Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/buildinternet/~3/mKiKq-wsKMM/

You got hired because you have a passion for brands and were able to talk intelligently to the client about Snapchat. You always thought you’d be doing something that had an impact on consumers. Clearly, writing Facebook posts for a cheese client wasn’t what you had in mind when you envisioned your career at a marketing agency.

So you’ve realized it’s time to do something else. The good news is, your skills are not at all limited to agency life. In fact, they are very applicable to the startup world. As a former agency person, let me explain why your skills can work well and are very needed in startups.

Building the right team is the most important thing in the first few years on a startup’s life. A quality product, happy customers… all of that is a result of getting the right people on the bus. At One Mighty Roar, we invest heavily in the people we bring into the company. Every person who ends up on our website has a backstory and lessons learned from their former work lives.

For me, I came to OMR after suffering nearly four years of agency life without much to feel good about. Now, my work as a strategist gives me more opportunities to impact how people use technology. Specifically, my team is working to help the Internet of Things be easier to use and make connected devices work together. I can see the real world business value on projects like this and this is my motivation to keep pushing the notion of what’s possible.

You might not realize the skills you learned while eating lunch lonely at your desk trying to power through a deck. But the truth is, startups are looking for people just like you. We sometimes just suck at writing job posts that reflect the skills we really need, so you may need to look beyond the bullet points and seek us out.

Here are four skills that I promise will make any startup person smile during the interview:

Attention to Detail – The likelihood of clients reading your meeting notes is about the same as getting your time-sheets done on time. However, this attention to detail can help the team keep track of items that need more attention. Your ability to take notes and follow up will be a surprising change to people who are used to being pulled in different directions all day. They will look to you as a valuable project manager and as the organized person to remind them about that pitch presentation that has been sitting on their to-do list for a month.

Distill Thoughts to Actionable Goals – Inside the war rooms of startups, many ideas are talked about with little or no action on what to do next. People with an agency background have been trained to distill a client’s thoughts into goals for the agency to solve or explore. Think of the startup as your client. By coming up with action items for each talking point, you’ll be the envy of the office happy hour.

Focus the Team on Solving One Problem – Remember that time you shut your creative team in a room until they solved how they were going to make a 30 second spot into a 15 second one? Well, the same skill to keep a team motivated and focused applies in the startup world too. While it’s not on most job descriptions, startups are looking for people that can motivate teams members, be their cheerleader, and keep projects on the right track.

Creative Thinking with a Mind to Build – Does it ever frustrate you that your agency doesn’t really make anything? You don’t make products, you advertise them. Building things is exactly what startups do. But what they need more of are people with a maker’s passion — but creative thinking — to solve the daunting “What’s next?” question that many agency folks can’t seem to master. The skills needed here are simple: You have the ability to think creatively on hard problems. This type of thinking happens all the time at agencies; you just don’t have the right team to actually implement the ideas. This is your chance to finally create things that people will use.

I hope by outlining the skills startups are craving will inspire you to consider switching to startup life. Skill level aside, what I believe to be the best reason to take your agency experience to a startup is the power you have to make change happen. Some agencies pitch “pie in the sky” ideas to clients knowing moving forward won’t actually happen. Startups, on the other hand, foster a culture to take on challenges and take the risk to actually execute ideas and try new things. Change is something startups embrace. Watching the success of a startup from the outside is one thing, but being involved in the experience will impact you the way you wish your agency did. Trust me, I work at a startup.

Original Source: https://css-tricks.com/playing-shadow-dom/

About a year ago, Twitter announced it would start displaying embedded tweets with the shadow DOM rather than an <iframe>, if the browser supports shadom DOM?

Why? Well, speed is one reason.

They say:

Much lower memory utilization in the browser, and much faster render times. Tweets will appear faster and pages will scroll more smoothly, even when displaying multiple Tweets on the same page.

Why the choice? Why is it necessary to use either iframes or shadow DOM? Why not just inject the content onto the page?

It’s a totally understandable need for control. An embedded Tweet should look and behave just exactly like an embedded Tweet. They don’t want to worry about the styles of the page bleeding in and messing that up.

An <iframe> makes style scoping very easy. Point the src of the iframe at a URL that displays what you want an embedded tweet to look like, and you’re good. The only styles used will be those you include in that document.

Twitter does this iframe-injection in a progressive enhancement and syndication-friendly way. They provide a <blockquote> with the Tweet and a <script>. The script does the iframe-injection. If the script doesn’t run, no matter, a happy blockquote. If the script does run, a fully functional embedded Tweet.

That script is the key here. Scripts can do just about anything, and they host it, so they can change it up anytime. That’s what they use to detect shadow DOM support and go that route instead. And as we covered, shadow DOM is faster to render and has lower memory needs. Shadow DOM can also help with the style scoping thing, which we’ll look at in a moment.

Height flexibility

There’s another thing too, that happens to be near and dear to my heart. An <iframe> doesn’t adjust in height to fit its contents like you expect other elements to do. You set a height and that’s that. It will have scrollbars, if you allow it and the content needs it. Back in the Wufoo days, we had to jump quite a few hoops to get embedded forms (in frames) to be as tall as they needed to be. Today, at CodePen, our Embedded Pens have adjustable heights, but there isn’t any option for just “as tall as they need to be”. (I’m exactly sure if that makes sense for CodePen Embeds or not, but anyway, you can’t do it right now.)

An element with a shadow DOM is just like any other element and that it will expand to the content naturally. I’m sure that is appealing to Twitter as well. If they calculate the height wrong, they run the risk of cutting of content or at least having the embedded Tweet look busted.

Most Basic Usage

Here’s the bare minimum of how you establish a shadow DOM and put stuff in it:

See the Pen Most basic shadow DOM by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Notice how the styling within the Shadow DOM doesn’t leak out to the regular paragraph element? Both paragraphs would be red if they did.

And notice how the paragraph inside the shadow DOM isn’t sans-serif like the one outside? Well, normally that would be. Inherited styles still inherit through the shadow DOM (so in that way it’s not quite as strong a barrier as an iframe). But, we’re forcing it back to the initial state on purpose like this:

:host {
all: initial;
}
Handling that fallback

My first thought for dealing with a fallback for browsers that don’t support shadow DOM was that you could chuck the same exact content you were stuffing into the shadow DOM into an iframe with srcdoc, like…

<iframe srcdoc=”the same content”>

Or more likely this is something you’re doing in JavaScript, so you’d test for support first, then either do the shadow DOM stuff or dynamically create the iframe:

See the Pen Shadow DOM Basic by Chris Coyier (@chriscoyier) on CodePen.

Turns out srcdoc isn’t the best choice (alone) for a fallback as there is no IE or Edge support for it. But also that it’s not too big of a deal to just use a data URL for the regular src. Here’s a fork by Šime Vidas where he fixes that up:

let content = `
<style>
body { /* for fallback iframe */
margin: 0;
}
p {
border: 1px solid #ccc;
padding: 1rem;
color: red;
font-family: sans-serif;
}
</style>

<p>Element with Shadow DOM</p>
`;

let el = document.querySelector(‘.my-element’);

if (document.body.attachShadow) {

let shadow = el.attachShadow({ mode: ‘open’ }); // Allows JS access inside
shadow.innerHTML = content;

} else {

let newiframe = document.createElement(‘iframe’);
‘srcdoc’ in newiframe ?
newiframe.srcdoc = content :
newiframe.src = ‘data:text/html;charset=UTF-8,’ + content;

let parent = el.parentNode;
parent.replaceChild(newiframe, el);

}
TL;DR

Shadow DOM is pretty cool.
It’s comparable to an iframe in many ways, including style encapsulation. Embedded third-party content is a pretty good use case.
It’s possible to use it while falling back to an iframe pretty easily.
It’s a part of the larger world of web components, but you don’t have to go all-in on all that if you don’t want to.

Here’s another simple demo (this one using a custom element), but instead of rolling our own back support, it’s polyfilled.

Playing with Shadow DOM is a post from CSS-Tricks

Original Source: http://webdesignerwall.com/general/best-email-marketing-tips-increase-engagement-subscribers

Email is your post powerful marketing channel when used well. Your visitor’s inbox is a perfect opportunity for you to capture attention, communicate important updates and invite readers back to your site for increased visibility. The stats on email marketing effectiveness say it all – top marketing specialists and service providers tell us that email […]

The post Best Email Marketing Tips to Increase Engagement & Subscribers appeared first on Web Designer Wall – Design Trends and Tutorials.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/visualswirl/~3/j2wM6SsTPq0/

We’ve all heard about why we should be using responsive design (beyond the fact that it’s current design trend). But the decision to go responsive raises a number of development questions. One of the biggest issues is handling media. And one of the most common features on a media-heavy website is a featured content carousel (or image slider, image rotator, etc). This post will help you find a solution for your responsive slider needs. We’ve gathered a number of the best  jQuery responsive image sliders to compare and share.

10 Responsive jQuery Image Sliders
Flexslider 2 – Free

I use Flexslider more than any other image slider (responsive or not) so it’s a great place to start. Flexslider offers a fullly skin-able and customizable slider that works great across all screen sizes. I  use it with both images and images with text/calls to action. It also offers both horizontal and vertical sliding as well as multiple slider support so you can have multiple image sliders on a single page. Definitely gets my vote!

Royal Slider – Premium

Another great slider that I have personal experience with. Royal Slider has a myriad of configuration options (my favorites being the “Gallery with Visible Nearby Images” or the “Video Slider”). The only thing keeping this plugin from the top spot is that it isn’t free (Flexslider is).  However, a very affordable and super-powerful plugin awaits. There’s also a great wordpress version.

Camera – Free

Camera slideshow is an open source project, based on Diapo slideshow and offers a variety of skin and customizable options. I’ve never personally used Camera but the documentation looks thorough and the sampel they provide in the demo looks really nice and clean.

Elastic – Free

Elastic is presented in a tutorial fashion and includes the downloadable code to get you started using it on your site. This plugin has a much more specific look than some of the other plugins mentioned but there are some cool javascript animations being used.

Advanced Slider – Premium

Another premium slider, Advanced Slider is fully responsive, mobile-ready, and can be used with either HTML markup or XML. The plugin also provides an easy to use API to customize it to your specific site. It comes with various pre-built styles that look nice out of the box.

All in One Responsive Slider – Premium

All In One is an Advanced Jquery Slider which comes in 5 flavors: Banner Rotator, Thumbnails Banner, Banner with Playlist, Content Slider, Carousel. It allows you to easily create powerful sliders with animated text using HTML standard tags, making the slider very easy to setup and maintain.

Responsive Image Gallery – Free

Another tutorial by Codrops on how to create a responsive image gallery with a thumbnail carousel using Elastislide. This slider is inspired by Twitter’s “user gallery” and is more useful for image galleries than a featured content carousel. But a free and great plugin nonetheless.

UnoSlider – Premium

UnoSlider is a premium jQuery content slider plugin that’s core feature is the number of transition animations offered (the plugin developer claims “unlimited transition animations”). It’s also touch enabled, and offers a variety of other features similar to what’s been mentioned before.

Fluid CSS3 Slideshow with Parallax Effect – Free

Another great freebie by Codrops (sensing a trend here?). This responsive slider mixes in a little parallax effect (another popular trend). A parallax and responsive site? This plugin is for the ambitious designers out there.

Layer Slider – Premium

We’ll end with another parallax/responsive combo (this time a premium plugin). Layer Slider offers something really cool and unique: the ability to control an unlimited number of layers with individual animations. Combing this cool functionality with the responsive aspect and you have yourself a pretty powerful and extensible tool. I’ve had quite a bit of fun playing around with this on a few websites.

What other plugins do you use?

I’m sure I’ve left off some really great plugins and tutorials. But that’s where you come in. Let me know what I’ve missed and what plugins are your favorites. Feel free to post links to examples of these plugins in action. We’d love to see your great work!

The post 10 Responsive Slider jQuery Plugins appeared first on Visual Swirl Design Resources.