My presentation for HighEdWeb 2018 in Sacramento was about our latest redesign of www.nd.edu and the performance goals we set for ourselves and how we tried to achieve them.
Lighthouse 100
We would have had a perfect Lighthouse score if the tool didn’t assume our Google fonts would be invisible while webfonts are loading.
Users may get a bit of FOUT, but the text uses a fallback until Google Fonts finishes loading. So I’m going to go ahead and call it a perfect 100.
Be Better: Accessibility
Everything is broken. And it’s broken because we broke it.
Accessibility isn’t something we should do because we might get sued. It’s something we do because it’s right.
Building a University Website
The current version of www.nd.edu was launched on April 1, 2012. While the site has served us well for six years, it’s time for a refresh. For the past several months, ND Strategic Content, the ND Web Team, and many partners across campus have been working together to create something fresh and new.
Chrome 68 Marking "http" as "Not Secure"
Starting with version 68 (arriving July 2018), all non-https sites will be marked as “Not secure” by Chrome. If you’ve been putting off making the switch to https, now’s the time.
Video Playback Rate
As a web developer who likes to keep up with all the latest and greatest in our profession, I find it difficult consume all of the media I’ve saved for later viewing or listening. I listen to all podcasts at 2x with little trouble. But what about videos?
Designing Web Content for watchOS
On Monday Apple announced that it was bringing Webkit to the Apple Watch with WatchOS 5. This will allow users to open links from the Mail and Messages apps directly on their watches. Naturally, as web developers, we wonder how this will work with our already responsive websites. Well here’s the basics.
Mind Your Cloudfront Headers
The following is a lesson learned about CDN’s and proper use of Headers. I’m going to preface this post with a disclaimer… I am neither CDN nor an AWS expert.
What's new in web accessibility (Google I/O '18)
Chrome is adding a number of features to DevTools to make testing and debugging accessibility faster and easier.
Custom Domains on GitHub Pages Gain Support for HTTPS
On May 1st GitHub announced that custom domains on GitHub Pages are gaining support for HTTPS thanks to a partnership with (no surprise) Let’s Encrypt. As someone who has hosted custom domains on GitHub Pages, this comes as great news.