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Hot Web Design and Development – December 2020

Welcome to December’s roundup of News, Web Design and Development resources. 2020 has been a difficult year around the globe but it’s been a bumper year for dev resources.  This month’s edition features Google’s AMP lawsuit over illegal practices. December’s edition also features web design tools and JavaScript resources.
Hello December

Google faces lawsuits over AMP

Google is in trouble again! Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is an open-source initiative. Launched in 2015 it began development to speed up websites on mobile devices.  AMP became adopted by websites and recommended by Google to boost website authority. Through their own exchange, Google sold advertising space to the highest bidder.

If a competitor came in with a bigger bid the system favoured Google which leads it to be a monopoly. Google AMP pages don’t work well with JavaScript and thus should be minimal as a result. This makes a mockery of the initiative.

There are several antitrust lawsuits in progress.  It remains inconclusive on what will happen. Currently, there are more than 500,000 AMP installations from the WordPress repository. Will AMP become abandoned like other Google technologies from the past!

Macbook Pro with Google

Learning and Career Options

I work in education so I will always be promoting learning and educational resources. Coding for the first time? FreeCodeCamp has published an article on 10 free websites to learn. If you prefer to learn more about computer science. FreeCodeCamp also has a list of free online programming cs courses. If coding or web design isn’t your thing then there are plenty of other opportunities to have a career in tech. If you have good communication skills or you are good at designing. Here are 25 career options if coding isn’t your strong point.

Tools for Web Design

I would have to admit that I like trying new tools when it comes to designing. I have built plenty of websites over the years but actually prefer the coding side to it, rather than the design. I like to follow other web designers and use them as a source of inspiration.  I recently came across 50 favourite web-based tools for web designers.

Fonts also play an important part of any web site. Services like Google Web Fonts and an increase in other web fonts gives each website its own look. If you want to add a little bit of touch to your code editor. CSS Tricks recently created a microsite which showcases coding fonts.  Designing a site is one thing but what about all the extras that you don’t think of. Favicons would be a prime example. With so many browsers, devices and screens to target what is the best size? Here is a 2021 guide to creating favicons.

JavaScript Resources

In 2020 I became a JavaScript fan. Each month I bookmark and read plenty of articles. I recently published a simple guessing game tutorial which used session storage. Session storage is temporary and is erased once the browser closes. Local storage remains until manually cleared. Browser storage can only contain strings. If you want to store arrays or objects you have to use the built-in JSON.stringify method.

Speaking of arrays I came across 14 awesome tips and a JS array cheatsheet that you may find useful. December has once again presented with us with some useful JavaScript hacks.   If you start to learn JavaScript first then it will be easier to work with JS frameworks.

In 2021 I would like to try out TypeScript. I’ve heard lots of positive things about it. Some knowledge of JavaScript would be an advantage before learning TypeScript.

The Best of the Rest in December

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