Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: https://webdesignledger.com/10-business-startup-wordpress-themes-better-website/

Today, we live in a highly competitive world. Thus, it is very important for your business to have the advantage to survive.

How to make your startup or small business stand out from the competition? One sure way is to have an award-winning website to promote your goods or services.

Building a business takes careful planning in many different areas. Moreover, executing those plans can take time. Yet, once a content of a company’s website has been determined, building the website can be done in short order. This is quite easy when the right tools for the job are at your fingertips.

Whether you’re simply looking for inspiration, or ready to get started, you are in the right place. You’re sure to find one or more out of the following collection of WordPress themes to be helpful.

If you need to have a quality website up and running in nothing flat, you need to look no further.

Be Theme

How is Be Theme good for building startup or small business websites?

Being the biggest has its advantages, and Be Theme is the biggest WordPress theme to date. Bigger means having more tools (features), ideas, and concepts than the other guy.

One of the things that makes Be Theme ideal for startups and small business is its selection of 260+ pre-built websites that address every nook and cranny of the business world. Most pre-built websites are multi-page affairs, all are customizable, and it’s not at all difficult to find one that has the functionality you want your website to exhibit.

Be’s Muffin Builder and Options Panelmake building a website a piece of cake, and having more than 200 shortcodesto work with means there’s no need for coding. A pre-built website can also be used to rapidly create a prototype to share with a client for feedback.

If the thought of being able to start from scratch, and get a website up and running in 4 hours appeals to you, give Be Theme a look.

 

Cribs

Why is The Core a good choice for startups and small businesses?

The Core is a multipurpose WordPress theme that promotes different themes or website examples for different uses. One of these themes, Cribs, is dedicated to creating small business websites. Thus, if you or your client is a small business owner, it makes good sense to invest in a theme that focuses on providing the basic layouts and functionality your business’s website requires.

The Core comes with a visual page builder, and tons of design options. Your website will be fully responsive, WooCommerce ready, and via a WPML plugin, translatable into the most commonly used languages. Discounted purchase plans are available for building a single website, or an unlimited number of websites. For the latter, you can pay either a one-time fee or an annual fee. Either way, you can expect dedicated support along with free updates.

Oshine

What makes Oshine a good choice for small businesses and startups.

Oshine is a creative, multi-layout WordPress theme that comes with 27 striking demos featuring clean and modern designs that are applicable to building any type or style of website. The demos are customizable, and since they can be installed with a single click, you can get started immediately.

Oshine has its own, unique visual page builder, Tatsu. Since it’s a front-end builder, building and editing pages is a snap. The powerful options panel gives you total control over the layout design process, plus you’ll have more than a dozen menu and header options to work with.

For creatives, Oshine offers unlimited ways to create a stunning portfolio, and if you have products to sell, or a service to provide, the theme is WooCommerce and WPML compatible.

Uncode

Why would Uncode be a good choice for small businesses and startups?

Uncode is a popular creative WordPress theme that was handcrafted by an experienced and award-winning team of designers and developers. Uncode is pixel perfect and ultra-professional in its presentation. It’s clean, modern layouts will satisfy almost any need.

Whether your intent is to produce a highly qualified e-commerce website, a magazine-style website, a corporate website, or simply a portfolio, Uncode will be an excellent choice.

Ultra

What makes Ultra by Themify a great choice for startups?

Whether it’s to create a rapid prototype layout, or to build the final product, Themify’sdrag and drop pre-made row designs provides a super-fast and efficient way to build your pages. This modular approach also provides an easy way to update a page in an existing website. There are currently 34 editable pre-designed rows to select from, including FAQ, Banner, and Testimonial sections.

Houzez

How is Houzez good for small businesses?

Houzez may not be the best fit for some small businesses, but this specialized WordPress theme is the best possible choice for creating a realtor’s or real estate agency’s website. The functionality most agencies need is already there, including property search, rate, and review, custom workflows, private messaging, and more.

Add content, and you can have a website up and running in hours, or even sooner.

 

KLEO – Ready To Go Theme For Your Business

How is KLEO a good choice for small startups?

KLEO is a community-focused, multipurpose BuddyPress theme. This is exactly the type of theme for creating websites that many startups, and more than a few businesses, could put into play to grow their customer or user base.

KLEO has plenty of demos, and it’s easy to install the plugins you may need. You can try KLEO for free, and test its options before you buy.

Kallyas

What does Kallyas have that startup and small business websites need?

Kallyas’s reputation speaks for itself. This nearly 5-year-old responsive theme, created by an experienced, customer oriented team, has been a top 15 best-selling WordPress theme since day one.

Kallyas is loaded with features, including 50+ pre-built websites, a simply amazing visual website builder, adaptive images, video tutorials, and dedicated support. Kallyas is a WordPress theme you can have fun with!

Infinite

What makes Infinite the right choice for a small business or startup?

Infinite is a multi-purpose WordPress theme. It was created with a goal of providing a website solution for everyone. All the needed tools are there, so it’s simply a matter of checking out the pre-built website demos.

The demos fall in 4 categories: WooCommerce, Creative, Corporate, and Niche Retail and Services; one of which should fit a small business or startup nicely.

 

TheGem

How is TheGem good for small businesses and startups?

Equipped with flexible features focusing on business, corporate and startup websites, delivered with outstanding designs for 50+ business concepts, and carefully developed by the best designers of the Behance network, TheGem will make your online brands stand out, and take your business to the next level.

The best thing is, it’s extremely easy in use. No coding is required. You can freely combine the pre-made demos per drag’n’drop with one another to create your own unique layouts. The 250+ content element styles, designed to cover the goals of any business or startup website make TheGem a reasonable investment.

To Wrap It Up

Finding the right theme for your small business or startup project can be difficult. However, no with this list of winning WordPress Themes. If there is a problem, it’s that of having to choose among several themes that are obviously just right for the job.

The good news is, you’re unlikely to make a poor choice. We’d like to hear what you have to say, or if you feel we’ve left something out. Happy website building!

Read More at 10 Business and Startup WordPress Themes For A Better Website

Original Source: https://css-tricks.com/evil-please-dont-modals-overlays-edition/

We’ve all been there. Landed on a website only to be slapped with a modal that looked something like the one below:

Hello darkness, my old friend.

For me that triggers a knee-jerk reaction: curse for giving them a pageview, close the tab, and never return. But there’s also that off case when we might actually try to get to the info behind that modal. So the next step in this situation is to bring up DevTools in order to delete the modal and overlay, and maybe some other useless things that clutter up the page while we’re at it.

This is where that page starts to dabble in evil.

We may not be able to get to the DevTools via “Inspect Element” because the context menu might be disabled. That one is easy, it only takes them one line of code:

addEventListener(‘contextmenu’, e => e.preventDefault(), false);

But hey, no problem, that’s what keyboard shortcuts are for, right? Right… unless there’s a bit of JavaScript in the vein of the one below running:

addEventListener(‘keydown’, e => {
if(e.keyCode === 123 /* F12: Chrome, Edge dev tools */ ||
(e.shiftKey && e.ctrlKey && (
e.keyCode === 73 /* + I: Chrome, FF dev tools */ ||
e.keyCode === 67 /* + C: Chrome, FF inspect el */ ||
e.keyCode === 74 /* + J: Chrome, FF console */ ||
e.keyCode === 75 /* + K: FF web console */ ||
e.keyCode === 83 /* + S: FF debugger */ ||
e.keyCode === 69 /* + E: FF network */ ||
e.keyCode === 77 /* + M: FF responsive design mode */)) ||
(e.shiftKey && (
e.keyCode === 118 /* + F5: Firefox style editor */ ||
e.keyCode === 116 /* + F5: Firefox performance */)) ||
(e.ctrlKey && e.keyCode === 85 /* + U: Chrome, FF view source */)) {
e.preventDefault();
}
}, false);

Still, nothing can be done about the browser menus. That will finally bring up DevTools for us! Hooray! Delete those awful nodes and… see how the page refreshes because there’s a mutation observer watching out for such actions. Something like the bit of code below:

addEventListener(‘DOMContentLoaded’, e => {
let observer = new MutationObserver((records) => {
let reload = false;

records.forEach((record) => {
record.removedNodes.forEach((node) => {
if(node.id === ‘overlay’ && !validCustomer())
reload = true;
});

if(reload)
window.location.reload(true);
});
});

observer.observe(
document.documentElement, {
attributes: true,
childList: true,
subtree: true,
attributeOldValue: true,
characterData: true
}
);
});

“This is war!” mode activated! Alright, just change the modal and overlay styles then! Except, all the styles are inline, with !important on top of that, so there’s no way we can override it all without touching that style attribute.

Oh, the !importance of it all…

Some people might remember about how 256 classes override an id, but this has changed in WebKit browsers in the meanwhile (still happens in Edge and Firefox though) and 256 IDs never could override an inline style anyway.

Well, just change the style attribute then. However, another “surprise” awaits: there’s also a bit of JavaScript watching out for attribute changes:

if(record.type === ‘attributes’ &&
(record.target.matches &&
record.target.matches(‘body, #content, #overlay’)) &&
record.attributeName === ‘style’ && !validCustomer())
reload = true;

So unless there are some styles that could help us get the overlay out of the way that the person coding this awful thing missed setting inline, we can’t get past this by modifying style attributes.

The first thing to look for is the display property as setting that to none on the overlay solves all problems. Then there’s the combo of position and z-index. Even if these are set inline on the actual overlay, if they’re not set inline on the actual content below the overlay, then we have the option of setting an even higher z-index value rule for the content and bring it above the overlay. However, it’s highly unlikely anyone would miss setting these.

If offsets (top, right, bottom, left) aren’t set inline, they could help us shift the overlay off the page and the same goes for margin or translate properties. In a similar fashion, even if they’re set inline on the overlay, but not on the actual content and on the parent of both the overlay and the content, then we can shift this parent laterally by something like 100vw and then shift just the content back into view.

At the end of the day, even a combination of opacity and pointer-events could work.

However, if the person coding the annoying overlay didn’t miss setting any of these inline and we have that bit of JS… we cannot mess with the inline styles without making the page reload.

But wait! There’s something that can override inline values with !important, something that’s likely to be missed by many… and that’s @keyframe animations! Adding the following bit of CSS in a new or already existing style element brings the overlay and modal behind the actual content:

#overlay { animation: a 1s infinite }

@keyframes a { { 0%, to { z-index: -1 } } }

However, there might be a bit of JavaScript that prevents us from adding new style or link elements (to reference an external stylesheet) or modifying already existing ones to include the above bit of CSS, as it can be seen here.

if(record.type === ‘characterData’ &&
record.target.parentNode.tagName.toLowerCase() === ‘style’)
reload = true;
record.addedNodes.forEach((node) => {
if(node.matches &&
node.matches(‘style:not([data-href]), link[rel=”stylesheet”]’))
reload = true;
});

See the Pen How to be evil (but please don’t) by Ana Tudor (@thebabydino) on CodePen.

But if there already is an external stylesheet, we could add our bit of CSS there and, save for checking for changes in a requestAnimationFrame loop, there is no way of detecting such a change (there have been talks about a style mutation observer, but currently, we don’t yet have anything of the kind).

Of course, the animation property could also be set inline to none, which would prevent us from using this workaround.

But in that case, we could still disable JavaScript and remove the overlay and modal. Or just view the page source via the browser menu. The bottom line is: if the content is already there, behind the overlay, there is absolutely no sure way of preventing access to it. But trying to anyway is a sure way to get people to curse you.

I wrote this article because I actually experienced something similar recently. I eventually got to the content. It just took more time and it made me hate whoever coded that thing.

It could be argued that these overlays are pretty efficient when it comes to stopping non-technical people, which make up the vast majority of a website’s visitors, but when they go to the trouble of trying to prevent bringing up DevTools, node deletions, style changes and the like, and pack the whole JavaScript that does this into hex on top of it all, they’re not trying to stop just non-technical people.

How to be evil (but please don’t!) – the modals & overlays edition is a post from CSS-Tricks

Original Source: https://webdesignledger.com/minimalist-web-design-effective-design-style-web-design-industry/

This article is the third in a series devoted to the understanding of minimalism in web design. During the time, this trend has become very popular among the graphic designers and it will still be on top for the years that will come, regardless the influences it will have.

You might assume minimalism is easy – after all, fewer elements mean less work, right? In fact, the opposite is more accurate. Because you are restricted to a usage of few elements, they must be chosen and used with care and thoroughness, having a specific purpose as a starting point. If it’s done properly, minimalist design can be a stunning masterpiece, in terms of UI, visual design, UX and conveying your message to the users.

It may seem ironic, but in the context of web design, simplicity is a little more complex to define. It’s not just the site looks like; it’s about the user’s overall experience while interacting with the site. From this perspective, minimal design is not made by mistake. It is intentional. It is an approach that strips the unnecessary elements from a framework to leave only what is required. Most minimalist websites will not include a lot of colors, textures, shapes or accents. They are defined by fearless usage of negative space in neutral colors, dramatic typography, large and vivid photography, very simple navigation tools and visual balance.           

Minimalism works because it does what all design should do – it puts the emphasis on content.

The advantages of minimalism in web design and the reasons for its popularity include:

It’s a natural fit with responsive design frameworks;
It reduces the information for browsers to process, causing faster site load times and better site performance; this leads to a better usability and user experience;
It needs less CSS and Html rules and elements;
The concept is content-driven, which coincides impeccably with the growth of content-first design processes and trends;
It is suitable for a variety of businesses, from architecture, interior design, fashion, photography, creative studios, to e-commerce, web app development, furniture, HoReCa and so on.

Using the minimalist concept in web design represents modern design. By only focusing on the content and branding, the web design will reflect its main goal and mission without any other distracting elements. 

Below are listed some websites from different industries, which use minimalist design concept for conveying their message and provide a great UX:

Minimalism in photography portfolios

Running a photography business is not common. Beyond stunning photos, it requires much creativity and refinement when it comes to communication with the potential customers. If you want to learn more about running a photography business, you may find more information in Braveen Kumar’s article (link to www.shopify.com/blog/how-to-sell-photos-online)

In terms of web design, minimalism is the preferred choice for the photographers who want to let their work speaking for itself. The style gives an air of elegance and sophistication that lends itself to this industry.

Christine Szczupak Photography

The stylized arrows and subtle drop-shadow are important details that increase the visual appeal of this website.

Ryan Willms

The spacing and arrangement of content here, along with the elegant typography and simple lines, give the feeling of a fresh design.

Caitlin Worthington Photography 

The white background is the perfect canvas for the large and vivid photographs that are perfectly balanced by the typography. A classic example of minimalist design.

Jonathan Glynn Smith

A dramatic splash screen and beautifully minimalist design.

Bruce Percy

A very simple design that leaves the viewer no doubt what he’s seeing. A quick glance is enough to see what the photographer does. Navigation is again clear and simple. The black background works well with the minimalist design.

Minimalism in the creative industry
Exponent PR

To highlight their video montage (and photos as you scroll), Exponent’s site features simple colors and fonts that make everything pop.

Bark PR

Like Exponent PR, the previous PR company on our list, you’ll see flat UI and bold colors. But in Bark PR’s case, the yellow is much more than a simple accent.

Oh My! Digital Design Studio

Oh My!  uses a large white background for some high-contrast effect and a very simple navigation to provide a great UX.

Brave Little Tank

Like Oh My!, Brave Little Tank also uses a large white background for getting a high-contrast effect with the website content. The accents of colors are given by pictures and the green color of highlighted text. The navigation is simple, letting the users dive in quick and easy through the whole site. With its website, Brave Little Tank has created a simple, impactful solution (what they also have promised to their clients).

Brian Danaher

Another website that opts for a single column and bold typography. If you take a closer look, you will notice the classic mix for the minimalist concept: a lot of negative space, large and vivid photos, typography that perfectly balances the images.  

Callens 

Minimalism is the preferred choice for fashion websites and those selling luxury items, like Italian brand Callens. This design concept gives an air of elegance and sophistication that lends itself to certain industries.

Leen Heyne
 

Besides its jewelry, Leen Heyne‘s monochrome logo and company name are the only significant visual elements on its homepage. The surrounding expanse of gray space and white texts make it a safe bet, the user’s eyes going back and forth between the two core visual elements.

 Bulgari

Italian luxury goods brand Bulgari is another company that uses creative techniques to keep its site interesting within its minimal framework. Side-to-side scrolling combines with an ingenious page-turning animation and high-quality photos.

Yield

Lots of space, soft pastels, middle to dark gray colors for text, large photos and keeping buttons to a minimum make Yield’s site delicate and easy to navigate.

 Conspiracy

Conspiracy’s homepage bundles necessary buttons on top then puts the product on a clean canvas.

NTN

This site is traditionally minimal. Design brand NTN uses the abundant white space, personality-infused typography, and a reduced number of elements that the minimalist style is known for.

Minimalism in website and app development
Squarespace

This screenshot from website-building service Squarespace illustrates the idea of one focal point per screen. The site explains everything it needs in screen-by-screen images, and groups together relevant blurbs on the same screen.

Scytale

Scytale is another defining website for the concept of minimalism in web design. They use very large white and light gray background and big and bold typography, helping the user to focus on the main message. The red color used for some flat design and typography are the only color accents used here.

Thrive

Simple design on a subtle grid. Garnished with flat design and simple bright blue color via scrolling. A fun, clean, good interaction!

iPad mini 4

Apple is no stranger to minimalism. The web page for the iPad mini 4 uses lots of literal white space to draw attention to the product’s sleek design. The clear top bar, also featuring an abundance of space, helps the user to navigate.

Château d’Yquem

Winemaker Château d’Yquem combines minimalism and subdivision in its site. Each section follows the minimalist philosophy with only a few elements revolving around a single concept. When combined, the sections’ size and location on screen create a visual hierarchy.

Maemo 

The website for double-Michelin-starred Norwegian restaurant Maaemo uses minimalism to create a sense of class. The visual treatment is perfect for storytelling, as the site demonstrates with HD photos used for each page.

Bottom line

We know you have a lot of information to offer to your visitors and you’d like to feature all of them on your website, but you should keep in mind that will also throw your visitors into an information overload.

Before anything else, make sure your website features only the most important information and link the additional stuff. And don’t worry, if people are interested in learning more about your company, they will look for links or they will contact you.

Most of all, make sure your brand and your target audience fit the concept of minimalism before going for this website design concept. Because unfitting use of colors, typography, and visuals will not bring the same results for your business.

Even if it’s not suitable for all business websites, minimalist design style comes with plenty of great advantages that make it more effective than any other design style in the web design industry.

Read More at Minimalist Web Design – More Effective Than Any Other Design Style In The Web Design Industry

Original Source: https://css-tricks.com/simple-server-side-rendering-routing-page-transitions-nuxt-js/

A bit of a wordy title, huh? What is server side rendering? What does it have to do with routing and page transitions? What the heck is Nuxt.js? Funnily enough, even though it sounds complex, working with Nuxt.js and exploring the benefits of isn’t too difficult. Let’s get started!

Server side rendering

You might have heard people talking about server side rendering as of late. We looked at one method to do that with React recently. One particularly compelling aspect is the performance benefits. When we render our HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the server, we often have less JavaScript to parse both initially and on subsequent updates. This article does really well going into more depth on the subject. My favorite takeaway is:

By rendering on the server, you can cache the final shape of your data.

Instead of grabbing JSON or other information from the server, parsing it, then using JavaScript to create layouts of that information, we’re doing a lot of those calculations upfront, and only sending down the actual HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that we need. This can reap a lot of benefits with caching, SEO, and speed up our apps and sites.

What is Nuxt.js?

Server side rendering sounds pretty nice, but you’re probably wondering if it’s difficult to set up. I’ve been using Nuxt.js for my Vue applications lately and found it surprisingly simple to work with. To be clear: you don’t need to use Nuxt.js in particular to do server side rendering. I’m just a fan of this tool for many reasons. I ran some tests last month and found that Nuxt.js had even higher lighthouse scores out of the gate than Vue’s PWA template, which I thought was impressive.

Nuxt.js is a higher-level framework that you can use with a CLI command that you can use to create universal Vue applications. Here are some, not all, of the benefits:

Server-Side Rendering
Automatic Code Splitting
Powerful Routing System
Great lighthouse scores out of the gate 🐎
Static File Serving
ES6/ES7 Transpilation
Hot reloading in Development
Pre-processors: SASS, LESS, Stylus, etc
Write Vue Files to create your pages and layouts!
My personal favorite: easily add transitions to your pages

Let’s set up a basic application with some routing to see the benefits for ourselves.

Getting Set up

The first thing we need to do if you haven’t already is download Vue’s CLI. You can do so globally with this command:

npm install -g vue-cli

# … or …

yarn add global vue-cli

You will only need to do this once, not every time you use it.

Next, we’ll use the CLI to scaffold a new project, but we’ll use Nuxt.js as the template:

vue init nuxt/starter my-project
cd my-project
yarn # or… npm install
npm run dev

You’ll see the progress of the app being built and it will give you a dedicated development server to check out: http://127.0.0.1:3000/. This is what you’ll see right away (with a pretty cool little animation):

Let’s take a look at what’s creating this initial view of our application at this point. We can go to the `pages` directory, and inside see that we have an `index.vue` page. If we open that up, we’ll see all of the markup that it took to create that page. We’ll also see that it’s a `.vue` file, using single file components just like any ordinary `vue` file, with a template tag for the HTML, a script tag for our scripts, where we’re importing a component, and some styles in a style tag. (If you aren’t familiar with these, there’s more info on what those are here.) The coolest part of this whole thing is that this .vue file doesn’t require any special setup. It’s placed in the `pages` directory, and Nuxt.js will automatically make this server-side rendered page!

Let’s create a new page and set up some routing between them. In pages/index.vue, dump the content that’s already there, and replace it with:

<template>
<div class=”container”>
<h1>Welcome!</h1>
<p><nuxt-link to=”/product”>Product page</nuxt-link></p>
</div>
</template>

<style>
.container {
font-family: “Quicksand”, “Source Sans Pro”, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, “Segoe UI”, Roboto, “Helvetica Neue”, Arial, sans-serif; /* 1 */
padding: 60px;
}
</style>

Then let’s create another page in the pages directory, we’ll call it `product.vue` and put this content inside of it:

<template>
<div class=”container”>
<h1>This is the product page</h1>
<p><nuxt-link to=”/”>Home page</nuxt-link></p>
</div>
</template>

Right away, you’ll see this:

Ta-da! 🏆
Right away, we have server side rendering, routing between pages (if you check out the URL you can see it’s going between the index page and product page), and we even have a sweet little green loader that zips across the top. We didn’t have to do much at all to get that going.

You might have noticed in here, there’s a special little element: <nuxt-link to=”/”>. This tag can be used like an a tag, where it wraps around a bit of content, and it will set up an internal routing link between our pages. We’ll use to=”/page-title-here” instead of an href.

Now, let’s add some transitions. We’ll do this in a few stages: simple to complex.

Creating Page Transitions

We already have a really cool progress bar that runs across the top of the screen as we’re routing and makes the whole thing feel very zippy. (That’s a technical term). While I like it very much, it won’t really fit the direction we’re headed in, so let’s get rid of it for now.

We’re going to go into our `nuxt.config.js` file and change the lines:

/*
** Customize the progress-bar color
*/
loading: { color: ‘#3B8070’ },

to

loading: false,

You’ll also notice a few other things in this nuxt.config.js file. You’ll see our meta and head tags as well as the content that will be rendered inside of them. That’s because we won’t have a traditional `index.html` file as we do in our normal CLI build, Nuxt.js is going to parse and build our `index.vue` file together with these tags and then render the content for us, on the server. If you need to add CSS files, fonts, or the like, we would use this Nuxt.js config file to do so.

Now that we have all that down, let’s understand what’s available to us to create page transitions. In order to understand what’s happening on the page that we’re plugging into, we need to review how the transition component in Vue works. I’ve written an article all about this here, so if you’d like deeper knowledge on the subject, you can check that out. But what you really need to know is this: under the hood, Nuxt.js will plug into the functionality of Vue’s transition component, and gives us some defaults and hooks to work with:

You can see here that we have a hook for what we want to happen right before the animation starts enter, during the animation/transition enter-active, and when it finishes. We have these same hooks for when something is leaving, prepended with leave instead. We can make simple transitions that just interpolate between states, or we could plug a full CSS or JavaScript animation into them.

Usually in a Vue application, we would wrap a component or element in <transition> in order to use this slick little functionality, but Nuxt.js will provide this for us at the get-go. Our hook for the page will begin with, thankfully- page. All we have to do to create an animation between pages is add a bit of CSS that plugs into the hooks:

.page-enter-active, .page-leave-active {
transition: all .25s ease-out;
}
.page-enter, .page-leave-active {
opacity: 0;
transform-origin: 50% 50%;
}

I’m also going to add an extra bit of styling here so that you can see the page transitions a little easier:

html, body {
font-family: “Quicksand”, “Source Sans Pro”, -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, “Segoe UI”, Roboto, “Helvetica Neue”, Arial, sans-serif; /* 1 */
background: #222;
color: white;
width: 100vw;
height: 100vh;
}

a, a:visited {
color: #3edada;
text-decoration: none;
}

.container {
padding: 60px;
width: 100vw;
height: 100vh;
background: #444;
}

Right now we’re using a CSS Transition. This only gives us the ability to designate what to do in the middle of two states. We could do something a little more interesting by having an animation adjust in a way that suggests where something is coming from and going to. For that to happen, we could separate out transitions for page-enter and page-leave-active classes, but it’s a little more DRY to use a CSS animation and specify where things are coming from and going to, and plug into each for .page-enter-active, and .page-leave-active:

.page-enter-active {
animation: acrossIn .45s ease-out both;
}

.page-leave-active {
animation: acrossOut .65s ease-in both;
}

@keyframes acrossIn {
0% {
transform: translate3d(-100%, 0, 0);
}
100% {
transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0);
}
}

@keyframes acrossOut {
0% {
transform: translate3d(0, 0, 0);
}
100% {
transform: translate3d(100%, 0, 0);
}
}

Let’s also add a little bit of special styling to the product page so we can see the difference between these two pages:

<style scoped>
.container {
background: #222;
}
</style>

This scoped tag is pretty cool because it will apply the styles for this page/vue file only. If you have heard of CSS Modules, you’ll be familiar with this concept.

We would see this (this page is for demo purposes only, that’s probably too much movement for a typical page transition):

Now, let’s say we have a page with a totally different interaction. For this page, the movement up and down was too much, we just want a simple fade. For this case, we’d need to rename our transition hook to separate it out.

Let’s create another page, we’ll call it the contact page and create it in the pages directory.

<template>
<div class=”container”>
<h1>This is the contact page</h1>
<p><nuxt-link to=”/”>Home page</nuxt-link></p>
</div>
</template>

<script>
export default {
transition: ‘fadeOpacity’
}
</script>

<style>
.fadeOpacity-enter-active, .fadeOpacity-leave-active {
transition: opacity .35s ease-out;
}

.fadeOpacity-enter, .fadeOpacity-leave-active {
opacity: 0;
}
</style>

Now we can have two-page transitions:

You can see how we could build on these further and create more and more streamlined CSS animations per page. But from here let’s dive into my favorite, JavaScript animations, and create page transitions with a bit more horsepower.

Javascript Hooks

Vue’s <transition> component offers some hooks to use JavaScript animation in place of CSS as well. They are as follows, and each hook is optional. The :css=”false” binding lets Vue know we’re going to use JS for this animation:

<transition
@before-enter=”beforeEnter”
@enter=”enter”
@after-enter=”afterEnter”
@enter-cancelled=”enterCancelled”

@before-Leave=”beforeLeave”
@leave=”leave”
@after-leave=”afterLeave”
@leave-cancelled=”leaveCancelled”
:css=”false”>

</transition>

The other thing we have available to us are transition modes. I’m a big fan of these, as you can state that one animation will wait for the other animation to finish transitioning out before transitioning in. The transition mode we will work with will be called out-in.

We can do something really wild with JavaScript and the transition mode, again, we’re going a little nuts here for the purposes of demo, we would usually do something much more subtle:

In order to do something like this, I’ve run yarn add gsap because I’m using GreenSock for this animation. In my index.vue page, I can remove the existing CSS animation and add this into the <script> tags:

import { TweenMax, Back } from ‘gsap’

export default {
transition: {
mode: ‘out-in’,
css: false,
beforeEnter (el) {
TweenMax.set(el, {
transformPerspective: 600,
perspective: 300,
transformStyle: ‘preserve-3d’
})
},
enter (el, done) {
TweenMax.to(el, 1, {
rotationY: 360,
transformOrigin: ‘50% 50%’,
ease: Back.easeOut
})
done()
},
leave (el, done) {
TweenMax.to(el, 1, {
rotationY: 0,
transformOrigin: ‘50% 50%’,
ease: Back.easeIn
})
done()
}
}
}

All of the code for these demos exist in my Intro to Vue repo for starter materials if you’re getting ramped up learning Vue.

One thing I want to call out here is that currently there is a bug for transition modes in Nuxt.js. This bug is fixed, but the release hasn’t come out yet. It should be all fixed and up to date in the upcoming 1.0 release, but in the meantime, here is a working simple sample demo, and the issue to track.

With this working code and those JavaScript hooks we can start to get much fancier and create unique effects, with different transitions on every page:

Here’s the site that the demo was deployed to if you’d like to see it live: https://nuxt-type.now.sh/ as well as the repo that houses the code for it: https://github.com/sdras/nuxt-type

Navigation

In that last demo you might have noticed we had a common navigation across all of the pages what we routed. In order to create this, we can go into the `layouts` directory, and we’ll see a file called `default.vue`. This directory will house the base layouts for all of our pages, “default” being the, uhm, default 🙂

Right away you’ll see this:

<template>
<div>
<nuxt/>
</div>
</template>

That special <nuxt/> tag will be where our `.vue` pages files will be inserted, so in order to create a navigation, we could insert a navigation component like this:

<template>
<div>
<img class=”moon” src=”~assets/FullMoon2010.png” />
<Navigation />
<nuxt/>
</div>
</template>

<script>
import Navigation from ‘~components/Navigation.vue’

export default {
components: {
Navigation
}
}
</script>

I love this because everything is kept nice and organized between our global and local needs.

I then have a component called Navigation in a directory I’ve called `components` (this is pretty standard fare for a Vue app). In this file, you’ll see a bunch of links to the different pages:

<nav>
<div class=”title”>
<nuxt-link to=”/rufina”>Rufina</nuxt-link>
<nuxt-link to=”/prata”>Prata</nuxt-link>
<nuxt-link exact to=”/”>Playfair</nuxt-link>
</div>
</nav>

You’ll notice I’m using that <nuxt-link> tag again even though it’s in another directory, and the routing will still work. But that last page has one extra attribute, the exact attribute: <nuxt-link exact to=”/”>Playfair</nuxt-link> This is because there are many routes that match just the / directory, all of them do, in fact. So if we specify exact, Nuxt will know that we only mean the index page in particular.

Further Resources

If you’d like more information about Nuxt, their documentation is pretty sweet and has a lot of examples to get you going. If you’d like to learn more about Vue, I’ve just made a course on Frontend Masters and all of the materials are open source here, or you can check out our Guide to Vue, or you can go to the docs which are extremely well-written. Happy coding!

Simple Server Side Rendering, Routing, and Page Transitions with Nuxt.js is a post from CSS-Tricks