Categories: Web DevelopmentWordPress

Hot Web Design and Development Resources – August 2020

Welcome to August’s monthly roundup of Web Design and Development resources. In this month’s edition, there have been updates to major players on the web sphere. If you are keen to get into the web development field then I hope you will find the resources helpful. As always there is a little something for everyone. Enjoy!

WordPress Update

On August 11th WordPress released version 5.5, named Eckstine in honour of Jazz singer Billy Eckstine.

The latest version comes with speed changes including the lazy loading of images by default. This core change will prevent images that are not in view from loading. Bandwidth will be saved as a result and it’s more likely to improve bounce rates as pages will load quicker.

Sitemaps are now a default feature that you would have previously used a plugin for. Sitemaps are an important part of any website that allows for search engines to discover your site. Some would have thought that they would have been a default feature many years ago.

One of the biggest new features is the auto-update of plugins and themes. I am still a little sceptical about this new feature. I enabled some to automatically update but ended up in a PHP redirect loop so I changed them back to manual update. For me, I personally like to manage every aspect of my blog and will continue to do so.

One of the biggest changes for developers was the removal of jQuery Migrate. The migrate plugin has been around since 2013 when the main codebase was upgraded to 1.9. Its primary focus was to support deprecated code in older versions. This would allow developers time to update their code to support the latest releases. Despite given ample time to update themes and plugins its removal has reportedly broken many WordPress sites.

jQuery is currently on version 3.5.1 at the current time of writing and WordPress plan on upgrading to the latest version over the coming releases. Maybe it’s now time for developers to refactor the code to ensure the transition is as smooth as possible.

Web Design Resources

One of the hottest and biggest design trends in 2020 is Neumorphism which combines flat design with realism and skeuomorphism. Web Design Ledger recently posted 20 of the latest designs to incorporate the features of Neumorphism. While we are on the subject of inspiration checkout 20 developer portfolios.

CSS frameworks are commonplace in modern web design. Not only do they support modern CSS features like the flexbox. They can also save loads of time when developing websites for clients. Most are modular and customisable so all websites don’t have to look the same. Here are the trending CSS Frameworks for August 2020.

Coding Resources

If you are already familiar with Python and need to take the next step in your development. FreeCodeCamp is offering a free 6-hour intermediate python course on their YouTube channel. It’s ok to start learning a new language but you also need to know what you can use it for. If you are unsure then the following article written by Estefania Cassingena Navone shows 10+ uses for the Python programming language.

GitHub has become a popular, easy to use source code management system. With so much code at your fingertips, you will find 10 Trending projects on GitHub for web developers ideal for inspiration.