Hot Web Design and Development – December 2021

Welcome to the December 2021 monthly roundup of Web Design and Development resources. I hope you have enjoyed the festive period so far. In this edition, we feature a look back at 2021. With 2022 looming I’ll highlight the new year’s resolutions for this blog. Here are the latest web design and development resources for this month. Wishing everyone a Happy New Year.

Table of contents

New Years Resolutions
Web Design Resources
Coding Resources
Learning Resources
The Best of the Rest in December 2021

New Years Resolutions

I’m not one for New Years Resolutions but sometimes it’s good to be different. Let’s look back on 2021. Blogging has changed since I created wow back in 2008. Each time Google change their algorithm it has a knock-on effect that affects small blogs. I didn’t create this blog to make a profit but need to have some funding to pay for the hosting fees. This is where sponsored blog posts are helpful. Very few of these opportunities come along often. People want to publish articles, which feature do-follow links but want them for free. In early 2021 I chose to have ads on my site. Like many I chose Google ads but after a while didn’t see this as being profitable. I didn’t like the speed of my site, nor the ugly placements of the ads. It’s not my style. In 2022, I’ll continue to source different avenues to create more revenue.

Photo by Anna Tarazevich from Pexels

2021 has been a year where I have been more consistent with my posts and have managed to publish at least once a month. I plan to follow this pattern in 2022 and continue my end of month mash-up.

This year’s most popular posts have been:

Due to the popularity of this type of format, I plan to do more tutorials which feature coding. I haven’t posted as much as I would have liked on social media this year so this is going to change in 2022.

As for learning, which I feature a lot on this blog. I am currently doing a degree as well as working full-time in education so I have to manage my time well. This does have an effect on the number of blog posts I can publish a month. I may seek someone to join forces with to publish posts but we’ll see how 2022 goes.

My new year’s resolutions are:

To use social media more.
Create more coding tutorials.
Learn Vue and React.
Rebuild my portfolio using Astro.
Finish unfinished projects from 2021

Check back in a years time to see the progress.

Web Design Resources

What’s in store for web designers this upcoming year? The primary role of a web designer has changed since the early days of the web. It has converted into a development role where the focus is not on design alone. The role has migrated to learning both server-side and client-side technologies, such as Vue and React. Often trends come and go. Do you see CSS sprites anymore or 1-page web designs. This is an example of two of the trends that have been around.

One of the biggest and most popular trends over the last 13 years is the technology used. Compared to 2008, 70% of my traffic now comes from mobile devices. Designing for mobile devices is now commonplace and no longer a trend. Check out upcoming trends for the new year.

Coding Resources

This month saw the release of Tailwind 3. The latest version features the new Just In Time (JIT) compiler which speeds up the build time. There are more colour palettes available and coloured box shadows. Other noticeable features include the Scroll-Snap API, multi-column layouts and fancy underline styles. I completed a rebuild of wow this year using Tailwind. I shaved a lot of bytes from my CSS file in comparison to using the previous Bulma framework. It’s a little bit of a learning curve to get the hang of but it’s definitely worth it.

Learning Resources

Finally the learning section. If you are a student, like me you don’t have the funds to buy every premium plan or tool. Here is a list of 19 resources you can access as a student. If JavaScript is your programming language of choice to learn. You may find this collection of free beginner JS courses handy. If you want more choice you can find the best free online computer programming courses.

If you want to learn web design why not start with building 20 web design projects. Check out the free ebooks and courses for frontend devs. Take time out to look at 35 online platforms to grow your software development skills.