A special selection of the most creative and interesting web designs from the last weeks. The post Inspirational Websites Roundup #27 appeared first on Codrops.

Ordnance Survey has provided an update on its OS Data Hub one year after its initial launch on 1 July 2020. OS Data Hub provides developers with the organisation's renowned open and premium mapping data through a suite of APIs. Charley Glynn, OS API Product Manager, said: "For those developers that will be searching for... Read more » The post Thousands of developers are benefiting from OS Data Hub one year after launch appeared first on Developer Tech News.

A slow website is everyone's concern. Not only that it chases visitors away but it also affects your SEO. So trying to keep it 'in shape' is definitely one of the main items to tick when you run a business or even a personal site. There are many ways to speed up your WordPress site, each one complementing the other. There is not a universal method. Improving your site speed is actually the sum of more of these methods combined.

Markdown is a lightweight text markup language that allows the marked text to be converted to various formats. The original goal of creating Markdown was of enabling people “to write using an easy-to-read and easy-to-write plain text format and to optionally convert it to structurally valid XHTML (or HTML). Currently, with WordPress supporting Markdown, the format has become even more widely used. The purpose of writing the article is to show you how to use Node.

Robots are great for cleaning the floor and are perfect for exploring the moon. They're just not that great at customer support. The last thing your customers want is another "We received your message" email or "Thank you for holding" recording. Robots only succeed in making customers feel like another number, a dubious accomplishment for your team. They're the opposite of the personal touch that effective support is supposed to be all about. It's not that robots are useless. They're great at repetitive tasks, perfect for finding data and remembering anything you've ever written down. As sidekicks, robots can help offer more personalized support, doing the tedious parts of support so that you can focus on actually solving problems. You just have to give them the right job. Here's how to find the perfect job for your robots, so that you can automate support and offer more personalized, hands-on support at the same time. The post How To Offer More Personal Customer Support Through Effective Automation appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

What started as a case study turned into a guide to visualizing audio with JavaScript. Although the output demos are in React, Jhey Tompkins isn't going to dwell on the React side of things too much. The underlying techniques work with or without React.

Code repetition is one of the more frustrating aspects of CSS. Having to type out the same property values over and over throughout a stylesheet takes time. And when making... The post How CSS Variables Can Improve Efficiency and Consistency appeared first on Speckyboy Design Magazine.

A simple transition where a large image animates to its place in a grid. The post Image To Grid Transition appeared first on Codrops.

In this tutorial, I will teach you how to work digitally on an image you draw by hand. You will learn two completely different ways to approach the image: through the Live Trace Tool and the Pen Tool. Two ways, two results. Learn how to take the best from both. Along the way, I will give you some Photoshop tips, too. The first thing you'll need to know is how to manage your drawing in Photoshop and which are the best ways to prepare it for Illustrator. If you are not comfortable drawing in Photoshop, don't worry! You can download my drawing in high-resolution, skip the Photoshop step and go straight to step 2 to begin with Illustrator.The post Pen Tool Vs. Live Trace: The Big Comparison appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Maybe you've heard of or worked with React, the JavaScript framework developed by Facebook. The social media company took it even further by releasing React Native, which quickly became the most popular framework for building mobile apps with JavaScript. Many companies embraced the idea and started building their apps with it. In this article, we'll get an idea of how to develop an application for Android and iOS using Expo and Firebase, based on my own experience of creating an application with these technologies.