do you want to read the text anyway?

Platform: Static Site

Thu-Van Tran

Thu-Van Tran’s website has one main theme that makes it visually interesting: layers. Every page is loaded on top of the home page like one piece of paper overlaying another. It’s like a paper prototype come to life. Combined with the sheer simplicity of layout, and strong typographic choices, it stands out.

Platform: Static Site

Aristide Benoist

Aristide Benoist’s portfolio combines a grid-based aesthetic with warping animations to striking effect. While most of the text could and certainly should be bigger, the visual theme of this site is enough to make you look, at least. Whether it’s interesting enough to make you grab your glasses will greatly depend on the user.

Platform: Static Site

Datagif

Datagif love their sans-serif type, and apparently spicing up standard layouts with geometric flourishes and animation. This one’s not going to blow your mind, but it looks good, even kind of playful for all the corporate aesthetic it has. Give it a look.

Platform: Static Site (I think)

Handsome

Oh, Handsome takes me back maybe five years or so. The large serif type, the darkened photos as backdrops, all those barely visible straight lines. Did we just go back to the early days of flat design? Well, it’s both nostalgic, nearly perfectly executed, and a pleasure to browse.

Platform: Static Site

Sister

Sister’s agency site is living proof that any design style, even the once super-artsy minimalism-with-asymmetry trend, can be given an almost corporate flair. And that’s not a criticism. Corporate-feeling front end design tends to be modern and devastatingly effective in its simplicity, and the same is true here.

Not a fan of those occasional modal pop-ups, though. That’s a corporate trend that can go straight to hell.

Platform: WordPress

Makers and Allies

Makers and Allies is a branding studio in the finest tradition of hipster design studios, but with a lot more motion design added to the mix. It evokes just the right balance of rustic aesthetics with the modern technical competence we expect. Or at least the animation we expect. Whatever, it looks good, even if some of the text could use more contrast.

Platform: WordPress

Bipolar Studio

Bipolar Studio combines motion graphics with a pretty modernist aesthetic style, and good old fashioned big type. Their work basically is video, so it’s they use a lot of it in their design. I do like the little “stats” section at the end of each project page, detailing what it took to complete each project.

It’s just that, and I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the logo could be bigger. With type that thin, it should be.

Platform: Static Site and/or JS App

Akins Parker

Akins Parker’s agency site wasn’t made with Powerpoint, but it’s presentational design in its purest form. You go to see this one for the graphics, not for the usability.

Platform: Static Site

Ian Jones

Ian Jones’ portfolio is another site to embrace the visual grid theme. But unlike many other sites, the visual representation of the grid is only visible when his work is on the page. It’s a dead-simple approach, but it looks calm and professional, and I can’t fault that.

Platform: Static Site

Michael Uloth

Michael Uloth is a rare talent indeed. When he’s not literally singing opera, he builds minimalist-yet-beautiful websites for artsy people. His own site is no exception.

Platform: Static Site and/or JS App

Lasse Fløde

Lasse Fløde is a photography studio with a striking one-page portfolio. Lovers of white space should definitely enjoy this one, as it employs that asymmetrical almost collage-style so favored by many photography portfolios these days. Simple and effective.

Platform: Static Site

Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5!

Source

p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;}
.alignleft {float:left;}
p.showcase {clear:both;}
body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;}

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/Yi0kECfpYmc/parallax-scrolling-1131762

One web design trend that refuses to go away is parallax scrolling. With this, the website layout sees the background of the web page moving at a slower rate to the foreground, creating a 3D effect as you scroll. It can sometimes be overwhelming, but when used sparingly it can provide a nice, subtle element of depth that results in a distinctive and memorable website.

But to show how it should be done, we've collected together sites that employ the technique to good effect. In some cases the parallax scrolling is the star of the show; in others it simply adds a touch of depth that makes the foreground seem to pop out a little.

01. Bear Grylls

Digital agency Outpost was tasked with creating a new digital strategy for explorer and TV personality Bear Grylls. “To live up to the new brand vision and values and embody the ‘adventure brand’ we needed to take people on a journey online,” says the studio in its case study. A rich, dynamic user experience was key.

Subtle parallax is used throughout, but the real scene-stealer is the homepage. Grylls appears in a dramatic mountainscape, and the viewer is drawn into the scene as they scroll. It’s a great introduction to the adventures to follow.

02. ToyFight

ToyFight is an award-winning creative agency, and its website is a whole lot of fun. Founders Jonny Lander and Leigh Whipday have turned themselves into 3D figures, which appear in a range of scenes throughout the site (including this cheeky Sagmeister & Walsh reference). Clever use of parallax amplifies the 3D effect, and paired with bold, bright, plain backgrounds, never becomes overwhelming or irritating.

03. Hello Monday

Hello Monday is a design agency based in Denmark. It aims to create immersive digital experiences that tell a story and bring joy to their users, and it has gone one step beyond with its portfolio site. When creating a studio site, the difficulty is that adopting cool or cutting-edge design ideas often means sacrificing clarity and usability, which is paramount for a design portfolio. 

Hello Monday manages to achieve both by introducing a subtle parallax effect within a pared-back page layout. Each project hero image moves slightly, to bring it to life and add energy to the design without detracting from the information on show. The effect is used on the studio’s homepage only, with individual project pages kept static to allow the work to shine. 

04. A-dam

A-dam uses parallax to showcase its stylish underwear

A-dam designs original boxer briefs and shorts for men with character, using GOTS-certified organic cotton. The boxers are handmade by people with fair wages and normal working hours. They're an ethical and stylish alternative to your usual supermarket pants, and their site, created by Build in Amsterdam, showcases them nicely, with assorted parallax elements popping in from all directions as you scroll.

05. Diesel: BAD Guide

84.Paris created this impressive parallax website (and associated social media campaign) to accompany the launch of Diesel’s BAD fragrance. The one-page site presents the series of rules that make up the ‘BAD Guide’. 

The user can explore by dragging the mouse around the parallax page, which is laid out like a pinboard of images to click through. There’s advice on everything from Tinder (‘Swipe right, right, right, right – you’ll sort them out later’) to Instagram (‘Don’t forget to get in touch with an ex on Thursdays #TBT’), accompanied by monochrome illustrations.

06. Myriad

Bareface’s site for Myriad shows off the furniture system’s infinite possibilities

Myriad is a range of modular office furniture by Boss Design that's designed to be flexible and reconfigurable, allowing you to build your own working spaces as you see fit. As part of its work on the launch, Bareface created a site showcasing Myriad's infinite possibilities with clever use of parallax elements, pulling in inspiring arrangements of furniture as you explore the site.

07. Firewatch

Each layer of trees moves independently

One of the most beautiful examples of parallax scrolling we’ve seen is this website for the game Firewatch, which uses six moving layers to create a sense of depth. It’s great because there’s no scroll hijacking (something that often accompanies the parallax effect), and it’s only used at the top of the page – the rest of the site is still so you can read the information without getting seasick. If you want to see how it’s done, here’s a nice demo on CodePen.

08. Garden Studio

Layering of the landscape makes it seem three dimensional

In a similar vein, Garden Studio has also opted to use the parallax technique in a sensible and delightful way at the top of its site, before moving into a mostly static page. The shifting landscape is subtle and unobtrusive yet also the star of the show – we found ourselves scrolling up and down again and again. 

09. GitHub 404

GitHub’s 404 breaks the rules of parallax for a disorienting effect

This isn’t strictly parallax scrolling as the effect happens on mouse wiggle as opposed to scroll, but it’s a really fun page that uses layering to add depth. Unlike 'proper' parallax, the background moves faster than the foreground, creating a disorienting, otherworldly feel.

10. Jess & Russ

Every illustration has a sense of depth

It's no surprise that design power couple Russ Maschmeyer and Jessica Hische's wedding website is a beauty to behold. The site charts their romantic story, with parallax scrolling used throughout to add depth to the illustrations. They got married in 2012, but the website is still well worth a look.

11. Alquimia WRG

Alquimia WRG uses parallax elements to simulate a 3D space environment

Based in Milan, Alquimia WRG is a digital agency that aims to create amazing and effective experiences for brands on digital media. Clean and minimal, and only black and white, the website uses a mixture of the usual suspects (HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript) to achieve a neat package.

HTML5 canvas is used to animate the initial loading image. Subtle "parallax elements in the homepage are dynamically created and animated to simulate a 3D space environment through mouse movement," says Andrea Bianchi, creative director at Alquimia.

Page navigation is achieved via a simple and smooth page sliding effect, which is implemented by changing CSS properties with JavaScript. The works page contains a simple list of selected projects, which, when selected, reveals further information in a smooth sliding effect.

When such content is loading, a JavaScript animated preloading bar appears at the bottom of the screen, which is a nice touch. The site achieves its goal, which, as Bianchi says, "was to create an ideal balance between content, usability and user experience".

12. Make Your Money Matter

Manage your finances with information and advice from Make Your Money Matter

Finance and money are hardly the most interesting of subjects. But New York-based digital agency Firstborn is quids in with this dynamic parallax scrolling website Make Your Money Matter for the Public Service Credit Union.

With the aim of teaching the public the benefits of joining a credit union, rather than using a bank, this brilliant site includes everything from how a credit union works, to where to find one and how to apply, as well as a calculator showing just how much banks profit from customer's deposits.

13. Seattle Space Needle

Scrambled egg all over my face. What is a boy to do?

The site for Seattle's iconic Space Needle starts at the base of the 605-foot tower and invites you to scroll up all the way to the top, taking in views of Seattle and the SkyCity Restaurant along the way. And if 605 feet isn't quite high enough for you, keep on scrolling and see what you find!

14. Madwell

New York agency Madwell uses parallax scrolling to add a sense of depth

Design and development agency Madwell, based in New York, shows off its portfolio with a range of parallax scrolling effects to create a noticeable 3D style that adds a huge amount of depth.

15. Peugeot Hybrid4

Peugeot uses parallax scrolling to create an auto-playing web comic

Peugeot has gone all out with using parallax scrolling to create an auto-playing comic in the browser. The comic plays as you scroll down the page (or use its autoplay feature that automatically scrolls) and helps to advertise the car manufacturer's new HYbrid4 technology.

16. Cultural Solutions

The circles move at different speeds for a subtle 3D effect

Arts consultancy Cultural Solutions employs a subtle parallax scrolling effect to introduce depth to its homepage. Its main brand image is the use of colourful circles – the circles in the background move slower than those in the foreground, creating a subtle 3D effect.

17. Walking Dead

Walking Dead uses parallax scrolling to pull you into its gory world

We're big fans of TV zombie drama The Walking Dead at Creative Bloq, and we were gripped by this website launched to promote it. The imaginative site harks back to the show's comic strip origins and makes clever use of parallax scrolling to pull you into its sick and depraved world.

"We came at this as fans of the show, first and foremost," says lead designer Gavin Beck. "With this drive, we wanted to create a world within the Walking Dead that fans could explore and appreciate.

"To achieve this, we looked to several existing technologies and techniques such as HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript/jQuery, Web Audio/HTML5 Audio, and parallax scrolling. The challenge was to find a unique approach to incorporate all these methods into a single engaging experience across all platforms."

18. New York Times: Tomato Can Blues

A beautiful experience is to be had with this parallax scrolling New York Times article

In today's era of low attention spans and bite-size media, how do you attract people to longform journalism? Here's a great response to that problem from the New York Times, combining some clever web design techniques with storytelling and comic-inspired illustrations created by Atilla Futaki.

One of the best examples of parallax scrolling we've seen, the article takes you through the story of a cage fighter written by Mary Pilon. As you scroll through the content, the illustrations come alive with clever animations and alterations, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in the content.

Futaki's illustrations were based on police records, witness accounts, photographs and the reporter's notes, and the attention to detail shines through. All in all it's a great reading experience – is this the future of online journalism?

19. Snow Fall

The New York Times’ ‘Snow Fall’ article kickstarted a whole new craze for rich parallax sites

One of the first sites to really push the boundaries on what you could do with longform editorial content online, the New York Times' Snow Fall article combines a range of different elements, including parallax scrolling and web video.

The article, about the horror of an avalanche at Tunnel Creek, was published online in December 2012 but still stands strong as an example of what you can do with parallax scrolling. The newspaper presented the Pulitzer-winning article in an innovative way that grabbed the design community's attention worldwide.

Related articles:

5 quick ways to improve your portfolio dramatically35 brilliantly designed 404 error pagesCreate an interactive parallax image

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/abduzeedo/~3/atJW2Zx6Duw/move-world-mural-drawings-deck-two

Move the World Mural Drawings by Deck Two

AoiroStudio
Jun 08, 2018

Very cool project title for a mural drawing by Deck two who is an artist from Paris, France. Entitled: Move the World, we follow him on this absolute beautiful drawing showcasing the important landmarks of the World. It’s quite stunning and I can’t even imagine the level of patience it would take to work on this kind of project. Props to Thomas for his incredible dedication!

One of my last mural project in Memphis, Tennessee. A huge 2,6 x 13 meters long panoramic view in the entrance of JKI offices. That mural embraces all the famous places in the world that the company has been reaching through the years. Long days of work to complete this freehand mural with just a couple of Molotow acrylic markers. I chose a small 2mm nib to get as much details as I could so the visitors could stare at the walls to discover all the hidden details. I hope you guys will like it too.

More Links
Learn about about Deck two
Follow Deck two’s work on Behance
Illustration & Art Direction

mural
murals
drawing
drawings

Original Source: https://www.sitepoint.com/complete-guide-wordpress-performance-optimization/

According to Builtwith.com, WordPress holds close to 50% of the CMS share of the world’s top 1,000,000 websites. As for the ecommerce sphere, we’re at 33% with WooCommerce. And if we cast a wider net, percentages go higher. Although we may complain that WordPress can get bloated, resource-heavy, and its data model leaves a lot to be desired, there is no denying that WordPress is everywhere.

WordPress can thank its simplicity and a low barrier to entry for this pervasiveness. It’s easy to set up, and requires next to no technical knowledge. Hosting for WordPress can be found for as little as a couple of dollars per month, and the basic setup takes just a half hour of clicking. Free themes for WordPress are galore, some with included WYSIWYG page builders.

Many look down on it, but in many ways we can thank WordPress for the growth of the internet and PHP, and many internet professionals have WP’s gentle learning curve to thank for their careers.

But this ease of entry comes at a cost. Plenty of websites that proudly wear the WordPress badge were not done by professionals but by the cheapest developers. And often, it shows. Professional look and professional performance were afterthoughts.

One of the main points of feedback the owner of an aspiring high-quality website will get from a grudging professional is that performance and a professional look and feel shouldn’t be afterthoughts. You can’t easily paint or stick them over a website. Professional websites should be premeditated.

Above, a famous UK used car dealer, Ling’s Cars, tried a unique way to make a kitsch marketing punchline. Unless you’re REALLY sure about what you’re doing, DO NOT try this at home

And this starts with…

Choice of Hosting

Typically, new users will go with products that are on the low-cost side, with most of beginner-friendly bells and whistles. Considering the shady business practices by some big industry players in this arena, and the complaints and demands for site migration professionals coming from clients, this is a part of website setup that requires due attention.

We can divide WordPress hosting vendors into a few tiers.

Premium, WordPress-dedicated vendors like Kinsta whose plans start at $100 per month, or even higher-grade managed hosting like WordPress VIP by Automattic, may be worth their salt, but also may be out of reach for many website owners.

Medium tier Flywheel, A2 hosting, Siteground and Pantheon are among those considered reliable and performance oriented, offering acceptable speed and a managed hosting service for those more price-conscious. Users here may get a bit less hand-holding, but these services usually strike an acceptable balance between a solid setup, price, and options for more advanced users. Not to forget, there is Cloudways, which is a hybrid between VPS and managed hosting. Those with their audience in Europe may look into Pilvia, as it offers a performant server stack and is pretty affordable.

There’s an interesting survey of customer satisfaction with more prominent hosting vendors, published by Codeinwp.

For those of us not scared of the command line, there are VPS and dedicated-server vendors like Digital Ocean, Vultr, Linode, Amazon’s Lightsail, Hetzner in Europe, and OVH. Hetzner is a German vendor known for its quality physical servers on offer, somewhat above the price of virtual servers, while OVH offers very cost-efficient virtual servers. For the price-conscious, OVH’s subsidiary Kimsufi in Europe and Canada also offers bargain physical dedicated servers, and Host US has very affordable virtual servers.

With managed hosting, things to look for are a good server stack, good CDN integration, and of course SSD storage. Guaranteed resources, like with A2, are a big plus. The next thing to look for is SSH-access. Tech-savvy users may profit from WP-CLI availability.

When choosing a VPS, the thing to look for is XEN or KVM virtualization over OpenVZ, because it mitigates the overselling of resources, helping guarantee that the resources you bought are really yours. It also provides better security.

Easy Engine is software that can make your entire VPS/WordPress installation a one-hour job.

Regarding the server stack, Nginx is preferred to Apache if we’re pursuing performance, and PHP 7 is a must. If we really need Apache, using Nginx as a reverse proxy is a plus, but this setup can get complex.

Tests performed give PHP 7 a big edge over the previous version. According to fasthosts.co.uk:

WordPress 4.1 executed 95% more requests per second on PHP 7 compared to PHP 5.6.

When choosing your hosting, be aware of negative experiences with some providers that have become notorious.

Software Considerations

Things that usually slow down WordPress websites are bulky, bloated front ends with a lot of static resources and database queries. These issues arise from the choice of theme (and its page builders, huge sliders, etc) — which not only slow down initial loading due to many requests and overall size, but often slow down the browser due to a lot of JavaScript, and stuff to render, making it unresponsive.

The golden rule here is: don’t use it unless there’s a good reason to.

This may seem like a rule coming from the mouth of Homer Simpson, but if you can skip any of the bells and whistles, do so. Be conservative. If you must add some shiny functionality or JS eye candy, always prefer those tailored and coded as specifically as possible for your exact need. If you’re a skilled coder, and the project justifies the effort, code it yourself with minimalism in mind.

Review all the plugins your website can’t live without — and remove the others.

And most importantly: back up your website before you begin pruning!

Data model

If you have a theme where you use a lot of custom posts or fields, be warned that a lot of these will slow down your database queries. Keep your data model as simple as possible, and if not, consider that WordPress’ original intended purpose was as a blogging engine. If you need a lot more than that, you may want to consider some of the MVC web frameworks out there that will give you greater control over your data model and the choice of database.

In WordPress we can build a rich custom data model by using custom post types, custom taxonomies and custom fields, but be conscious of performance and complexity costs.

If you know your way around the code, inspect your theme to find unnecessary database queries. Every individual database trip spends precious milliseconds in your TTFB, and megabytes of your server’s memory. Remember that secondary loops can be costly — so be warned when using widgets and plugins that show extra posts, like in sliders or widget areas. If you must use them, consider fetching all your posts in a single query, where it may otherwise slow down your website. There’s a GitHub repo for those not wanting to code from scratch.

Meta queries can be expensive

Using custom fields to fetch posts by some criteria can be a great tool to develop sophisticated things with WP. This is an example of a meta query, and here you can find some elaboration on its costs. Summary: post meta wasn’t built for filtering, taxonomies were.

get_post_meta is a function typically called to fetch custom fields, and it can be called with just the post ID as an argument, in which case it fetches all the post’s meta fields in an array, or it can have a custom field’s name as a second argument, in which case it returns just the specified field.

If using get_post_meta()for a certain post multiple times on a single page or request (for multiple custom fields), be aware that this won’t incur extra cost, because the first time this function is called, all the post meta gets cached.

Database hygiene

Installing and deleting various plugins, and changing different themes over the lifetime of your website, often clutters your database with a lot of data that isn’t needed. It’s completely possible to discover — upon inspecting why a WordPress website is sluggish, or why it won’t even load, due to exhausted server memory — that the database has grown to hundreds and hundreds of megabytes, or over a gigabyte, with no content that explains it.

wp-options is where a lot of orphaned data usually gets left behind. This includes, but is not limited to, various transients (this post warns of best practices regarding deletion of transients in plugins). Transients are a form of cache, but as with any other caching, if misused, it can do more harm than good. If your server environment provides it, wp-cli has a command set dedicated to transients management, including deletion. If not, there are plugins in the WordPress plugins repo that can delete expired transients, but which offer less control.

If deleting transients still leaves us with a bloated database without any tangible cause, WP-Sweep is an excellent free tool that can do the job of cleaning up the database. Another one to consider is WP Optimize.

Before doing any kind of database cleanup, it’s strongly recommended that you back up your database!

One of the plugins that comes in very handy for profiling of the whole WordPress request lifecycle is Debug Objects. It offers an inspection of all the transients, shortcodes, classes, styles and scripts, templates loaded, db queries, and hooks.

After ensuring a sane, performance-oriented setup — considering our server stack in advance, eliminating the possible bloat created by theme choice and plugins and widgets overload — we should try to identify bottlenecks.

If we test our website in a tool like Pingdom Speed Test, we’ll get a waterfall chart of all the resources loaded in the request:

This gives us details about the request-response lifecycle, which we can analyze for bottlenecks. For instance:

If the pink DNS time above is too big, it could mean we should consider caching our DNS records for a longer period. This is done by increasing the TTL setting in our domain management/registrar dashboard.
If the SSL part is taking too long, we may want to consider enabling HTTP/2 to benefit from ALPN, adjusting our cache-control headers, and finally switching to a CDN service. “Web Performance in a Nutshell: HTTP/2, CDNs and Browser Caching” is a thorough article on this topic, as is “Analyzing HTTPS Performance Overhead” by KeyCDN.
Connect, Send, and Receive parts usually depend on network latency, so these can be improved by hosting close to your intended audience, making sure your host has a fast uplink, and using a CDN. For these items, you may want to consider a ping tool too (not to be confused with the Pingdom tools mentioned above), to make sure your server is responsive.
The Wait part — the yellow part of the waterfall — is the time your server infrastructure takes to produce or return the requested website. If this part takes too much time, you may want to return to our previous topics of optimizing the server, WordPress installation, and database stack. Or you may consider various layers of caching.

To get a more extensive testing and hand-holding tips on improving the website, there’s a little command line utility called webcoach. In an environment with NodeJS and npm installed (like Homestead Improved), installing it is simple:

npm install webcoach -g

After it’s been installed, we can get detailed insights and advice on how to improve our website’s various aspects, including performance:

The post The Complete Guide to WordPress Performance Optimization appeared first on SitePoint.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tympanus/~3/Olnl81Lv55U/

The Layouts of Tomorrow

Max Böck shows how to break out of the common layout patterns with the power of CSS Grid.

Read it

Our Sponsor
15 Tools and Resources That Designers Are Using In 2018

These tools and resources will help you on your way to become more productive. They will keep you better informed, and keep a step ahead of your competition.

Check them out

Going Home

A lovely WebGL project made by 302 chanwoo.

Check it out

Roller

Roller is a Sketch plugin that helps you find and fix design inconsistencies.

Check it out

JavaScript engine fundamentals: Shapes and Inline Caches

An article by Mathias Bynens that describes some key fundamentals common to all JavaScript engines.

Read it

More Unicode Patterns

Yuan Chuan shows how to create even more fantastic Unicode patterns.

Read it

Theme For A Dream

A beautiful audio-visual web experience using WebGL and Web Audio created for the launch of Natureboy Flako’s second album “Theme for a Dream”.

Check it out

Shy blob

Cassie Evans created this super-cute dancing blob demo using tracking.js for face detection. The blob stops dancing when you watch.

Check it out

Free Font: Renner

A beautiful evolution of Futura designed by indestructible type.

Get it

Spaghetti Audio

A fun demo by Joe Harry.

Check it out

Distinct Design Systems

An interesting article by Dan Mall about what makes a design system better than any other.

Read it

ColorSpark

Luke Johnson created this tool to help designers find unique colors and striking gradient combinations.

Check it out

World Cup 2018 …in JSON

The classic API for the World Cup, now with all the new data for 2018.

Check it out

ChromeREPL

In case you missed it: a Sublime Text plugin to execute JavaScript in Google Chrome. By Arthur Carabott.

Check it out

Ok→Cancel versus Cancel→Ok

An interesting article on how buttons are arranged in the Factorio game.

Read it

The Problem with Patterns

Cathy Dutton asks the question if design patterns actually result in better-designed products and services.

Read it

8-Point Grid: Typography On The Web

Ellito Dahl shares some best practices for 8pt grid typography.

Check it out

Yett

A small library to control the execution of scripts on a website.

Check it out

Weboji

A library for building your own animoji embedded in Javascript/WebGL applications.

Check it out

Vue Native

A great project by GeekyAnts: a framework to build cross platform native mobile apps using JavaScript. Read more about it in this article.

Check it out

Google PageSpeed Insights – Scoring 100/100 with WordPress

Brian Jackson’s step-by-step guide on how to achieve better website performance.

Read it

Pure Bash Bible

A collection of pure bash alternatives to external processes.

Check it out

From Our Blog
Full Image Reveal Effect

A simple fullscreen image reveal effect where thumbnails slide out of the viewport to reveal a larger image.

Check it out

Collective #425 was written by Pedro Botelho and published on Codrops.