On Tuesday morning, January 19th, from 1:00 – 6:00 AM ET, we will be performing internal network maintenance. During this time, there may be brief network interruptions to the following services:
It’s that time of year when the year in review lists start getting published. Maybe we should do our own retrospective on the websites launched this past year, but that is a post for another day. Anyway, I found this 2020 Web Design Year in Review published on Speckyboy interesting as it highlights a couple of core ideas for us in Web Services.
Something we have always preached at CU*Answers Web Services is always design and code your web site to the formal standards. Don’t get caught up in individual browser’s special cases. All browsers will converge on standards. And this is the first 2020 highlight from the Year in Review article. All the major browsers became more conforming to the standards this past year. This means our developers can more reliable use the features of CSS, JS and HTML as they were intended.
The second highlight from the article kind of shocked me. According to their stats, Google Chrome holds nearly 70% market share of desktop browsers. Followed by Apple’s Safari in the high teens. The good news is the old Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 is down around 1% as it is phased out. We’ve previously reported about Microsoft phasing IE out back in August and October.
Finally, it was interesting to learn that WordPress’s Gutenberg editor is now 2 years old! It’s definitely come a long way. The CU*Answers Web Services team has been actively using it internally for special projects and rapid prototyping. I think we’re finally getting comfortable with using it for a client site and I wouldn’t be surprised to see new client themes launch in 2021 using the new editor. It feels like its almost ready for prime time.
2020 has been a crazy year, but we wanted to say thank you to all the clients and owners of CU*Answers for making it a great year also!
You may remember our previous post about how Microsoft is ending Internet Explorer in 2021. As web developers we see this as good news!
The phasing out has officially begun. Starting in recent versions of Microsoft Edge, when Internet Explorer visits an incompatible site, the browsing session will automatically be launched in Microsoft Edge to continue the browsing session.
What does that mean? Well, if a visitor to a site is still using Internet Explorer 11, Microsoft keeps a list of incompatible sites and will automatically force the visitor to open the site in Microsoft Edge.
This special list is maintained by Microsoft, and is starting with big sites. Notably on the list are YouTube, Instagram, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, StackOverflow, StackExchange, VK, ESPN, Chase, Hotstar, Moneygram, eharmony, and GoDaddy, just to name a few. These sites all dropped Internet Explorer support already.
It’s going to take a while for this process to trickle down, but we’re already seeing less IE11 traffic and more Edge traffic on our client sites.
Here’s more information from ZDNet and Bleeping Computer.
The browser will be finished on 17 August, 2021, says Microsoft.
Starting November of this year, Microsoft Office 365 Apps will start to stop working in Internet Explorer 11. Also on the chopping block is the non-Chromium version of Microsoft Edge.
You may not realize this, but Internet Explorer causes lots of headaches for web development. While it used to be the most used browser, now its outdated engine and rendering creates idiosyncrasies that web developers have to work around. So, in that respect, this is good news for your website, and will hopefully save you a little money.
At the same time, it’s a little bit of bad news. Microsoft’s new Edge browser is based on Google’s Chromium, which is the same source the Google’s Chrome is generated from. That means the browsers are homogenizing around a single platform. This is what happened back in the Internet Explorer 6 days and caused compatibility problems with web code and browser code. Here’s hoping we don’t end up in that boat again.
This article came across my news feed today. It struck a chord as Web Services has been working with clients who are developing their own Web Developer talents. It’s an interesting new consulting track we are getting into as we learn different clients developer’s have various levels of skill – but all consider themselves web developers. Its a world…
Web Development is a complex thing and so many parts to it. Not everyone can know them all and there is always constant learning. Choosing the right skill set for your developer is important – see this article on CUSO Magazine. You need someone who knows the right parts to make you project successful, but also one that is not going to cost an arm and a leg. This is one of the reasons having a team, like CU*Answers Web Services, where individuals support each other’s knowledge and skill deficits works well.
Anyway, back to the article. This article is a visual roadmap of all the things you might need to learn as a front end developer for a website. Not all websites require all these tools and concepts, but your web developer should probably be aware of most of them. This roadmap is also changing as new tools and security concepts emerge.
Take a look at the article. I hope you appreciate all that’s involved in web development. Its not all just pretty pictures and HTML Code.
You’re not going to guess what the Web Services Team did a lot of this week. Maybe you are. This past week we published a bunch of alerts on credit union websites about this virus thing everyone is talking about. A people virus, not a computer virus.
Luckily, CU*Answers Web Services was prepared for this. We’ve published special alerts on credit union websites before for things like weather related closings, power outages or telephone troubles at branches. If your credit union website is on our WordPress with SiteControl platform, we have the ability to turn on Notifications Bars.
Notification Bars appear at the very top of your website to highlight an important notice for your members. These notification bars are highly customizable and mobile responsive. Here’s a screenshot of a site with a live notification bar enabled:
If you have a need for an alert to your members on your site — and who doesn’t this week? — let us know. We can enable this feature and the content is manageable in your WordPress dashboard. Also we’re happy to add the content for you, just let us know what you would like it to read.
