Maira De Gois

Web Authoring

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10 Best Free Blogging Sites in 2021 (Create a Blog for Free)

Looking for free blog sites? If you don't know what platform to use for your blog, check out these free blogging sites. Learn which is best!

Just come across with this site and I thought extremely useful to have in mind how the good website could help to build a broader audience. The positive aspect is some of them provide us excellent features to start a blog for free. 

 Wix is a free website builder that can be totally managed from the front-end. Basically, you can drag and drop images and other assets and you don’t need to handle anything in the back-end. It is friendly manageable as the design is very intuitive and modern.  It can be used by both beginners and advanced.

 The free platform WordPress.org allows you to build the site from scratch. Also, you also have to host the software by yourself. Additionally, you can find some free WordPress hosting, a better long-term strategy is to pay a moderate amount for a solid WordPress host.

 Although LinkedIn isn’t popular for users as a first choice for free blogging sites, it can be useful to get exposure. In addition to this, publishing on this platform can be easy. Just go to your LinkedIn feed and use the “Start a post” widget at the top of the page.

Weebly is another option for designers and beginners. Not only does this site help you to build a blog, but it also showcases your portfolio and help you to sell products.

You can find more advice on this text. Other aspects which are worth being considered: name of the blog, buy a domain, WordPress installation, find a theme and useful plugins.

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WebPageTest API | CSS-Tricks

I'm willing to bet you know WebPageTest. It is the premier tool in the toolbox of web performance people. Maybe you didn't know that WebPageTest was a

While I was reading through this text, I could see how this tool is friendly. It’s also designed for web performance people. Basically, is an entirely API-driven product so if WebPageTest offers more functionality, you’ll have it in the API. It means that when API drives the product you can rely on its functionality. 

Before going over it, it is essential to understand the meaning of API. This is an application programming interface that defines interactions between multiple software applications or mixed hardware-software. By adding WebPage API, it will make the web developers’ job very efficiently and a way easier. On top of this, it will provide an at cutting-edge product definition.

One of the advantages is you have freedom to do whatever you want, for instance, you can build a performance dashboard for your company. Another positive aspect is, you can focus on tracking and reporting the most important goal for your company.

It might be handy to build alerting tools. For this, there is a Node wrapper. This tool will help you to set up your performance tests to run and your performance metrics you want to get results.

What makes the tool very useful is it can track down the metrics and deliver results which can be essential to adding value to your company. Thus, you can evaluate and spot any performance issue. Then you can have a clear view on how aspect should be improved. The amount of detailed data you get from the Webpage Test API, you can track anything you want.  

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Tools to Improve UX and Win Over Your Customers | CSS-Tricks

Try Hotjar for free today! An enjoyable user experience and high conversion rates go hand-in-hand. It makes sense then, that if you want to improve

One of the business goals is to uplift conversion rates. One of the most important action which should be taken is to improve user experience. To improve UX, it is highly advisable to deeply to grasp what’s behind users’ intentions. By doing so, you can understand the ups and downs and then come out with a feasible strategy. To make the long story shorten, if you don’t have an idea about your customers’ behaviour, the most at cutting edge tool will not help to lead conversions action into your landing page.

 Walking through this article, I bumped into some valuable tools which you can use to learn more about your customers. Thus, you can make impactful tweaks that improve UX and increase conversions.

 There are some essentials tips which should take into consideration to have high volume of conversions:

Your website should be clear and easy to navigate. The users should navigate easily towards the checkout page. In other words, users should get from point A to point B with no roadblocks or confusion. If they are distracted by unimportant elements on your page, they won’t convert. The worst case scenario is they’ll get frustrated by a lack of flow and leave your website. Broadly speaking, poor design, spelling issues in your ad copy, and low-quality imagery can turn potential customers away.

To enhance UX in your landing page, it was displayed some efficient tools in this article. Two of them grab my attention.  The first one is Heatmaps. This tool gives to you a visual representation of your analytical data. Basically, you can easily spot popular and unpopular areas of your website. By applying heatmaps, you can figure out which areas of your website contribute to a poor user experience. Another tool is Incoming Feedback tool. By using this tool, you can have an idea what exactly  your users like and dislike. Then you can use that information to fix issues.

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Comparing the New Generation of Build Tools | CSS-Tricks

A bunch of new developer tools have landed in the past year and they are biting at the heels of the tools that have dominated front-end development over

What I could learn from this article was there are a bunch of tools out there to improve the developer experience. Despite the fact these tools aren’t designed to perform the exact same function, it seems there is another common goal between them is to provide outstanding experience to users. 

To make the developers’ end meets, it is crucial to look over their needs out there and come up with the best solutions. Undoubtedly, there are an awful lot in designing new tools to modernize the developer environments.

The author outlined a few tools which are worth going through. One of them is “esbuild”. Basically, it gives to users intuitive JavaScript and command line APIs with smart defaults. Many developers can be benefit from it as it’s going to be very useful and efficient in big production sites.

Another tool mentioned is “Snowpack” which provides an outstanding development server.

While esbuild does the build step and Snowpack concentrates on the development server, Vite does a little bit of both. It seems to be more efficient tool as it provides a full development server and an optimized build command using Rollup. 

There are more tools outlined in this article, What I could notice was regardless the size of the project, it could be small or complex, there are a rage of sophisticated tools capable of increasing productivity at high quality. As mentioned in this article, “these tools are going to lower the barrier-to-entry for new developers by providing a leaner, faster developer environment with fewer abstractions between the code that gets written and the code that runs in the browser.”

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HTML Inputs and Labels: A Love Story | CSS-Tricks

Most inputs have something in common — they are happiest with a companion label! And the happiness doesn’t stop there. Forms with proper inputs and labels

To make the content more readable the usage of proper inputs and labels are essential. In this article, the author highlighted the lack of a semantic label and input combination makes harder for all sorts of people to complete forms for instance.

To make the proper combination between both elements, it’s necessary to create a harmonious relationship between an input and a label. Going more granular in each element definitions, input element is used to create interactive controls for web-based forms to accept data from the user. There is a wide variety of types of input data and it relies on the type of device and user agent. While labels acts as a caption for a specified element. By using labels, the text increases the clickable area. 

There are two ways to use in coordination input and label elements. These ways are implicit and explicit. The implicit way, the label wraps the input element. While the other way, it is added “For” attribute to the label and an “Id” to the input. It is pointed out in this article that the explicit labels “For” attribute value must match its input’s “Id” value. In other words, if “For” has a value name, then “Id” should have a value name. As a best practice, it is advisable to use explicit label instead of an implicit label. The reason behind is it isn’t usable for all assistive technologies.

As the use of HTML semantic elements have been more meaningful to users, it seems all functionalities can’t be applied equally across different devices. Thus, the markup language can be more specific and challenging not only for the users in general but also for practitioners.  

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Scope of Web Development in 2021 | Future Technologies to Watch

Web development is an exciting and growing field in this digital age. This guide will explain the future and scope of web development.

The term customer centred is widely used nowadays across all channels and social media platform. I would say it’s applied in market world. All the best practices applied from the development of a product at the cutting edge to the optimal user experience solutions are prone to attend the target audience. 

As mentioned in the article attached, when it comes to reach out to customers online a website matters more than anything. What’s more, a robust website which is easy to navigate and contain all feature at the hands of the users, this can mean a growth from any online business. Because of this, most of the business put a huge effort on design development to deliver their products and their service at an outstanding quality. Saying this, it can be noticed deal of scope for web development and design.

Due to the continuous upgrade of websites, the developers tend to create designs layout and platforms based on customers’ and business needs. Thus, it’s not uncommon that web developers and designers gather an awful lot information to design unique website to overcome the competitors. The positive aspect of the high speed technology innovation is to design easily web design at shorter space of time compared to few years ago.

It was highlighted in this article the scope and future of web development. They are moving very quickly to these arena: Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), 360-Degree Video experience, Internet of Things (IoT) and Motion User Interface (UI). It will be incredibly challenging to developers to keep up the pace of the frenetic movement of the technology.

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The SEO Advantages of Machine-Readable HTML5 Semantic Markup

Semantic HTML5 provides us with an opportunity to improve our websites and optimize for search engines. We can take full advantage of these opportunities

SEO and HTML5 Semantic Markup

One of the best advantages of Semantic HTML5 is to enhance our website for the search engines by using machine-readable semantic HTML5 elements. This can describe page outlines and specially named containers which can help search engines and browsers to identify how our page is structured. For instance, the element <header> is its own element now, as is <nav>, and so on. Thus, we can describe our page outline, deploying these terms.

The most important element considered by the author is <article>. From his perspective, the ideal content is analysed by overall readers and search engine. Depending on how unique and well-built the content is, there is a high chance to be crawled by SEO. The author suggests to see how this works with a page loaded in your browser by toggling the reader view. In addition to this, he outlines despite not being incorrect to have more than one <article> element per page, this approach seems not be the best practice.

Other elements are displayed to support <article>. What he meant by this was, <section> element can correctly nest as a child of <article> in this case. However, the parent-child relationship between <article> and <section> can’t be reversed as long as they would be semantically logical.

Other elements such as <main>, <article>, <header>, <nav>, <footer>, <aside>, <section> can be indisputably important to shape the HTML semantic structure and delivery readable content to search engine. Consequently, across the SEO we can have access to more meaningful and well optimized content.

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The Future of HTML 5 Mobile App

Nowadays, our online presence is more robust than ever. For this reason, all developments for mobile and devices tend to solve all sorts of compatibility issues and speed problems. However, it seems HTML5 solutions for mobile seem to face up some drawbacks when it comes to live up users’ high expectations across the board.

This blog gives an overview on advantages and downsides of HTML5 developments for native apps and devices. Due to the high number of the third-party software options, the author states there are a huge variety of options of HTML5 functionalities. These can maximize suitability for native app and availability for device features access. Additionally, the competition among software companies has a positive impact on cost reduce for service and products.

In the other hand, he pointed out the downside is caused by the high complexity of the HTML system. What he meant by this was it is crucial to provide a bunch of third-party systems practitioners to execute a seamless operational job. However, in some cases these companies do not have what he named as “the discipline and predictability developers” expected from larger corporations. These can result unfeasible change in the API and an app can collapse.

It is handy to be aware of the most updated developments around HTML5 structure and to have some understanding of different viewpoints from who has some expertise in this field. Although it is hard to have grips on this subject and to how HTML structure will be applied across many devices, some ideas on these topics can alleviate the burden of our doubts and concerns.

https://techbeacon.com/app-dev-testing/html5-mobile-app-or-native-it-depends

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Behind this landing page, there is Hypertext Markup Language structure, well known as HTML5, which consists of a range of elements. Walking through on how this text was built up, we can see some important elements applied such as headings, paragraphs, listings, breaking and strong tags. Once I found myself questioning on how important these elements can be to structure a text or a landing page. The response which I came across was how important it is to the browser makes readable any content to us. 

As we need a solid foundation and blocks to build a house, this could not be different in a text from any website. At very first, the text needs a root which is named as <html> </html>. Inside it, there are two elements which are at the same level of the hierarchy of this structure. They are <head> </head> and <body></body> elements. The head is not displayed in the content, actually it includes keywords and a page description which both appear in search results. Within the head there are <meta charset="utf-8"> attribute and <title></title> elements.

Following up on this, there are body tags which all elements inside are displayed in the landing page readable for users. In this post, we can see heading <h1> The Art of Blogging</h1> and paragraphs <p></p>. The paragraphs have a noticeable space which non- closing tag break function <br> was added. Additionally, in the following paragraphs there are ordered listings which are <ol> </ol> tags. To highlight these listings in bold, it was applied <strong> </strong> element. To conclude this text, it was added closing tags such as </p> to close the final paragraph and </html> to close the entire text.

Image taken from this blog below:

https://artofblogging.net/2021/03/07/the-art-of-writing-a-fantastic-article-per-week/