Hot Web Design and Development – January 2021

Happy New Year! Welcome to January 2021’s web design and dev resources. This month we feature a new tool for WordPress development. As the UK are once again in lockdown. Learning is challenging. Teaching is another. There are many ways to educate your children. It doesn’t always have to involve tech.

Table of contents

Kinsta Release Free WP Software
Learning in Lockdown
Web Design Resources
Coding Resources
The Best of the Rest in January 2021

Kinsta Release Free WP Software

WP host, Kinsta has released a free WordPress Development tool. DevKinsta software is available for Mac and Windows. Whether you are a developer or a designer you will have worked on your local machine.

Of course, you can also host your WordPress sites on the Kinsta platform. This is a boost if you already have your sites hosted by them. DevKinsta has support for both PHP7.2 and 8.0 and runs on the Nginx server. It comes with built-in tools to manage the database and local mail server.

Why install? If if you fed up of setting up a local web server on your computer. Installing WordPress to test your plugins and themes. DevKinsta is the right tool for you. There are several alternatives including Flywheel’s Local and VVV among them. Try them all out.

Learning in Lockdown

Here in the UK at the end of 2020, we faced another lockdown. Again with school closures, we are teaching our children from home. I find myself quite fortunate that I have older children and they are more independent.

My daughter is currently at University. My son is moving on to the senior stage of his secondary education. I also work in education and am currently working from home.

My best advice would be to use all the services around you. BBC Bitesize has some wonderful resources for children of all ages. Schools may have provided access to EducationCity which is suitable for younger children. Learning doesn’t always have to be at school though.

As parents, we should take responsibility to educate our children from the day they were born. Furthermore, that should never stop!

Baking or cooking with your children or reading to them can build up their relationship with you. Putting them in front of a gadget won’t help!

We are all teachers! Let me know of your approaches in the comments.

Web Design Resources

Typography in web design has changed lots over the past 10 years. You are not tied to using boring system fonts anymore. Web Designer Depot published an article on how to improve your website typography. In under 30 minutes! Leading on to trends Noupe published 8 Typography trends for 2021.

If your typography is on par then is your web design? Here are 3 essential trends for January 2021. Whilst on trends. Designmodo has created another roundup of top web design and UI trends for 2021.

If you think of yourself more as a developer. You should check out 15 reasons why developers need to learn UX design. Likewise, if you are more developer minded. It may be hard to get the creative juices flowing when dealing with featured images.

Static Site Development has become popular over the last few years. I have built a couple of websites using Jekyll, built using the programming language Ruby. There are many others available including Hugo and Gridsome. If you are looking into building a blog you may find this tutorial interesting.

Coding Resources

If you want to start coding but not sure where to start. FreeCodeCamp published a wonderful article on the key differences between Python and JavaScript. If your primary focus is to develop a web app you can decide on which language to choose.

If you are familiar with JavaScript you may also want to learn TypeScript. Check out the free TypeScript beginners course.

Every year JavaScript has new features which get adopted by developers and browsers. Here are 12 features that you should learn in 2021 and 7 developer lessons to set you on the right path. JavaScript wouldn’t be the same without some optimisation tips.

JavaScript does get better with each release. As it gets better why not learn it. If you are already comfortable with the functional aspects of the language why not try OOP.

On a final note. We will end our coding resources with the Top 10 trending projects for web developers in January 2021. See you next month!