Last week, we discussed a few ways design deliverables can be made with the goal of streamlining the front-end development process. This week, we’ll address design complexity and how to simplify things with that same goal. Assemble page designs as a collection of modular pieces that fit together, and provide notes for any edge cases …
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Design tips for lowering front-end costs, part one: Deliverables
Here at Advomatic, we frequently get the chance to partner with really creative, disciplined, and talented design shops. Over the years, we’ve identified a few areas where we can be more helpful to them. We’ll try articulating the best ways to solve design problems which have an impact on the front-end development approach. Along with strategizing …
Read more »Eliminating render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content in Drupal sites
One of the things we do on an annual basis for our clients at Advomatic is an annual site audit – a high level kick-the-tires kind of site inspection. For Drupal sites, we check the logs for any glaring errors, check for overrides in Features, run some SEO and accessibility testing, and, of course, take it …
Read more »Using Configuration Split to have dev-only configuration in Drupal 8
The problem If you are using Drupal’s Configuration Management subsystem to deploy configuration out to the production environment, you’ll run into a problem where the configuration .yml files contain your development settings. To avoid this you’ll need to use the Configuration Split module. I couldn’t find any good documentation for this, so I had to …
Read more »DrupalCon Baltimore 2017: Thoughts on the community
I was fortunate enough to get to Baltimore for this year’s DrupalCon. Here’s a few takeaways regarding Drupal’s open-source community. The community is still strong. There has been some major turbulence recently with the dismissal of a community member from his position as DrupalCon track chair. It’s had repercussions about issues of both governance …
Read more »Avoiding the boom/bust website cycle
How to ensure that satisfaction in your websites remains high, while also levelling out your spending A typical website is created in a burst of activity (and spending), then “launched” to the public. There is probably some really great thinking that went into it, but because no one can predict the future, you don’t really …
Read more »Accessibility As You Go: Part 3
Picking up where we left off in Part 2, in which we went over some of the tools and design considerations for accessibility, in Part 3 we’ll review some tips for minimizing accessibility issues by addressing them early in the development process. Plan Your DOM Order DOM is Document Object Model, which is the fancy …
Read more »Accessibility As You Go: Part 2
Picking up where we left off from the first in our Accessibility As You Go series: Testing Tools and Design Process Nip Color Contrast Issues in the Bud During the design phase, it’s important to verify that all text on the site has high enough contrast with its background color. Level AA contrast requires a …
Read more »Accessibility As You Go: Part 1
Introduction and Terminology Earlier this year, I went to a tech accessibility event here in Minneapolis (sponsored by Clockwork and WeCO) that was incredibly enlightening. Participants got a chance to watch and ask questions as several users with different impairments interacted with websites: A blind man was visibly frustrated using a screen reader that kept getting trapped …
Read more »Theming Drupal 8 pages based on URL
We’ve been all heads down over here, digging in to Drupal 8. We are trying to figure out best practices for the front end, now that we are no longer building new sites in Drupal 7, and documenting as we go. It has been fun picking things up, and I’d like to try to share more …
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