Com followers, my name is ty Kilgore. Today, I’m going to be answering the question: how do I rank and local search or how do I rank in maps? Local SEO has been something that’s really taken off in the last year to year and a half and the search engines are putting more emphasis on the users to fill out the information than ever before. So I’m going to talk about five different things that you can do to rank in local SEO.
The first thing is that you want to make sure that if you want to show up for localized terms that you have a business address and a phone number that is local, so, for instance, if I were wanting to show up for a term in Lawrenceville Georgia, I would need to make sure that my business was located in larval Georgia and that I also had a phone number. That was local point number two is that you want to build out citations.
One of the main things that you want to build out is there’s many different popular citation sites out there, such as Yelp citysearch, yellow book insider pages superpages. The list goes on so essentially what you want to do is make sure that you have all of those local citations built out, and you have all the correct information listed there. The third thing that you want to do is you want to claim your local business on Google Places are being an owner, verified listing will rank higher than a non owner verified listing.
So it’s important that you claim that listing and you fill out the proper information on google or bing and they send you the information to input so that you own that page. The fourth bullet point that I would talk about is link building. You want to link bills pacifically to those local listing on google or being so that you have different things that are pointing back to that actual page. The fifth thing that I’ll talk about is also very important is actually getting reviews.
We live in an age where everybody wants to find out what everyone else thought about a product or service, and no more is that important than in local search. So if you have customers that are satisfied and that actually enjoy your product, encourage them to go online. Fill out a review about their experience, that will also help people that come to your site to learn more about what other people think.
Hopefully, these five things will help you in your local SEO, search
Really Really different, Whereas if you take two colors that are very Close together on the color wheel, it ’ s, going to be harder to tell the two apart Now the reason why this is important in web Design is because often times our whole goal is convey some information to the user, usually Through text and images, But if the contrast of our text is a little Too subltle and too mixed in with the background, it might be difficult for the user to read.
The page and that might sort of degrade the user experience. So what I wanted to do today is walk through Some of the process that I use to sort of check the page and figure out if it has appropriate Contrast and how to tune it up if I find some issues But to start follow me over to my laptop And I have a little presentation that I want to show you It kind of walks through how we measure contrast.
On the web, So here I ’, ve got a set of text boxes on A white background, and up above you can see, I ’ ve, got these numbers up here for some Contrast ratios, So I ’ m measuring in terms of luminance The difference between this foreground color and this background color Now on the web. We actually have guidelines That try to instruct us what our contrast minimums should be So the web content accessibility guidelines, In section 1.
4.3, they say for body text: you want to aim for a contrast: ratio of around 4.5:1, for, like smaller text or your general body copy For larger text, something that is 14 point. Bold or 18 point you can ratchet that contrast ratio down just a little bit to 3:1. So if we go back and we look at our image – Of contrast, we ’ ve got these first. Two examples would meet that minimum contrast requirement.
So this one is just pure black on white, so its 15.9:1 Thats really high contrast. This one is a little more of a subtle grey But we still have 5.7:1, which is pretty nice. These last two, though, are just a little too Low contrast, so they wouldn ’ t quite meet that requirement. We can also actually bump this up, though Theres a enhanced contrast recommendation in the web content accessibility guidelines, As well So this is for situations where you know you Might have either an older audience or a low vision audience.
In that case, we can bump the contrast ratio. Up to 7:1 or 4.5:1 for the regular body text. So if we go back – and we look at this example – Here, really only this first one would meet that enhanced contrast, ratio requirement So consider who your audience is going to Be when you ’ re, building your site or application, and that can help decide where you want to Aim on the contrast ratio scale, I use a number of different tools to try to Figure out, if I ’ m nailing those contrast, ratio, minimums And actually my friend Louis, has done this Really cool thing where he has put together this accessibility testing for the web handbook.
Called OATMEAL, which stands for Open Accessibility, Testing Methods for Experts and Lay folk. He actually has a whole guide in here about How he measures color contrast and the folks on his team do that, And so we ’ re going to kind of follow this Guide a little bit, We ’ re not going to use all the exact same Tools, but this is a really cool methodology that you can check out and use in some of Your own apps to maybe figure out your process, So what I ’ ve got here is a website called The accessibility blog and we ’ re, going to follow two of the steps in that OATMEAL Guide doing a sort of semi-automated check using a tool like aXe And then we ’ ll, do a more manual spot.
Check using a WCAG, color contrast analyzer, So starting on this site, the first thing: I ’ m going to do. Is pop open, my DevTools, I ’ ve already installed the aXe. Extension For Chrome, If you actually check out our previous episode, On A11ycasts and I’ll leave a link to this down in the show notes we covered all the different Ways that you can install aXe on your system, So I ’ m just using the extension for Chrome Here – and I ’ m just going to open it up and check out this page and hit the analyze button, And you ’ ll – see that it tells me over here.
On the left that I have a few elements that do not have sufficient color contrast, I ’ ve. Got about 7 issues here: It ’ ll! Try to give me a CSS selector to the Elements that need some work, but there ’ s an inspect button that I often use to just Inspect the element in the Dom – and I can scroll up and say who exactly is this Alright, so we ’ re starting of with these Little anchors up here in our navigation – and this is one those areas that I see a lot where It looks like we ’ re, actually pretty close to having good contrast here, but we ’ re.
Sort of on the bubble – it ’ s, a little unclear. Are we hitting that or not So? What I ’ ll often do. Is I ’ ll. Take this Foreground color and I ’ ll, take this background color and I can use another tool this one That I often use is called Lea. Verou: ’ s, Color Contrast Checker, so I ’. Ll also include a Link to this down in the show notes, And then we can just drop in our foreground.
And that background color, and we can see that the contrast ratio of these two is 3.6 So its not quite where we want to be for smaller text Again, we want to bump that up to about 4.5. So this is an area where I know that I need To go back, and since I also have some of these elements right here that are even lighter, And since I know that this is pure white text – and I can ’ t make it any brighter, my only Real option here would be to make this header bar a darker blue, so that all three of those Links pop a bit more Another thing that we might notice in our Tool, if we step through some of the options, is that we also have areas down here like This little sub-heading, which we ’ ve, got a kind of subtle, grey on white thing, going On and again we can take that into Lea Verou: ’ s, Color Checker and we can figure out.
You know, Are we on the bubble One option if we want, we can make the text Bigger so we can maybe hit 3.0 contrast ratio That ’ s one option we just make the text Sort of larger, if we ’ re on the bubble Or we darken the foreground text because The background is pure white, so we can. ’ t really make the background any lighter, So we can go through and we can work through. Our CSS and tune those colors up and that ’ s really what a tool like aXe is doing It.
’ s actually, looking at the CSS values, For background and foreground, But there are some situations where a tool Like the aXe inspector is not going to be able to tell us if we have contrast issues And that ’ s in situations where we don ’ t have clearly defined foreground background. Colors So, for instance, over here on the right, I ’ ve, Also got this advertisement, and these are pretty common, where you have some text over An image background and the text itself might even be an image right So for a tool like aXe.
It can ’ t pick out. Two distinct foreground background colors, so we ’ re going to need to use another tool. To figure out, if we have contrast issues over here, So the tool that I like to use is the WCAG 2.0 Color Contrast Analyzer, It ’ s, another Chrome extension and I ’ m. Going to warn you, it ’ s a little bit buggy, but I ’ m going to walk you through how I Use it and maybe point out some of the issues, so you can work around those, But basically what we do here is after we ’ ve.
Installed the extension we ’ ve got this extension up here in the top right click. On that, What I found to be sort of an issue here is On retina monitors, if you try to tell it to analyze a region and you select a region, It ’ ll, be sort of off Like it sort of zooms in and it doesn. ’ t. Seem to be able to handle retina that well, So, instead, I ’ ll tell it to capture visible Content And what this is going to do, you can see That it ’ s already sort of zoomed in what this is going to do.
Is it ’ s going to try To scan all the pixels on the page and it ’ ll highlight the contrast between that pixel And the ones next to it, So you can pick out those areas that have Low contrast, While it ’ s scanning, so it will take a while Right, it ’ s, only up to 27 %. So far, so I can walk through some of these settings for You, though, So the first one here is asking us what level We ’ re measuring at So again.
I mentioned that we have the minimum Contrast ratio of 4.5:1 or we can take it all the way up to the enhanced contrast ratio. Of 7:1 right So again you can choose your target there. Then there ’ s. Also this pixel radius option And at first I wasn, ’ t quite sure what this was for by default, it ’ s set to one. So it ’ s. Going to compare the two pixels next to each other, but it goes all the way up to 3 Often times when we ’ re working with text.
On the page, it ’ s, not a clearly defined. The text ends here and the page starts here. Instead, it ’ ll, do a sort of anti-aliasing Thing So if we go and we look at the image of our Text this D: here it ’ s, actually sort of three colors. So we ’ ve got a couple greys and then the Solid white and that ’ s, what forms the body of that character When it ’ s, asking us what pixel radius that We want to use it.
’ s, basically asking us what sort of anti-aliasing range do you want? To accommodate, for So what I do is I tend to set it to 2. That way I can analyze a couple pixels next To each other, Alright cool, so it looks like it just finished. And what it ’ s doing here? Is it ’ s drawing these white outlines to show us areas of high Contrast And any place where it gets sort of noisy Kind of like right in here we can tell that we have slightly lower contrast If we go over and we look at that ad, we can See that yeah we definitely have some issues here So up at the top, where it says developer.
Friendly, it seems like it: ’ s, doing ok.. We can toggle this mask on and off. So when We hide it. We can see that when we get to the body text inside of this ad, it actually Is even more translucent than the header and when we get down to the bottom and it Mixes with that background, it ’ s, really really tough to see. So this is an area where we know we might Have to go back to the designer and say “ Hey, I can show you this and I can definitively Prove that there is a contrast issue here, and this is a place where we need to maybe Tune it up Either give the text a backing, so it pops A little more or figure out if we can use a different background image, something that Doesn, ’ t interfere with the text as much ” So yeah using these tools and using a guide.
Like OATMEAL, you can, through you, can analyze the contrast for your site or application. Maybe look for problem areas tune. It up make sure users have a better experience That about covers it for today. So if you Have any questions for me, as always, you can leave them down below in the comments Or hit me up on a social network of your choosing, As always. Thank you so much for reading. And I ’ ll see you next time.
If you want to learn more about color contrast, We ’ ve got some additional articles. You can check out in our playlist Again thanks for reading and I ’ ll see You next time,
Ala social media e pessoas que Trabalham com as redes sociais, seguinte, henrique, fala, uma, coisa, muito, importante, Hoje que diz respeito às palavras chaves do beijo e precisa usar palavras chaves Do google quem anuncia no google, quem, faz, post blog não, cara, pálida, precisa Usar o planejador de palavras chaves também quem usa, as redes sociais, como Assim as palavras-chaves interferem na rede social presta atenção que eu vou te Contar todas a milonga quando você vai falar nas redes, sociais, sobre, um, assunto, Por exemplo tinta de cabelo, sim você vai falar você, vende, você, tem Uma loja de vender tinta de cabelo e aí você precisa desenvolver conteúdo, para, o Seu instagram pelo seu facebook, em nossas, foi, o clube, mais, importante, ainda, Mas você precisa desenvolver conteúdo pra vender os produtos da sua loja Qualquer primeira coisa que você tem que entender sobre, o seu conteúdo para Começar produziu de que forma as pessoas procuram esse conteúdo elas vão procurar Dentro da igreja procurar dentro não necessariamente porque, a gente sabe que A diferença entre o google eo youtube e essas redes sociais como, o instagram Facebook é que no instagram e, no facebook as pessoas escola não, o seu Feed e vamos recebendo a li para 1 quando alguma, coisa interessa, a elas Já, no google e no youtube as pessoas vão lá procurar por algum, assunto e aí você Programa o seu conteúdo de acordo com o que as pessoas estão procurando e pô-lo Youtube entrega na mão de quem procura aquele conteúdo que você produziu essa é Uma diferença básica porém se você entender muito bem como, as pessoas estão Procurando um assunto, no google, ou seja, quando, você, coloca, lá, tinta de cabelo; no Google eo google preenche a continuidade da sua frase ele fez, isso de acordo com, Que as pessoas já procuraram com, a frase longa que as pessoas já procuraram então Se você utilizar, o planejador de palavras chaves para saber que frases São essas que as pessoas procuram sobre, o seu assunto Você pode utilizar essas frases que só são familiares das, pessoas porque elas Estão procurando dessa forma nas redes online do seu conteúdo tanto, no Instagram quanto no facebook e olha que lindo as pessoas vão prestar mais Atenção nos seus posts, se aquilo talvez com, incidir com que elas procuraram, no Google hoje olha e não é procurei, no google como pintar a Sobrancelha com, rena e casualmente eu vi, essa mesma frase que eu digitei; no Google no perfil da loja de tintas de cabelo que eu sigo não é lindo então Cônsul magnânima como sou, pessoa generosa, eu fiz, o seguinte eu peguei uma Aula sobre o planejador de palavras chaves que dioninho que é o responsável Por esse segmento aqui dentro da equipe produziu para os alunos do criadores de Conteúdo e vou disponibilizá la como, uma espécie de amostra grátis do meu curso Aqui pra vocês então do primeiro comentário e na descrição desse vídeo Está um tutorial sobre como utilizar, o planejador de palavras chaves para Identificar de que forma que o seu público está procurando, o seu assunto Nos buscadores do google isso é muito rico isso é muito importante e qualquer Pessoa que trabalha com, qualquer coisa, no meio digital deve, saber usar, o Planejador de palavras-chaves pra confeccionar, a sua estratégia de Conteúdo, a higiene mas não sei como, confeccionar Estratégico de bom né então é porque você não é meu aluno ainda porque se Você fosse nascer já saberia de tudo, isso então, cara, pode, ser, para resolver, Esse problema de estratégia de criação de conteúdo de forma rápida e Inteligente já sabe que existe um curso com, a tia Rei: aqui chamado criadores de conteúdo que eu também deixa a descrição em todos Os meus vintes então gente ninguém mais produz conteúdo sem perguntar por que o Google o que é que as pessoas estão procurando a respeito daquilo Valeu então já sabe terça e quinta, estamos aqui, debatendo, todos, esses Assuntos do universo do marketing digital às, vezes, coisas de Neuromarketing e muitas vezes coisas de marketing de conteúdo, como foi, o caso Desse vídeo tá então um beijo lá escreve, no canal, se não está, inscrito e me Aguarde que venho sempre com, nove nac, beijar, carreira
So today I thought it’d be fun to go through my process for doing a simple accessibility audit a lot of times I have teammates or even like third party partners who reach out and they say hey. You know. I’ve got this site that I built, I’m not deeply familiar with accessibility, so can you give it just a once-over, and let me know if there’s any sort of like major gotchas I should be looking out for so I wanted to cover my process today.
This is not, you know, an exhaustive review or anything, but this is generally the stuff that you can do to find some obvious high level issues. So, if all the way over here to my laptop, usually the first thing that I do on any website, I’m going to use webbing as an example here, webbing is an awesome site for web accessibility. Usually one of the first things I do one on any web site is: I want to ensure that I can navigate using the tab key on my keyboard and that there are discernible focus styles, as I move around the page, so in the case of webbing, if I start tabbing through here, you’ll, actually see the first thing that it does the very first time I hit tab.
I get this thing called a skip link up here in the top left hand, corner skip links are super useful. You know on sites where you might have heavy navigation. You want to let the user skip immediately down to the main content, so webaim implements the skip link. Some other sites, like github, have skip links. If you actually go to github and hit tab, you might notice, it says, like you know, jump to your repositories or whatever so skip link is kind of a cool thing to look out for, but then, as I’m tabbing around the page, I want to make sure That I see a focus ring on different elements on the page now web aim actually does a cool thing here, where they animate their focus ring.
So you can even see it moving across the screen, which is pretty cool. They highlight their focus States. This is, you know, just about the best link, a tab focus behavior. I think I’ve ever seen really, but I just tab through the site, and I make sure that you know I can reach everything that is interactive using the tab key on my keyboard right. So that’s step one tab through your experience, so the other thing that I like to look out for is, as I’m tabbing around the page.
I want to make sure that there’s no off-screen content that can accidentally be focused so follow me over here. I’ve got this. This material design, Lite sort of like template site that the the team has created and notice that it has this sort of like sidebar over here and, as I’m focus moves into that sidebar right now. Let’s say I shrink the page a little bit right. So it’s totally possible that someone could have their browser this size on their desktop and let’s try it and tap through this now.
So I tab through this write. My focus is over here on the top left or sorry top right in that search field. Now it’s on that button. Now, as I’m pressing tab, though we don’t see the focus indicator, it’s as if it has disappeared and we keep tapping, we keep chatting and eventually it’s going to show back up. Ah did you see it down here at this? Like read more button, so what was going on there? Well, if we expand again, we can see that actually, what was happening was focus was sort of hidden in these off-screen fields was over here in our side nav, and so I see this on a lot of websites, and this can trip up.
You know anybody who’s using a keyboard to navigate and I can come trip up mobile screen readers because you have something off screen, but it’s still in the tab, water, it’s still focusable, so a screen reader might travel into those off screen elements. You know you might have dialogues off screen, you might have side nav off screen and you don’t actually want the user to be clicking on those during that current state.
So that’s another thing that I look out for. I want to make sure that people are disabling off, screen, interactive content, making sure it’s removed from the tab order. The next thing that I look for is I want to make sure that I can do kind of like a simple navigation of the page using a screen reader, so for this demo, I’m going to use the shop app by the polymer team. This is a pretty cool site that I work with that team, a lot to try and make sure that this was a good, accessible experience.
So, in the previous few episodes we covered how to use NVDA, we covered how to use voiceover on a Mac. I really recommend all web developers familiarize themselves with the basics of at least one screen reader just so they can quickly move through a page kind of like what we were doing with the tab key – and this is just sort of like a sanity check to make Sure the screen reader can actually like land on controls and they’re, announcing things that they should.
So let me turn on voiceover and all kind of like move through this page quickly, to show you what I mean by that all right. So I’m just going to use the vo Keys to kind of like quickly move through some interactive stuff visit, link, home link, shopping, cart, zero items, link where link ladies outerwear link men’s t-shirt. I might you know, try and move down to like Lane section. I want to land on an image right.
I want to make sure that that image has alt text. That’s really important a lot of websites, especially like e-commerce sites and things like that, you’ll move through and because they haven’t provided alt text for any of the images it’ll oftentimes just read like the file name for an image. So that’s another thing that I often look out for as and as I’m going through, this phase, you know, did the the person building the site use proper, alt attributes.
I also want to make sure that if there are custom controls like buttons and things like that, that have been implemented using either custom elements or using like divs with a bunch of JavaScript, that those are interactive with a screen reader. Okay, so we’re on this drop down, it says size collapsed, pop-up button. Let’s try and use voiceover to interact with this, so I’ll click on it. Okay, it’s reading me the number of items, and now I want to use just like my regular arrow keys to move around inside of this control.
So up down right, left right things like that, so go down to extra-large, hit inner right. Okay! That’s something that I look for right. Any custom control is working as I would expect with the keyboard. The other thing I know about this site is when I add something to the cart. It’s going to sort of add like a little sort of a like modal pop-up type thing that’ll show up on screen, and so I want to make sure that the screen reader user is notified of that, possibly by moving their focus into that item.
So let’s do that item added to the cart added to cart for items interact without it took our view. Cart, don’t close dialogue voiceover off, so you can see that when the item was added to the cart, the screen reader focus was directed into that thing. That just slid out on screen, so I know the way the polymer team is doing this, if I recall, is they’ve got something in there with the tabindex of negative 1 and they’re, focusing that element just to direct our focus.
So that’s another thing that I read out for making sure if, if something is being dynamically added to the page, that focus is directed to it. So that’s a quick pass that we can do with the with screen reader. The next thing that I do is I try and check the page structure, so I wan na make sure that the page is using appropriate headings and that there are appropriate, landmark roles or landmark elements on the page, because those help with screen reader navigation as well.
So, let’s look at something like Wikipedia which does a really good job of this. So I’ll turn my screen reader voiceover on Google and what I often do is I just opened the the rotor inside of voiceover in NVDA. There’s the. I think it’s called the web elements thing. I think we showed it off in the last episode. Basically, it’ll give you kind of an outline of the page in voiceover. You can open it by using a ctrl, alt or a control option you and just hitting, left and right to menu all right.
So we can see all the headings on the page. We can see that they’re doing a really good job of using. You know. H1. H2, h3, going all the way through the hierarchy of headings they’re, not just mixing and matching H tags based on like the size that they are, which I see a lot of developers do, which can generate kind of like a broken document outline for the screen reader. I want to make sure that when they’re using heading tags they’re using it to basically build the skeleton of the page, so you know we can right move through this content in a sort of a logical way.
So if I wanted to jump down to this, the section I can easily do so. The other thing that I look for again is is landmark elements. So, let’s, let’s go back and look at webbing, so webbing does a really good job of using landmark elements on their site. So again I open my web Roder. I look for landmarks and here we can see that there’s things like banner navigation search main. So if I wanted to bypass all the navigation and get right to the main content, I can do that right.
So that’s another thing I look for you know there are sites out there, which really don’t include many landmark elements at all and again, that’s sort of an efficiency feature that you can very easily add in use, use main tags, use, nav tag or use like you Know, role attributes to create those landmarks, somebody users who use screen readers can, you know, just navigate around a lot faster fashion, so that covers a focus that covers basics of screen, readers that covers headings and landmarks.
The next thing I check for is color and contrast. I want to make sure that you know if someone who might have a low vision impairment, it’s going to be able to discern the text on the page. So again, you know looking at a site like material design lite. This is a really attractive website, but there are areas where I think some of the texts could be a little low contrast and maybe a little difficult to read.
So there’s a really great Chrome extension that you can install on the Chrome Web Store. We can look for axe extension, so acts like a like a chopping axe right, so this is by DQ systems, and basically this is a simple extension that you can add to Chrome, which will sort of run an audit against the page and flag. A number of accessibility issues, but one of those is color and contrast. So on this site I can just open my dev tools after I’ve installed that audit.
You can see it’s right here in my dev tools panel, there’s this big analyze button. So I click on that and it goes through. It looks at the page and can tell me right here that there are some elements which need better contrast. So I click on that and it’ll actually give me kind of like a path to reach that element in CSS. I can actually even click on it and it’ll highlight that element in the dev tools for me.
So, in this case, for instance, this might be a little hard to see, but maybe I’ll try and boost the page. But you can tell that uh that these footer links down here right where it says right under this github logo, wears like web starter kit and help. These are low contrast texts that the audit has highlighted for me. So that’s something that we can read out for. There’s another extension: the let’s see the the chrome, accessibility, dev tools extension here we go so we’ll include a link to this as well.
It does very similar stuff to the axe extension, but one of the nice things that this extension does is when you highlight something that is low. Contrast it’ll actually give you a color suggestion, so it could be like you know. Maybe if you make the links, you know this different hex value you’ll be able to meet the what tag minimum. So, let’s see if we actually highlight these guys right here and then our dev tools, I’m going to go to where it says, accessibility, properties and see right here, lists this warning for contrast, ratio and I can actually click these color values.
And it’s very subtle, because this one’s actually like almost perfect – it’s not quite clicking these little sreades will actually change the text. Value on sites and it’ll apply an inline style for you, and that way you can see. You know what a better alternative color would be. The last thing that I try to do after I’ve done all of this is I try to recommend that you know whoever is building this site, integrate some excessive regression testing into their build process.
Again, if we go to github and we look up acts core, so this is the library that powers that axe extension, but you can also use this library as part of your build process right. So, as you’re running your automated tests, you can have a sample page. You can have axe core, look at that page and flag in accessibility audits, and you know those could then call your tests to fail. At which point you know you got to go back and you got to fix those issues.
Okay, so we we’ve covered a lot, but this is basically how I do my accessibility audits, it’s by no means exhaustive, but on many of the websites out there. This is how you’ll catch some of the major issues that folks need to work on. That can take their experience from totally broken to. You know at least sort of like a decent baseline experience for folks. If you have any questions, as always, you can leave them for me down in the comments.
Otherwise, you can contact me on a social network of your choosing, as always thank you so much for reading so yep hey. If you enjoyed this episode of alley cat, you can always catch more over in our playlist or click. The little subscribe button and you’ll get an email notification whenever we launch new stuff on the blog, as always, thanks for reading
Here’s the agenda: this is what we’re going to go over in this webinar. A brief Google Places basics. What not to do reviews using the review triage system, the best use of coupons, QR codes, building your business and then, if we have time we’ll, do some question and answer so.
The first thing I want to show you is exactly what a what Google Places is and what it is not so in this in this screenshot here, what you see is at the top. What you see is the paid listings so paid results. This is google pay-per-click. If you look at this third listing here, you can see that autumn journey hospice is actually using their google places listing or their their actual address, as an extension to their google adwords, and so that way their phone number and their actual citation shows up in their Google adwords campaign and that’s also called google boost, so there’s a couple of ways you can do that, but that gives them the blue a on the map and then, if you go down here a little bit further you’ll see that now we’re into Google Places – and You can see that these are the top seven listings.
This is what we call the seven pack abcdefg. This is a seven pack, and this is where you want to be so all of our local businesses want to be in the seven pack for their local area, and that’s where you show up at the very top of the Google search page – and this is all Natural, these are not paid results. If we look over here on the right hand, side you can see that there are some paid results underneath the map on the right hand, side as well, really the focus for this webinar is this right here.
This is the seven pack, and this is where we want to be so now. If we actually look at what a Google Places page looks like we can see here that whoops, we can see here that eminent home Healthcare has a very good Google Places, page they’ve maxed it out with pictures. They have a article. They have lots and lots of reviews coming from everywhere from citysearch from superpages from all kinds of different things, so they have reviews, they have maxed out their listing, they have citations and all kinds of good stuff.
So this is an example of an excellent and very well done. Google Places page – and this is what everyone should strive to have – is something that’s maxed out completely put together correctly. Just like this. This is the bottom of their Google Places page and what you can see here is it’s a little cut off, but these are the actually the M, the additional citations for that Google Places page. This is what else Google finds about this business across the internet extremely important, and we’ll talk about that.
So, let’s look at keyword and market research. This is the very first step in deciding and what you want to do with your Google Places page, and this is extremely important for two kinds of people that are on this webinar. I should preface this our back up a little bit and say that the two people listening two kinds of people listening to this webinar number one, our local business owners who want to do this themselves and want to do it correctly and save a little money.
By doing it themselves and the other set of folks that are reading this webinar, our internet, marketers and consultants, marketing consultants who help small businesses get to that top seven pack for Google Places. So this is geared for both of you kind of in the beginning phases, and this gives you the step-by-step on and the basics on how to achieve these results. Now we also have an entire suite of articles like 19 articles that actually walk you through can’t hold.
You the whole way and show you exactly what to do to get in that. Seven pack and those articles are very important, but this webinar just kind of goes over everything all at once. It gives you a real big overview, so you can understand why Google Places is more complicated than it may seem. So, let’s look at keyword, research. The first thing you’re going to want to do is some very targeted keyword, research, you’re, going to want to find out what people are typing in.
To look for your business is your location, and once you know the answer to that, then you are. It can be very laser focused on how to get your business to the seven pack. So this what you see on the screen here is actually a google adwords keyword, research tool, so you can use this for free, there’s no cost to it, and what I did here is you can see right here. This says seafood restaurant in san, diego right here I actually pretended like.
I had a client who is a seafood restaurant in san diego, and so what I can see based on these results that you can see they’re pretty small. But what you can see here is that they actually have about a thousand global monthly searches, but I what I really want to see are the exact searches. So if I change over here on the left-hand side to exact match types, then I can see that on a monthly basis about a hundred and forty people are typing in exact searches for the keyword phrase seafood restaurant in San Diego and that’s what I want to Know so those are a hundred and forty opportunities from my client to get a someone inside their restaurant because people are looking for that.
So that’s what I want to focus on and that’s how I do this is not the entire way. You do keyword research, but this is a good beginning to keyword, research, understanding what people are typing in, so that you know where you should be showing up on Google Places and for what keyword terms. The next thing you want to do is assess your clients are Institute current location or current situation. So is your client or are you on the in the top seven already, and what do you need to do to maintain that if you’re not in the top seven, if you’re not even near the top seven, what can you do to change that so assess your Current situation and then assess the competition status.
This is where it gets fun. You can learn a lot from what your competition is doing. So let’s say that the fish market in San, Diego is my competition, and I want to learn as much as I can about what they’re doing so that I can do it too, and I can beat them at their own game. So the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to appear at the very top I’m going to check out their website. I actually want to see what kind of keywords are using on their website and then I want to look at the categories that they’ve chosen for the Google Places page and the first one.
They chose a seafood restaurant. They also chose some custom categories that they typed in, and I want to find out what those are too and if they apply to me, then I want to look at the tons of reviews they have and from multiple places. So Google is aggregating and grabbing from the internet all these different reviews on the fish market, restaurant, and so I want to know where those reviews are coming from and what I want to do is make sure that my business is listed on all those review sites.
So that I can get reviews there too, and I can beat the fish market at its own game, and I guarantee you if you look really closely at this page. This wasn’t done just by the people that own the fish market they actually hired. Someone to take care of this for them very, very smart indeed, especially in a competitive market like San Diego seafood restaurant. Then, if I look down, of course, they’ve got all our photos are maxed out and they’ve got article.
Then, if I look at the menu right here, they actually have sorry they have a live link to their menu, and this is great because you can put a live link to just about anything within the details section of Google Places and you want to make sure You’re doing that, that’s a page rank 10 back link to your website and that’s something you definitely want to go for and then down here. You can see more reviews from the web and I definitely want to take advantage of that look into those reviews and find out as much as I can about.
What’s going on with the fish market, restaurant and then Google Places basics. You want to write up your plan once you have established your keyword, research, you understand what your competition is doing. You know where you’re located right up your plan, so the the plan will involve these things, and this is where you get out a pen and paper and you write it down. I will optimize the following: five high-volume keyword phrases, so you want to take five keyword, phrases that you’ve researched and you want to make sure you’re optimizing that only your website what your Google Places page for those five high-volume keyword phrases.
You want to take a look at your categories, decide what they need to be going to look at some secondary keywords that you might be interested in also optimizing for. You want to look at your citation and most people don’t understand what a citation is. So I’m going to tell you right now: what a citation is your citation is the exact name of your company without any keywords added to it. That would be called keyword stuffing the exact street address and the you know, city, state, zip code and the exact local.
Not toll-free but local telephone number, so your citation is your exact business name, your exact business address and location and your exact business local phone number. That is your citation write it down exactly the way you want to appear on Google Places and exactly the way you wanted to appear everywhere else, including your website other directory listing sites. It should be the same across everything and then your website SEO take a look at what your keyword phrases are that you’ve done your research on and look at your website.
Does it have the same keyword phrases you need to match everything up and make sure it’s all very consistent, very relevant and all together make sense your description. You have a 200 character limit description for Google Places. That’s also a good rule of thumb for your website. Behind the scenes, you’re allowed to put a description of each page of your website, so you want to make sure you find out what description you want to use and you want to use it consistently across your website and your Google Places pages in your directory listings.
Hugh ponds and offers people aren’t making the most out of coupons and offers, so I would encourage you to do the best you can to get all kinds of coupons and offers out there on the table, make sure that people are aware of them and really use This to your advantage, because most people – don’t it’s important – that you do, then I want you to go to express, update, USA com and enter you or your clients, exact citation their address, their name, their phone number.
All of that into this program. This is extremely important. Express update, USA is a division of info USA com where you can buy mailing lists Express update. Usa com is an aggregator of data. So when you go there and put your information in your information is shared with lots of other places across the internet. It’s sort of like a validation service, so you want to make sure that your client citation is exactly correct in Express update, USA, what not to do! First of all and when you’re filling out your Google Places page, you do not want to engage in keyword stuffing.
So if you look at the top of the page there, you see American care partners at home. It does not say American care partners at home in fairfax in Falls Church in Arlington in Virginia. It just says American care partners at home. That’s the name of the company, that’s the end of the story. We don’t add anything to that and then, if you look down a little bit next you’ll see local number. Only. Please only use a local number here.
If you use a toll-free number, your listing simply will not show up the question becomes. Can you use a VoIP number? Can you use a cell phone number and the answer is this: if you intend on being consistent across all websites all directory listings and your Google Places page, you can use any local number that you want, but if you start mixing them up and adding different things Here and different things there then you’re going to confuse the Google monster and you’re not going to show up at all so use the same phone number everywhere across the board for your listings, email address.
I see a lot of listings missing an email address, even if it’s one that’s just for a general mailbox or maybe it’s one that you set up this just for junk mail. Please always enter an email address for contact information and then the website don’t ever click. I don’t have a website, you do, have a website do something, but you must have a website and never choose the option to not show your full address.
You always need to choose your full show your full address, or you will simply not have a listing on Google Places so make sure that the information on your website matches the description in your Google Places page and then, if we keep going down, we go down To categories when you fill in your categories, the first category needs to be one. That’s found on Google and they’ll, give you their list and then, after that, the other four can be ones that you customized yourself.
So just use your keywords, use them wisely and click and make sure that they’re not stuffed with location information. So Google Places advice, no keyword stuffing, no peel boxes. No, you cannot use peel boxes, you cannot use UPS stores and you cannot use mail boxes etc. You can look at Google’s Terms of Service to see this. You cannot use any of those services. Virtual offices like, for instance, sold by Regis re G, us calm, Regis calm.
They have virtual offices worldwide. You can rent one for around 100 bucks a month. That’s a much better option than having no listing at all. In most cases do not use toll-free numbers, you can use them as a secondary number, but not as a primary number. No duplicate listings. You cannot have multiple listings under different names and titles that will get you delisted completely, no fakery or ridiculous insanity that covers everything else that you might think that you might try when it comes to Google Places.
Don’t do it be consistent, be real and be relevant. Don’t piss off the Google monster because if you play you will pay and you if you get delisted, orb and then you’re simply out of the picture for Google Places. Don’t do that to your client? Don’t do that to yourself set up the Google Places page now. I’m not going to go into great detail on this, because you can look at all the Google Terms of Service and support for setting up a Google Places page.
So we won’t go into that here, plus we have 19 articles that walk you step-by-step through the process of setting up Google Places and give you all the tips tricks and hints, as you go as to what to do to make sure you’re getting the most bang For your buck and then you want to track the results. Google Places provides its own set of analytics. You can see here that this listing had 1299 impressions in the last 30 days and of those impressions.
363 people took action so 23, clicked on more info. For the maps 308 clicked for driving directions and 32 clicked on to the website, that’s excellent results. You can also see the top search queries and where people requested driving directions from so top search. Queries shows that when American care partners has typed in they got 60 impressions from that they got 55 from home care. They got 43 from the word living, caregivers, assisted living and on and on it doesn’t give us the detail that we would like to see under other, which is 930 other search, queries that we show for but at least we have some basic knowledge of where we’re Getting our impressions and then driving directions now this is really important for florists, chiropractors, dentist, retail spaces and even other service providers.
I want to know where people are requesting driving in directions in direction. Information from because I may be very surprised at where people are coming from to find my shop or my store, so I’m in this case this is a service provider who goes out to the home. So most of these folks don’t need to drive to this office, but you can see that alexandria has the most requests: advanced, page techniques, the power of citations, the what who and the how.
So if we go back to our example of the seafood restaurant in san diego, we can see that the AXI food restaurant has lots of Google Places citations examples here and if you look at the very bottom left hand corner, you can see that there actually a Hundred and forty more so if I were trying to beat them at this game, what I would do is I would look at every place that they’re listed and I would go in and try to get my client or my business if it were.
If, if I’m doing this myself listed on all the places that they’re listed on, because obviously Google likes to aggregate data from those websites, so that’s the first thing I would do Google Places advanced. The advanced techniques mean that you want to look at the competition citations. You want to copy them and you want to one-up them. It’s that simple. It does take a lot of time, a lot of effort and a lot of energy and sometimes an entire team of people to make this happen, but you can do it local SEO.
Your website metadata and I’ve said this before – should match your Google Places. Data should match all other directory listings data. So when you’re filling out your Google Places information make sure that everything else you do matches what Google Places says and you’ll have much more success off-site. Linking now should you be creating backlinks to your Google Places page. This means and people ask this question, because what backlinks are are links to typically to your website and the more backlinks.
Your website has the more authority it has and the it shows up. So the question becomes: if your Google Places page has a lot of links to it, will it show up better in the Google Places rankings, and I don’t think I think the jury’s still out on this? It does not hurt to get backlinks to your Google Places. Page each Google Places page has its own unique URL, so it never hurts to get backlinks to it.
Although you have to realize this, the continuous addition of citations and information about your clients, local business referencing, their nad, which is their name, address telephone number website, etc. In other words, their citations – this is one of the most effective ways to increase listing rank so that in reviews those the two first things you should be focusing on not necessarily backlinking to the Google Places page.
So when it’s all said and done and you’ve tried everything else and you’ve done anything else, then go for the backlinking. That might be something that you outsource article and Google Places. Ok, so just a little information. This is kind of our secret sauce. If you go to any of the articles that we upload for our clients, we put their exact citation in there YouTube in the description of the article we put their exact citation from google places in that section for the description of their article.
We always do that. It gives them extra citations and it works very, very well – the review triage system, what who and how? Ok. So let’s talk about reviews for a minute if you’re a restaurant – and you have a thousand reviews, the review triage system is not one that you necessarily need to use, but for everybody else, who’s not in the restaurant, entertainment industry or the travel industry. If you’re a plumber, if you’re a painter, if you’re a lawyer, a home care agency, a roofer or whatever, you might not have as many reviews as a restaurant with a thousand reviews, everybody knows that when lots and lots of reviews build up, there’s always bound to Be a few negative ones in there.
That’s completely normal and completely human nature, and we wouldn’t have it any other way so of a thousand review. Several of them may be a little on the negative side, but they kind of get buried by all the good stuff. So that’s okay, but if you’re somebody that doesn’t have any reviews or not many reviews or your industry doesn’t typically get a lot of reviews, then the most important thing you could do is use what’s called a review triage system.
This is a program that we develop. So that you only get the most positive reviews, but they are real reviews and they are from your customers. So what we do is we set up a website? That’s just for the review system. So we have it. Our client who’s. The business owner asked their customers to please go to a dedicated website, that’s just for them and leave some reviews. There are several questions that they’re asked it’s just basically, yes, no rating on the scale of one to five and then a little place where they can add some text and lots of clients are happy to do that.
They don’t have to. They don’t have to create accounts, they don’t have to do anything. They just go and leave their a review and they’re done once the review is done. That review is automatically emailed to us and to our client. So we can each take a look at it and decide if that review needs to move on to step 2. If it’s a really good review, it moves to step 2. If it’s not a good review, then the client are, but the business owner goes back to the customer to try to resolve the issues and that review never sees the light of day.
If it’s a great review, then we summarize it we send it back to the customer and say we would love for you to share this wonderful review with the rest of our community. Would you please put it on Google Places, yelping, yahoo or whatever, and we give them the link to do so. So this we have all of the scripts written out all of the emails written out. We have for anybody, that’s not so much in the elder care industry.
That’s the one you’re looking at here, but for anybody who’s, not the elder care industry. Like a plumber, a painter auto repair shop, whatever it is, you can actually incentivize clients by maybe giving them a free oil change or ten dollar gift card to starbucks or whatever. So you might want to think about the ways you can incentivize somebody to go through the kind of hassle factor of leaving a review on a review site and there’s a lot more to this, and we will have a product together just for the review triage system.
If you need help with the review triage system, let us know and we’ll put together one just for you and your clients top 10 review sites in Google Places search. This is just for for your reference. Only you want to look at what your competition is doing. First, this data and research comes from local SEO guy. This is andrew, scotland’s blog a local search, optimization small business marketing and search engine, optimization strategy.
So for 2011, the top ten review sites are Yelp, citysearch, insider pages, yahoo, local dealer, rater duties, book, tripadvisor, edmonds, agates an open table, and you can see a couple of them really do cater to the restaurant industry, but definitely look at what your competition is doing And then also, this list is extremely helpful. The best use of coupons that I went online to look for some really good examples and was hard to find any actually in google places, but I did run across this one, not too bad.
Free estimates are no new water heater through Hoffman brothers. There’s a local company to me: maintenance, programs and water heaters and all kinds of stuff like that, so they have three pretty good coupons. Actually they have four and when, if you are looking at them on your mobile phone, this is what you would see. You would see that they have some good information now. Only one of these coupons actually has a phone number in it.
This one over here on the right. All of them should have a phone number in them, and the reason is that, if you’re on your mobile phone, a phone number like this is one that you can just click on and automatically dial huffman brothers. So that’s something that they should include in every coupon plus there’s opportunity to put a picture in here, and so they should have a picture in each one of these here’s an example.
This is my listing. I just put this up as a quick example. If you know that most of the customers that are coming to your store or your website or two are looking for, you are using a PC or a laptop, you might consider putting a QR code with a dis special discount in your in your in your coupons And the reason I say that is that you can actually once somebody uses their smartphone to capture or to scan that QR code.
You can actually then capture their name, their phone number, their email address whatever it is, you want, so you can get more data from them if they they scan it. Now. The problem with this is, if you’re, a restaurant or you’re doing this for a restaurant or an entertainment, venue or travel industry. You don’t want to use QR codes in your coupons because they will show up on the actual cell phone and then they’re not scalable by the cell phone.
So this only is a good strategy when it’s done for businesses that you know, people are searching from their pc or laptop, but just sort of an example of what can be done. The next. The one of the important things to know is that Google Offers is in its beta phase right now and it’s a really only active in portland oregon and it’s just getting started, but it will be a competitor of Groupon and several other things.
If you have your Google Places act together, you will then have your google offers act together. So, if they’re, for no other reason, you want to make sure that you have google offers together and our google places together so that when google offers comes to your town, you can make the most of it. Google Maps and Google Places. Many people know what my maps is and if you don’t that’s, okay, it still exists, but it used to be that they would show up on Google Places pages and they don’t anymore because everybody spam them.
So what we do is we create a dynamic google map of our clients, location and we place it on their website. So if you look at any of our websites, you’ll see that each of them in several places, has a google map actually on the website. Now this is not a screenshot, it’s actually a dynamic map. So if you were to put your pointer on it and move around or click on it, it actually does stuff it moves around with you it you can actually click on the directions or show service area or more or rate it.
You can click on these things and you can actually make them work, so this is not a screenshot. This is an actual dynamic map and the embed code is on the Google Places page QR codes. This is a part I love. So if you want to know more about QR codes, you should first of all take the time to pull out your smartphone and scan this one and then you’ll see what I’m talking about so actually I just did this one in a mysterious way.
It’s a picture. So if you know me at all, you’ll know why I picked this picture, but anyway you can use QR codes for lots of things and they are going to fast become one of the most interesting ways to market your business, especially local businesses, so be sure to Pay attention to this vast company’s top 13 lists. Qr codes on business cards for scavenger hunts for labeling, for storefront displays, promotions, discounts and giveaways laptop stickers.
T-Shirts get funky with your QR code design by making it pink blue multi colored use. Qr codes to get like some follows on your facebook supplement, your retail space, increase your ecommerce sales, build your email subscriber list and get the phone ringing. In fact, you could. You know, instead of for a good time, call Jane. You can just create a QR code with James phone number on it. Stick it up all over the place and then lots of people will call Jane and I’m kind of just kidding.
Don’t do that. But anyway, it’s very funny: ok and then let’s talk about building your business. If you are the internet, marketer or the consultant, let’s talk about you for just a minute. First of all, you have lots of tools to your advantage. If you’re a traffic geyser person, you have influenced engines, local search, results, screen shots and other online tools of show placement. You should use all of them for pricing.
I always charge a setup fee at a monthly legacy fee to and to help your client. Your client understand more about why you need a monthly fee beats the simple rule of you cannot set it and forget it in this case. This is not a Ron Popeil product and you just can’t set it and forget it. You have to list everything so that the customer has a clear understanding of the amount of work involved on a monthly basis and folks, let me tell you there is a lot of work involved.
You need to you, have a choice. You can charge a high setup fee or a low setup fee and a higher monthly recurring fee, which makes the most sense in this economic environment. For you, my guess is that maybe a lower setup fee and a higher monthly recurring fee makes more sense because it becomes more digestible, easy to buy it off and chew. For the small business owner, I will say that for look for google places we do.
Custom quotes for anybody who wants us to do a Google Places program exclusively, and the reason is that, if you’re in New York City in your restaurant – and you want to be on the seven pack and you’re located in manhattan – guess what it’s going to cost you A lot more money for me to get you spend the time to get you on the top seven than it is for me to do that for you, if you’re a restaurant in West winnemucca North Dakota, where there is very little competition, so we always custom quote: Not because we think somebody else can afford more or less it’s because location, demographics, geography all play a role and how difficult or how easy it might be to get somebody in the top.
Seven so always make sure you check around a new little research before you throw out quotes for Google Places. Results, show results screen shots from before to after never miss an opportunity to show your client results and show prospects results. All you need is that first client and you’ll be able to get more to come to you over time. So what’s next, you can do this yourself if you’re a small business owner.
You can do this. If you’re, an internet marketing consultant go to ww LOL, place, profits, com, that’s local place, profits, com, there’s a 40 page PDF and of course I spelled and wrong and 19 articles that walk you step-by-step through everything from set up to advanced techniques. All 19 are there and they’re they’re excellent and they do walk you through step-by-step. The list price on the website is five hundred forty nine dollars and through midnight tonight now you’re reading this article or this webinar after we did our first webinar so and in the first webinar the price was 199 and you can do a to pay at 9950 E 30 days apart, so you can get some special pricing and special deals, but my request to you – because I don’t know when you’ll be reading this article is that you actually check with us.
First, these prices are not set in stone and we do not have to honor the 199 just because you’re reading this six months later, so you need to check with us and find out what the pricing is. What the deals are. There may be some really good out there, don’t ever hesitate to ask what you want to do. Is you want to send your questions about pricing about product if it’s not on the website, go to valerie at LTC, EP calm, just email me and i’ll be able to tell you what the current pricing is and where you can find the right length so Valerie At LTC EP calm, if you want to call us as 888 404 1513 you’re going to get a much faster response, though through email valerie at LTC EP calm.
Thank you so much. This has been valerie van move and I hope you enjoyed the webinar and good luck with your Google Places.
Today, we’re going to dive into the tools that browsers give us to quite literally design in them will be using chrome, dev tools, a material design as our baseline to see where we can adjust and play. Let’s dive in like design tools, developer tools, help designers and developers build test and debug in the browser.
Luckily, there are a ton of great tools and plugins that make this process of prototyping iterating so much fun. There are tools from everything from color selection to finessing animation, to ensuring a nice user experience on a variety of devices and even testing load at various network speeds. Dev tools help us not only to see under the hood but to also make changes and decisions and see what those decisions look like in the browser, the medium in which we’re delivering the final product.
That’s why the series is so important as designers. We have to work in this medium and use it to our advantage to really have the most control and power over our designs and what’s the first tool that we need inspect element. This is the primary entry of dev tools. Inspect element is often how I open up dev tools just by left-clicking, an element and finding that inspect item in the drop down, inspect element lets you select an elements and get information inside of it.
This information includes the Cascade of styles, styles on various States, computed values, classes, shape and size and more you can even change the text content in order, the Dom of the element within the elements panel. You do so like this, so here I’m going to left-click on this heading and hit inspect, and now I’m opening up this information here – and this is the elements panel you can see. The sizing here is 350 pixels by 32 pixels and Heights.
We have the class name here of headlines, 6 and all of the class styles inside of that. You can see here that this Moz OSX font smoothing, is not being applied in favor of the WebKit font smoothing. So it shows you which styles are being applied and which ones are being applied. We also can see here this h1, so we’re getting styles from the h1 as well as the clasp on top of it, and it shows you which styles are being overridden.
For example, this font size of 2 M is being overridden in favor of a font size of 1.25 bream with the class MVC typography headline 6. There’s also a variety of element classes that I can play with here, and I think that this is a really great way to prototype. So inside of this, if I started typing MVC typography, we get an autocomplete evolve, the different type of graphic options, so you can just sort of scroll through and start to see what these would look like within here.
So you can see that headline. One highlight two aren’t actually making a difference and that’s because I still have MVC headline six selected, so you want to uncheck that and now we can see what the headline two looks like. So if you truly want to play with a baseline for the styling here, remove all the classes and then start to search the classes that are relevant to this element. So here we can see all the typographic styles and decide which ones make sense.
This also lets you separate your logic from your styling. Your logic is the date of the text content here. So this is a header one in this form fields element, but you can apply a class on top of it to style it. However, you want say we want to style this headline, one like a headline: five or headline six. We can do that and we can test that inside of this elements panel, I’m going to select the button now so here I’m just going to hit inspect on the button and it’s going to go right to that element, and we can see that this button has A few classes as well so right now we’re using the MVC buttons raised style.
But here I could select this outline style as well and put that in there. You can play with density inside of buttons, and these are all classes that I’ve just sort of playing with earlier applying them, seeing what they looked like testing this in the browser. So it’s a really powerful tool and there’s a ton that you can do by changing. Some of these Styles around you can reorder things in the Dom as well.
I’m going to just grow back into my UI here so say we want this headline. Maybe after the paragraph we could do that we’ll probably want to change that to be not an h1. In that case, you know make sure that your Dom still makes sense, but you could reorder things you could reorder the buns. You could reorder this remember this device text there and really just start to play with your UI in the browser.
So here you could even change the text of what this says: I’m finding this label here and now I can change this to always Pat disco, and now I’m checking I’m always going to Pat disco. This is a place where you can test our front language if you’re unsure how a piece of text will fit into an element on your screen, then you can test that and you can test this at various sizes. Let’s look at the color palette now.
In this example, we have a custom properties based theme playground for material design if you click to inspect the page and we’re opening up that panel and inside the HTML. You can see this route here with all the custom properties and their color values. So here we can start to play with what our colors look like. So if I want to change the primary theme color, I could click on that square and I have this whole array of color here that I can start to pick and choose and play with and see what that looks like in my UI.
Maybe I want like a bright paint color here. You can also change the color type, so here’s the hex code, if I click on these arrows here it changes from hex to RGB a to hsla and speaking of alpha. You can also use this alpha toggle to toggle the Alpha, which is the amount from transparent to full color and how much will show through to elma behind it. So we have all of these capabilities and another fun one.
Is this color palette, so in this color palette we get a base palette of colors, but we can also start to pick color from the page. So you see these page colors here were the initial page colors. These color variable is that the dev tools have found from the page as most proud colors on that page. So, if you’re working within a design – and you have a pallet that you’re working with you – can easily find the colors from that pallet inside of this dev tool here, there’s also the CSS variables that are being pulled out here that we can get the color values From and we can just start to really play with color in this way so say I want this to be a bright pink.
That sounds good. Maybe we want to change the color on that primary here. We can also change this color value. We can change the we can change the secondary color value, so we can change this to maybe a purple value and you can start to see how this cascades throughout the entire application. So now, if I scroll through, you can see that all the secondary values, like the check boxes, the switches.
This is all live code and we can see that this is in the browser, transitioned and transformed all these elements to be pulling in those colors in the drawer. Here we see a background on the active elements and that is also pulling from the primary color but being all but faded behind, so you can still see a contrast with the text on top of it. So by applying these color changed in the browser, you can really see what that looks like in various elements and in various states of those elements.
So let’s go back to the top up here and select this button. What we can also do in dev tools is figure out if something is accessible or not, which is a really great shortcut to have so here on the button, we have a color value on a background, color value. If I click on this color value, you can see that we have a contrast. Ratio of 8.5 point 1, that’s great. If we made that color value a little bit more closer to the background color that contrast ratio starts to get lower and you can see that that’s no longer accessible.
So we get a lot of help here when you have a color and background color within an element to help us make decisions on contrast and on colors that are accessible for our users. If we click this open, we can see where that’s accessible. So we can see that’s accessible for double a for a larger text and not necessarily for Triple A which means that we will have to have that white value for it to be triple a contrast, accessible and for this to work for our users.
Make sure that you’re keeping accessibility in mind at all times and you can use the color palette inside of dev tools to help you to do that, especially when it comes to color selection and readability on various elements. Let’s talk about the animations palette in episode 1, where we talk about motion on the web, we recreated this wringing button. So let’s inspect this element in dev tools and explore what that looks like behind the scenes.
So here I’m going to hit inspect on this button. I want to make sure that I have the button selected here and then in the bottom. Here we have this animations palette. Now, if you don’t have this, you can find it in this drop-down menu, this little kebab menu and you can hit more tools in the drop-down and then animations is the first item in that secondary drop-down. So that’s what’s going to bring up this animations palette for us so now, inside of here we see that we have multiple animations happening.
If I click open on those animations, we can find that on the button we have this grow animation, where it’s growing over time and on the icon. Inside of that button, we have this ring and I can actually toggle back and forth between here like this. Is a keyframe, I can go forwards and backwards. I can pause. I can play I’m going to pull this up a little bit here. So what I can also do is I can adjust the time stamps.
These are percentage based animations. So if I wanted to make this grow really long, this will break up the effect of ringing as it grows, but just to show you, I now have it sort of off-kilter. It’s ringing its ringing still sort of not changing its size, so you can start to really break things down here. I have it ringing very tightly in this section here. I could break that up too. You can move these around, so I can move it back and forth.
I can have this start to grow before I have the ring happening, I’m ruining this animation, but the idea is to show you that you can have animations that are separate from each other and then also test what this looks like together. So now I have it ringing off kilter from the size changes, but here, if you have a lot of animations that are complexed and you have to orchestrate them together, you can take a look at what that is what that looks like you can take a look At what the animations are happening inside of this element, so we have a box shadow change to as its growing and changing color there and then start to play with this start to finesse in the browser – and this is a really great opportunity for prototyping, because if Things are off, it’s a lot easier to see it visually.
That is, to try to read the code and figure out what’s a little bit off when those time stamps are different too. If you want to slow this down to get a little bit more of a finesse and detail here, you can also change the speed at which you’re animating. So here I’ve set 25 %, and I have this very slowly now, starting to grow and shake here. Starting to ring very slowly so this is another opportunity for you to adjust speeds and see where things are in a very precise way.
10 % is another speed option for very complex animations. Again, you can start to really get in there in the details and intricacies of these animations. Let’s talk about the device panel. Now I use this tool all the time and we’re going to showcase it. I’ve opened up the material dot, IO websites and I’m just going to hit inspect from any part of the page to open up dev tools, and here is that device toggle toolbar.
So I could also hit command shift M on my Mac computer, but anywhere that you’re using Chrome. You could always, let’s click into the browser, screen and open up dev tools, so I’ve clicked this open here. I have a few options. I have a responsive option, so I could see what this looks like at various screen sizes by dragging it over. You also have a drop-down here with some default devices like the Galaxy s5, the pixel to excel, to see what this looks like at various screen sizes.
We have the iPad pro here and you’re also able to adjust this from horizontal to vertical. So you can see what that looks like when you flip that device. That’s a little bit more dramatic on a phone here. So if you flip that you get a completely different layouts, you can also again use this responsive mode. You can even edit what the devices are that you want to showcase. So here in the dev tools, I’m going to pull this out and going to hit edit, and I have a bunch of devices here – you can add a custom device.
You can add devices that aren’t currently in your drop-down by default. So if you want to test, for example, on the iPhone 4 or if you want to test on the Nexus 7, I will now have these inside the drop-down. When I next open it so there they are iPhone 4 and the Nexus 7 somewhere in this drop-down right here. So you can see that that focal looks completely different than that iPhone 4 and that’s important for you to know.
As a designer. We also have various breakpoints here that allow for you to just quickly change between common sizes, mobile medium, large tablet, sizes, laptop sizes, and you get a percentage based visualization here, that’s scaled down to fit inside of this browser screen. So if you want, you can make this 100 % view you can make it a even larger view. If you want to sort of zoom into that, you can make it 50 % sort of fit in this area, and then you can see really large screens, 4k screens you’ve.
Even and if you don’t have a 4k screen, you can still test on those devices. Your design does change, based on the DPI of your screen and kind of is determinate of whether you have a Retina screen or non-retina screen, and that can also come into play when you’re deciding what images to send to your users. So if you want to test those, I have an example here with disco right how this high-res image and now inside of my dev tools, I can actually test to see that I’m sending a lower res image with the lower resolution browsers in my CSS.
I have a media query where I’m sending a different image based on the density of the screen. So here, if I have a high density, Retina screen, I’m sending a high resolution in and if I don’t it’s going to fall back to this low resolution image. So I can actually test this with a medium dpi screen inside of my dev tools, and this becomes really useful if you’re sending a lot of large images. And you want to think about performance for your users and for their devices.
And if all of those aren’t enough for you, there are some tools that you can use to extend these capabilities and make designing of the browser even easier. One of those tools is called this bug created by Adam Argyle. We’re going to fly over to him to have him explain why it’s so useful for designers right now. Hmm this page, I like the layout – I think, there’s a lot going for it, but it’s lacking some color.
Don’t you think? Well, let’s have fun and and try it out. Let’s make some color in here with this bug. All I have to do is launch it. In fact, I’m going to scoot it down off of here so that it’s not conflicting with the header and I’m going to start with the header. It’s just asking for a nice, bold color, don’t you think? What do you think of, like a purple, ooh, pink, a hot pink, I’m always down with hot pink all right? I’m actually settled that that’s great okay, you can see our guides tool is trying to help us make some alignment checks here, as we as we hover on other elements, you can get distance between them all right, but I’m also interested in changing this image up here And I’m going to drag in a new one.
Will I have an SVG icon here? It looks like this. Oh thanks for that that didn’t work out very well, but if I drop it up here, look at that. I replaced it. That’s kind of nice all right. So what about all of this these cards? I feel like they’re a little tight. I want to check. I want to check out their spacing here. So if I select I’m trying to select the card element in here and I’m having a little bit of a trouble because there’s so many elements in here look, I can actually select the elements inside of here.
That’s crazy town, but in order to get to these grid items, I’m going to select the parent and use keyboard navigation to help me get there. Someone hit Enter, which is going to select the first item as a child, so I selected the grid container. I hit enter and I selected the first one I hit command shift E, which is going to expand my selection. It’s going to find all the other elements to match.
I found them there. I still have the margin tool. So if I hit shift down twice, I’m going to add 20 pixels to the bottom, and that’s going to give me a little bit of spacing between my rows super neat. I can actually continue using this multi selection of I hit enter. I’m going to find that that each of these cards had a rapper element I hit enter again and I’m going to get the imaged container. That’s in the upper part.
If I hit tab I’ll find the next element in the layer tree – and I want to change the alignment of these, so I’m going to grab my flex box a line tool, I’m going to hit left and right and find a nice alignment and I’m going to Pick the center and I’m going to hit enter again and we’ll find that there’s a span inside of that container, and I want to change the text size of this. I grabbed the text tool I’m going to hit up on the the keyboard a few times here.
I’m going to hit command down to change the font weight and, of course it needs some hot pink. So I’m going to go over here to my color picker and grab that hot, pink from up top close out and see what I did and look at that. We brought some color to that page, really pretty quick and we’re able to just sort of express ourselves in a nice fast manner. That was fun. I hope you enjoyed seeing a little bit of taste of what vis bug can do for you super cool.
Thank you. Adam, I really love using dev tools. I use them every day for designing directly in the browser for prototyping for making decisions, and I find that these tools are just getting better and better and better, and that’s really exciting. For me, as somebody who likes to design and build the browser, what are your favorite to have tools? Are there any that we missed in the show, and that we didn’t mention tools that you use every day? I would love to hear your thoughts.
Please leave a comment below and thanks for reading the show we’ll see you next time save I just go.
Everybody goes oh when I start to talk about this, but it’s something that can really change your life. I just wrote a post about this on my website and I of course use long tail keywords in my keywords. So Google SEO things like that.
So let’s talk about at 40,000 feet what longtail keywords are because there was a gal in a Facebook group. The other day and she had written a post and I’m going to say I’m using my friend barb grassy as my goat, that she’s the book loss and she helps writers. She helps edit book. She helps coach writers, she’s except successful author herself, and so I figure if barb doesn’t know how to do SEO. Longtail SEO, then, who does so longtail SEO means kind of you’re going to go for the shortest version of the biggest keyword you can pick? Okay, so I’ll give you an example from my site when I started my website years ago, I was trying to rank for real estate marketing and or let’s go back to marketing right like I was trying to rank for marketing and there’s no way, I’m going to Rank in Google for the term marketing because there’s a lot more bigger sites that can rank for that, but even real estate marketing.
You know if you do a search for real estate marketing, because marketing people do marketing there’s um million there’s over 1 billion results for real estate marketing, okay, and so I I knew I to do some other things. That would help me rank for longer. Tail keywords like real estate, marketing marketing to a farm, real estate, marketing, funny realtor postcards real estate marketing how to get your first listing like those are all longer terms now.
Would I use real estate marketing every single time heck? No, I would say marketing your real estate business, how to succeed at real estate at your real estate, marketing how Realtors well you’re not supposed to use Realtors. I got in trouble for that one. You got to read your chart, your trademark keyword terms, but so real estate marketing. So you have real estate marketing strategy tools, ideas.
So then you can go even longer right, so real if real estate marketing was your logging. It like your shortest long-term keyword, then you would add things on the end, so we’re going to go with Barb’s and we’re going to yell at her. So I found this on her site. How do I start my book and I’m sure that this is super super interesting to her people, and I love that she’s answering a question that her readership or the people that she meets in public or her coaching clients house.
So this is probably I do this too. I’m like okay, I get to ask this question a thousand times. I want to answer this question. How do I start my book, but from a standpoint of Google, if you go and figure out, I use a tool called ubersuggest, it’s free and what they do. Is they pull in the Google search volume? So I did a search for how do I start my book and this was closest to it. How do I begin to write a book so for D and then, let’s see if we have how to start, how do I start a book? Thirty? How do I start my book ten? So those are searches per month, so I wan na help barb get right.
So that’s excellent! That’s going to be like part of her title, but we need to get her longer like more search volume. Keywords in her long tail. So, let’s, let’s sort this by search volume, can we search it by search flight filter results? Oh find keywords within search results. That’s awesome! Oh, and it’s an order by search form. It is in order by search volume, okay, so uh, okay. So how to write a book? How to write a book is our very, very, very best volume, 40,000 searches a month.
So we got how I’m going to write little notes over here right, I’m going to do this, how to write a book. So now, let’s find out from Google how competitive that search term is because probably other people know about it: how to write a book right how to write a book. There’s a 64 million different how to write a book results, and that is, if you put the quotations around it, it forces you to it forces Google to just look up in that exact order right.
So if we took them off so there’s a million how to write a books, there’s a billion how to write a book results, so we can’t really probably compete with that very well right. So, let’s add a word nonfiction right: how to write enough fiction book. How to write a nonfiction book now we’re down to 54 million results, which is still a lot, admittedly, but there’s only a hundred and sixteen thousand how to write a nonfiction book.
So we went from billions to hundreds of thousands, so I would say we could start with how to write a non-fiction book right whoa. We could do write a nonfiction book how to so. We just moved our how-to over how to get started right just by changing that. How do I start my book right like? How do I start? My book is not good, but how do write a nonfiction book now, let’s see uber, suggests write a nonfiction book.
It’s Lincoln it’s thinking now, isn’t this fun the best two seconds to figure this out a nonfiction book? Oh start it right. We want to filter it by words that have right in it how to write a book. So that was our 40,000 book. I write a novel: how to write an e-book, how to write a book, so we still have our how to write a book, how to write a book now. Is it an order right so she may want to. This.
Is it this is where it gets super exciting how to write a book for nonfiction authors right? She may want to write a big giant post. That is all about how to write a book for nonfiction authors right. So here’s my thing: this would be her bullseye. So this would be how to write a book for nonfiction authors. That is just blatantly going after the highest level of SEO longtail keyword that we think we can get.
Then she would say, write a nonfiction book how to get started. That would be one of these supporting posts. She would link back to that. She has other she’s other posts that are titled poorly, that we will go look at. She has a lot of words here, she’s writer, so she can. She can write some words. Girlfriend doesn’t have a problem with that choose one: how long should you book B so then she would do a writing non-fiction.
How long should your book be, which is slightly different right, writing nonfiction, is different from write. A nonfiction book people ask me all the time. So if I get a longtail keyword, should I do that one over and over and over again – and the answer is no like – that would be the most boring thing and you would only be trying to get that one tiny, long-term keyword search, let’s see what I Don’t want to know what shoes one is except the worst title ever Barbara Grassi.
You know I love you. Okay, write a book. He had ideas for as a marketing tool. Okay, so this is kind of about marketing. So we’re going to say, writing a nun. Now we got write a nonfiction book, write, nonfiction, writing, nonfiction and writing a non-fiction book to market your business right, and so now we have our three posts that we can try to get to how to write a book for nonfiction authors right and as we do More and more content with those longtail keywords on our website or on our blog most people have a wordpress or maybe a square skate space at this point.
But as you write more and more of those, you will go up so in my first example where I was telling you minis talking to us in my first example when I was telling you about my how to marketing to a farm or how to you know, Do a funny, realtor, postcards and stuff like that, what happened was I wrote enough different posts that were about real estate marketing? That, eventually, Google began to give me credit, but in the meantime I got Google traffic from those littler posts and my blog started to grow and I started to gain Authority.
So that is how you do. Longtail research in a super super easy to step way. Hoover suggests find a better search term that has more searches and then do a search on Google to find out what kind of results they get. Oh, I forgot one more thing: ooh. This is very exciting, so you can also do this. So if you say nonfiction, I don’t think it’s going to be in there. I think we got to do nonfiction, author Association, nonfiction authors, but let’s say right oops.
If I could type I would be unstoppable, oh shoot. Now we have to I’m glad that happened, though. So because I did that write a nonfiction book search, we need to do a incognito window, so I’m on a Mac. So I do control shift to control, shift command and just look up non opening on an incognito women window. So we’re going to go. Google right and then we’re going to say, write a book in a month in 30 days, so obviously, obviously there’s a lot of quickness around like that would be some good topics.
You could use right ain’t, let’s see what happens if we do nonfiction book outline. Oh, my gosh. She could do a an outline business plan. That’s nonprofit business plan. So let’s see write a nonfiction book fast, there’s fast again, it seems to be writing a nut seed. Now this is where now we’re crossing over to the other word. So we went from write to writing writing a nonfiction book for the first time.
That’s a really good one, and so, as you do this you’re going to be able to find these things in Google and just start writing them down. Everybody wants to make this so hard. Google tells us exactly how to do it, and this is how I do my research. Now I have all kinds of expensive keyword tools. I love SEM rush with the rest of us. I love you know the Google Keyword planner, but nowadays you can really start to get those super high level keywords right from Google just from showing the search and then doing a little research so hopefully helps Tara, Jacobsen marketing artfully.
If you like marketing articles, please make sure to subscribe, and if you like this article, please be sure to leave me a comment below YouTube, really likes comments, and I will talk to you soon.
Okay, this is an awesome service that will explode. Your agency help you overcome the GMB difficulties that you currently having with your agency, I’m Gio B’s and, if you’re a business owner this even better for you guys, this will help you dominate local areas.
Okay, we put a whole bunch of a couple of testimonials on the main site we didn’t put all of them cuz. Obviously this is a black hat, slash right at our method and a lot of our customers don’t want us to uh, show their rankings. Okay, so um, let’s go let’s scroll down; okay, all the way to the plan sheet. Okay, these are the pricing. Okay, we offer a 60-day 180 day and 120 day. Optimization. Okay, the sixth day is for you is for you, customers, who are very, very low competition areas, okay, so this is basically for the suburbs: okay, the outskirts of the city; okay.
So if you’re in that area and it’s stupid, it looks like it’s super easy to rank just grab this one, and this will definitely give you everything you need to UM dominate your customers, local area. Okay, let me just get a little closer on. This is we’re going to set up a local, SERP tracking and campaign. Okay, we’re going to send you those reports um for the two months that we wish you um we’re going to do a beautiful link, local link strategy that we have that’s been working: amazing.
Okay, I’ve been building websites for the last seven years and we had websites all throughout the United States, and this link strategy works beautiful, okay, we’re going to give you a baseline local visibility report that show you where you actually coming up within the local area. Okay, we’re going to give the citation audit of the two top competitors so if Harry’s appliance, repair or Harry’s plumbing is you know or Harry’s debt or dentist or whatever, whatever it is, is dominating you we’re going to actually do a quick consultation report of your two Competitors and see what they’re doing why they’re number one that we could take them down: okay, um we’re also going to create an optimized social, essential accounts.
Okay, this is everything from Facebook all the way down the spectrum. Okay, social link. Social signals are a big thing for 2018: okay, we’re going to create the social fortress accounts; okay, um we’re going to create in the UK in the u.S. We’re going to do citations for the for big data, aggregators those the big guys that people actually have to Use the subscriptions for okay, a lot of companies use, do yaks and DS going to knock knock those out the box.
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Local press releases. Okay, a lot of you guys are not doing this, and this is something that’s killing it for 2019 press releases, okay, basically, when we have sites that don’t um don’t get just need to get over that fence. We know we indicate out. We syndicate some press releases and it pushes them right over there right over the fence. Okay, we’re going to write five custom, G+ description. This is going away soon, so we’re going to replace this widowed, Google, post, okay, um GMB categories, I’m a lot of you guys input input the businesses into the wrong categories, so we’re going to actually go through it and make sure optimize everything and make sure that You’re doing that correct, okay, especially with the listing optimization, okay, GMB, photo optimization and product service post.
Okay, we’re going to actually do those also, okay, GUP GMB posts, are one of the most important things in 2019. You have with all these family listings that going around you have to show googly of real okay. The g bran account shared photos. We do twenty minimum, the public photos we do for the accountant, it’s relevant publishing. We do for okay, Google, my map with embeds. We do that also that’s a big optimization thing and we submit the links to the URLs for Google submit okay.
So that’s something that a lot of people not doing now. Okay, so, like I said this is not the run-of-the-mill Fiverr gig that she’d get on Fiverr of legit. This is real real SEO. Okay, this is the stuff that separate the weak from the strong people – okay, let’s say from the freelancers, to the professionals. Okay. So, let’s go to the next one: okay, let’s go to 120 with 120. We are doing everything we do with the 60 all right and we’re, including the extra okay we’re going to create an optimized for team or secondary citations.
We submit to six GPS listing services. Okay, big thing with with the whiz app Garmin, all these big big brands right now, um, you know your customer could be driving down within his brand new Audi and submit information right through his GPS. You want to come up in those areas to you. Want your customers to come up in those areas too: okay, Arthur Authority, bread network lakes. This is something that we build unique and um.
It’s pushing really good for 2019 um social Authority stacking okay. This is a big thing that a lot of people don’t do um. We do that with the da da MS link building strategy, okay, Apple maps and Bing places we claim and verify them: okay um. I had it up here, but they just had a quick post about um customers, actually using Apple maps instead of Google Maps um. There’s a big surge in it in 2019, so Apple maps is up and coming and you definitely need to be an Apple maps and Bing okay, so we we verify and we claim those listings from that.
Also. Okay, my map, citations and brand mentions okay with those map citations. We do a lot of the brand mentions: okay, something that ninety percent of SEO don’t do out there. Okay, rich media citations and brand mentions. We do that. Also, Google Places map embeds, okay, um. A lot of people not utilizing the map embeds in the Google map. This is something that we’re going to utilize in this campaign.
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Okay, now, let’s go to the next one, a hundred and eighty day this is for the big kahuna. This is for the New York City. This is where the Chicago’s, this is for the Miami’s. This is for all the big cities with the big players: the big competition. Okay. This is the name of the mill okay, um, GMB website creation. Okay, we also offer this. This is something that you definitely need to do in 2018, okay, in 2019.
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Locators, okay, create and optimize forty more citations, okay, more citations, more better citations; okay, um create and optimize geo networks. Okay, fifteen geo. Local articles and links – okay, so we’re going to make fifteen unique articles and links for the geo network, okay, fifteen driving direction maps with embeds. Basically, I know a lot of you guys know about the driving directions, um um tip, but um.
A lot of people will deal with the in bits, so um you need to do this. Okay and dislike again. Like you know, I try not to say it all the time, but this what separates the weak from the strong okay create an optimized niche networking. Okay, we also do that okay, so the pricing is very good guys if you want it. If you want deep these pricing you’re going to kill it, okay, you’re going to make up or you can make fifty to a 300 % or a why or these pricing.
That’s how good our GMB optimization is. Okay, so again, sixty day, that’s for the lo comp arm markets 120 day is for this big city. It is for the big cities with the low population. Maybe we don’t have the low competition? Okay: this is a favorite all 120. A lot of people buying this cuz they’re, not sure if they should do to 60 or 120 or the 180, so they go in the middle I’ll do the 120 and they kill it.
Okay, um: let’s go over a couple of it arm for 649. That’s a one-time fee, guys a one-time fee. So you just take this out in a brand, build you! Let us handle all your GMB optimization! You do your on-site, you do everything else and we take care of this. For you. It’s super simple in our industry. Time is an essence. Okay, you don’t want to sit here and build citations. You don’t want. I pay a VA, a separate amount to do these citations and you got a check up and make sure you do it right.
You know follow us guys, we’re we’re good at what we do. Okay $ 15.99 for the 180. That is an awesome price. You can absolutely demolished new york city markets, chicago markets, with this built, okay arm and, like I said that 120 is for the mid, builds okay, you guys going to just hit. By now, you submit um you’re going to submit the payment and then i’m going to shoot you you’re going to submit your information after after this some pay now button you’re going to be submitted to a submit business.
Now: okay page, where you going to put all your business information and then um you that’s going to come over to us and then I’m going to shoot you back a Google sheet. Okay, I want you to fill in all your information and basically we take it from there guys if you want us to white label it for you, we could do that for your customer or if you want us to do that or if you want to just Submit you know the just submit results via customer, that’s cool.
We could just create labels of the ER name and submit all the information to your business. Okay. So thank you so much for reading this article um, hopefully we’ll work together, have a wonderful day.
My guest is Adam Argyle he’s a developer advocate at Google and creator of the viz bug, design tool and today we’re talking about the state of design systems. Let’s get started Adam thanks for being here, so I want to ask you what purpose does design fulfill on a webpage? What are its goals? Mmm. That’s a good question at a high level. I feel like design, does a couple things we have.
You know it’s supposed to be guidance. You want to have credibility, so that’s like the better designed it is the more credible it feels right. You don’t want to spend money somewhere where it looks like there’s no design, even though that might not accurately reflect the product or what you’re investing in. But I like thinking about at a very, very high level. What design is doing is we have affirmative design and we have critical design and critical design.
It’s the type of design that is exploratory. It sort of provokes you Brutalism as a good example of critical design where you’re looking at something is like wow. This is like stark and shocking, even though it’s sort of retro in a way so there’s design, can do really interesting things to your psyche. In terms of like challenging you and or we can see more of this affirmative design, which is kind of getting more popular, it’s safer, where you’re sort of piling on to the social norms of like what’s going on in design because it’s safe and it’s familiar and So folks will visit your site and they might feel old into an action because they visit it and it’s beautiful and airy and they might be looking at something terribly, not attractive, like let’s say a scrubber.
For you know your sink. You can make a scrubber and a sink look very nice, so you visit the site and says: do you have problems with your sink feeling? Dirty and nasty. We’ve got the scrubber for you, so it’s like every design States the problem, and that brings in the solution and that’s sort of lulling you into this behavior there like eyes and this familiar you’re here it looks like a normal ad.
It has the normal flow. Let me guide you down this path and we’ll take you through this excellent experience. So design does both those things that’s really high-level, to does a whole bunch other stuff too, but yeah, I think that’s sort of what it’s trying to do is credibility flow. You know somebody else has done the work to organize it for me, so it’s supposed to be easy, I’m supposed to be here to consume quickly and get a task done, guiding the user towards the solution for that weapon yeah, and in that case it’s usually the Solution that the webpage wants you to go down, which is where you know, design, has a little bit of cunning in there.
Some people say design is a type of trickery as well, which right we have like dark patterns that are like legit trickery, or we have light patterns, which are it’s trickery or we’re just sort of like? No. This is just a healthy guidance. You can you could diverge it’s okay, yeah, so in terms of the tools that designers have what is a design system and what are its goals ooh, so a design system, that’s sort of it’s a hard one to nail down.
It’s gone through all these phases. Ah, my current opinion on what a design system is is where we previously had design deliverables that were sort of like a design system, and then we had engineering deliverables that were kind of like a design system. Well, we have with a design system, it’s a merging of the two where designers have their symbols and their files that generally represent the same components that engineers are making and there’s like this coming together moment and a design system.
That’s what I think we’re currently personifying that as we’re before engineering had like a pattern, library or component set, and then the designers had a style guide. So what are some of the principles of a good design system? Ah, yes, okay! So, at a high level, I think a design system intends to make future us have easier decisions like in the future. I shouldn’t have to invent a new button. I shouldn’t have to invent a new login form like these.
Things should be solved already, so at a high level. That’s one of its most. You know valuable propositions. Is that future you, or even, if you’re, being really consider it like other customers of your design system, customers being maybe other development teams or the designers? Maybe even like the marketing team? You have people that want to use that those are. I call them your customers. So a good design system is considerate of them and it empowers them.
But I like a low level when you’re implementing a design system, you should have things like reusability extendibility. You should have accessibility built in. Essentially, these LEGO pieces should have solved a bunch of problems for other people already and and be battle tested and have gone through. You know: ok, I’m gesturing right now, but the gesture is imagine a rock that I’m tumbling into a pearl like we’ll take and then we’ll have a bunch of pearls to give so that other people can and get their tests done easier and also there’s some something About that, where you need interactivity as part of your design system right, I have seen some design systems that don’t just talk about the component.
They give you levers to pull so you can visit a page and there’s some tools out there that do this. Like a story book is one we have other tools coming like frame racks, so there’s like design tools that are coming out very either very focused on this one particular use case, or you have ones that are a little bit more documentation focused so they’re less like Compose and build and more like no tinker and play and assess what component you need beforehand, and I like that tangible learning it.
It’s really nice, especially for someone visual like a designer to come into a design system website and peruse and find a component and be curious and play. It helps get really sticky the features and the capabilities of that in terms of the life cycle of a design system. Is it ever really done or is it more iterative? No, I think they really only grow. I have seen them be reborn or we, you know, we’ve seen them bring reborn with brands or they’re reborn as complete redesigns, but no, I don’t think they’re done.
I think they’re growing. I think we’re making teams now to facilitate these things, because they are so difficult and they only grow in complexity because well, there’s considerations that are often lost like mobile. You know. A lot of design systems are like a look at our sweet, desktop design system and they’re like cool what to do on mobile. We’re like we’ll get there same with like accessibility and layouts and there’s like a few other things that I think some design systems can do to grow and be even better, and I think that’s just what we’re discovering right now, like folks, are playing and they’re trying To figure out what aspects of the design system are really meaningful on? What’s crufty and you know for young industry we’re all still learning kind of like what this means.
Do you have any examples of older design systems that we draw inspiration from today? Whoo, yes, okay, whoo, okay, so old design systems. I have a bunch of them that I’m a big fan of we could go back in terms of like inspiration and things that are influencing what we’re doing today and go back to print and be like print. You made beautiful style, guides or brand guidelines. You would give Legos to a client and that client could go put them on an envelope.
They could put them on some stationery, so that was a very early set of like Lego deliverables that had some rules and some intentions. Then you have operating systems that feel very much like design systems as well right. The first iPhone had a design system for sure they even had a document, the hIgG right, the human interface guidelines. I would like to see more Design Systems have a hIgG. Are we super cool all right, and then we had Android with Halo.
These are inspirations to me, Android with Halo, and remember that one dark and glowy everything looked like it had like lightning, bolts or like neon around it. Actually, you know what it looked like that was looked like that Batman movie was. I was like a UI based on that was kind of cool. It’s right. We had platforms, we had web kits, oh yeah, so this is like material bootstrap, html5, boilerplate, jQuery, Mobile yeah, those were and what they call those right, those weren’t design systems.
They were component. Libraries at UI framework, UI framework, yeah pattern. Libraries, they had all these interesting names. I think we also take inspiration from fashion. We have this kind of goal right now. I have this metaphor. I like to think about a design system. It’s like you’re trying to make a capsule wardrobe. That’s everyone else in the company should want to wear right. You’re like okay, I’m the designer.
We need to make uniform, looking things across our site and they should be familiar and an elegant, blah blah blah. So what they do is they go make this this design system? That’s essentially like making a set of a wardrobe like you can’t screw this up. Just walk in the closet. Grab a shirt grab, some pants grab. Some shoes grab a hat. Who cares? It all goes together and that’s a that’s a term from well.
I learned it from Pinterest. I don’t know where else it came from though, but the capsule wardrobe idea is this yeah grab and go wardrobe and we’re trying to make a grab-and-go design system. I’m going to hoppy and grab a couple things make a new layout, be on my way, so fashion, I think, is influencing us in that way too. They want to be very minimal. Alright, it’s almost like Marie Kondo, your your wardrobe like go in and pull all the stuff that doesn’t fit in the capsule.
Make it reduced set like reduce your anxiety by you, know, reducing your options, but I have a question about that like when you limit your wardrobe or you limit like your UI elements. Is it true that you can have one size fits all UI elements or sometimes you need to reach out and use something new and different, whoo right cuz, you don’t want to wear my clothes. Do you know yeah you should like dude, your wardrobe is well.
It looks like your wardrobe right like what, if I want to have my own looking clothes, and this is where it comes down to like well, and I have two opinions here. One is, I don’t think designers want to wear other people’s clothes. So it’s to me it’s a little interesting that we’re trying to unite. I think the goal is super right, like that. We do need to make reusable Legos that are extendable and and are helpful for future problems, but at the same time, the more you try to abstract and reduce these like very subjective visual emotional things into like little units.
They start to feel very functional. They lose some of that that excitement that creativity and I think people want to start breaking out of your design system at that point they feel trapped. So there’s like a there’s, a there’s, a struggle here with design systems, which is we want to empower everybody, but we want to not be trapped. We want to be able to pick clothes every day that are really easy for us, but then we want to be able to go out to a fancy dinner and not look like we’re dressing from our capsule wardrobe and especially if you have customers, customers want to Have unique aspects of the site, and so naturally they’re always pushing on the design system to extend even more.
This is a good shout out to to material and Google material. The new version looked at what their customers were, doing, which the customers for materials tons right. People all over the world using it from dashboards to mobile apps, and in that case they looked at how people were using it and people were constantly customizing it right. They didn’t want material, vanilla. They wanted material with my Flair, whatever that Flair was like right, like I want crunch material, so oblong it doesn’t exist, but maybe I should make it no, but yeah that they looked at their customers and they empowered them to customize, in an extent material as a Base, I thought that was really observant and it was like research-based it’s just a very, very nice plan for the next version of a design system to lean so heavy into customization and enablement of people to fork.
It’s almost like they’re letting people fork to to manage their own and they can still pull updates in that’s a really great segue into my next question, which is there was a comment on our previous article in March, the state of CSS, with you know, Kravitz our Guests and this commenter is cool twisted TV says the problem. Seeing lately is that most websites now look the same. It’s like they all have this standard template or something, unlike back in the day when flash was a thing, people used to create out of bounds designs along with tons of nice animations, but nowadays everything is flat.
All gridded up the same way with a few minor positioning tweaks here and there I miss those kinds of designs that today we rarely now see all because everyone is now into this flat and blocky design. Look slap a few fonts on a page and add a few pics and color on the background and you’re done: that’s 2019 for you. What do you think about that? You know we’re. Can an agency even working at startups? We couldn’t take a lot of risks and we were moving so fast.
The only thing to do was affirmative design. I think what this question is kind of poking at is affirmative versus critical design and they’re upset that everybody’s gone affirmative they’re, like ah you’re, just piling on to the currently socially acceptable design patterns and strategies. That’s so lame, which I agree, because I built a lot of flash websites and yeah. You could land on one of my experiences and it was like you’re in a fishbowl right.
It’s like fishing yeah. You could hover over the treasure chest and would pop open and bubbles would come out. It was way more critical, design way more like experimentation and in creativity was like. You were unfettered, but at the same time, if we think back at that because there’s, I think, a lot of joy and and fun that was there, it was less serious and it wasn’t really achieving inclusive design as well.
I think one of the reasons folks other than you know you know being safe – is that flat and and choosing some these modern strategies. They really make accessibility easier because you’re not going critically, you don’t have to go undo something to be inclusive, so I think inclusive design, which is a really impressive and great push that we’re doing right now. It’s also kind of inhibiting some of our exploration because we want to be able to reach as many people as possible and affirmative design is lolling right.
You visit it you’re like all right. Well, I don’t really have to stress, while I’m here or do very much deep, diving, there’s the navigation menu, there’s my primary reaction, but if I scroll down nope, there’s three little things that tell me about the feature this: the other features of this product. Oh Harry Roberts, today, Harry Roberts today writes this thing, which basically is like recoating.
This person yeah, I have a quote here flat design in the rise of more and more digital products, does seem to have killed off a lot of that exuberance and experimentation, which is a huge shame. I missed the days of seeing what adventurous and out-there things people were trying to create. You would log in every day just to see what crazy stuff people built, whether it was flash or web. I feel that I think, there’s a there’s another tweet.
I can never remember that guy’s name, I think it’s John gold huh. I remembered someone’s name. Wow we’ll have it. I know your name, yeah, Rick Vesco me mm-hmm screen name. This tweet, though, had two images up and it was like which site? Are you building the one on the left? Are the one on the right and they’re pretty much identical? They they’re like big there’s an app bar at the top there’s, a big header image with big diner was text in it.
That’s like there’s a problem and then underneath that it’s like what’s a solution right and they’re, both there and they’re the same they’re like the practically the bootstrap templates that you could get for free they’re, practically the the theme for every WordPress site is now looks like This and the coolest and most creative and critical ones might have a article playing right. What text overtop like put some extra effort into that one that pictures animated? Do you consider bootstrap to be a design system? I do.
I don’t think they do well, and maybe this comes down to where I’m I’m curious about what a design system is and how it’s different than a pattern. Library. I think I think it’s that designers were more involved in a design system, whereas, like bootstrap is very developer, led, I think design kind of came in a little bit later after their Legos got really popular and so yeah. I think I think their design system that just kind of got there in a different way and the result, the thing that they have the tangible thing I can go pick up off the shelf and just like place in my tool belt right.
I’m I’m Wayne right now from Wayne’s World, so I just got my like from the back of the car. If anyone remembers the Shockers anyway, whatever that’s bootstrap right now, I could go get that off the shelf and be immediately useful with it and solve my future problems. It’s like the same value, props that I got and and we’re sharing about a design system. You could get them from bootstrap, but it doesn’t call itself a design system.
I can’t remember what their home page says. I think they’re one so, according to the HTTP archive bootstrap, is used, unlike one out of every four websites, at least in some fashion, which is a surprising stat who knows to y’all, but could that contribute to this feeling that websites are all looking the same? If 25 % of the web is using bootstrap with the same type of layout, is it possible that bootstrap is a victim of its own success in a way whoo? I, like that phrase victim of its own success, yeah.
Yes, I I think they are this. This is funny. This reminds me of two two metaphors I don’t want to share like bootstrap is funny it like. If you think back to high school, there was probably a super cool band that their album just came out and you really little dead band, so cool and you listen to him a ton. They made a second album with Chapter four made, a second album when you’re like this Bay, it’s still cool or bootstrap three, and then it gets really popular and everyone’s.
Listening to him. It’s like some fool who you don’t like, shows up wearing the band shirt and you’re like okay. That’s it done with this print and you start calling them a sellout and the reality is just like they’re now popular they’re, not making money they’re successful. You should be happy for them, but instead you’re turning your nose up and like this, like defensive, disgust like I don’t want to use it anymore, even though all the stuff you’ve built with it was great all the music and moments you had with that band.
We’re really nice, but it’s hard for anything to stay in fashion for too long, that’s kind of like the second metaphors, like the Wardrobe, we all had favorite stores we shopped at back in the day whether it was zoomies or gap or whatever right, and these were Like places, we went to go, make easy decisions that helped us get on with our day and that we were still picking something like relatively cool and meaningful, but then it just gets old we’re kind of rude as humans.
You know we we we burned through stuff. All the time we consume it and we’re like this is so good and then we throw it in the trash. So I think bootstrap is a victim of its own success, but it’s also very much still a success. I think being successful is hard. I mean look at any big framework of like whether it’s a JavaScript framework or big design tool. As soon as you hit the big shots and like you’re the cool one, everyone wants to take you down and that’s that’s a hard life to be in so bootstrap.
Stick it out, I think it’s still a great product. It’s obviously just reaching a different market. Almost like the pop band right, the pop band Green Day right loves their first couple. Albums third one came out, didn’t want to play that band anymore, but they reached a whole new set of people, and those folks fell in love with them. In a way that I didn’t – and I shouldn’t say that Green Day is bad.
I should say that Green Day is successful and they’re reaching new people and I still like their dewy, so you’ve spent a year as a UX engineer at the Google cloud team, as designed systems engineer so to speak yeah. What was your experience on that team? Yeah? That was really I was oh, so illuminating, so yeah I was a my title was really long ready for this. I was a UX engineer on the design systems team of GCP through a design lens, so they have two different types of UX engineers.
There’s UX engineer, engineer and then there’s UX engineer design, so I was in the design side. I was in a team of four or five other UX engineers who were supporting the design system, which had a big team, and I this was really cool to see how much commitment Google had to their design system. In so much that this team was made up. Of three teams there was a trifecta. It’s like a triforce of folks were managing that design system.
That design system is creating jobs, and it was really interesting to see how all of them were working together. What problems they were solving. There’s two things. I want to point out the first one I think is really interesting in meta, which is Google here I’ll just start with the first one it was built on angular, so is angular, which was transitioning from material one to Google, material and angular was doing a good Job at this work, the the struggles that they had were with how many customers that they had.
So this is where I like this meta comparison. You have Google clouds and their design system, which they call their design system, a condensed version of material. So it’s like a child seam. It’s like they forked Google material and made an enterprise, condensed version, that’s not as airy and fluffy. That’s interesting, because that means Google Cloud is a customer of another design system. Simultaneously, they have hundreds of customers, so they’ve got customers that are internal right, App Engine there’s like various products and each one of those products has a team.
Each one of those teams are consumers of this design system. That’s crazy! Then you have third-party players. People don’t want to add plugins or other support and other features into GCP that also want to use your design system. So they had this really really unique scenario where they were simultaneously a customer of a design system and a producer of a design system. Anyway, yeah. It’s meta I liked it and they were really adamant and very good at listening to all of these different customers and trying to make this thing work for everybody.
But it’s a very difficult task. They’re hiring they have tons of headcount, because this is GCP is humongous and they need help that and the UX teams they are really fun and really cool. So, if anyone’s looking for roles GCP in seattle, we’ll put a link in the description yeah sure so you mentioned something earlier. I want to come back to inclusive design. What is that, and what is the purpose of it? Oh man, this is so inclusive design.
We want this is so funny. It has a name, because I feel like it’s the thing that everybody’s wanted the whole time. We want our content to be accessible for as many people as possible right like. Why did we have to put a label on that? And I think the label is there and what it means is you need to have a site, that’s accessible, which really means you just need to test. First testing your site for accessibility is always this awesome.
Empathy experience where you’re like. Oh no, my sites, probably fine on that. Then you go tap through you’re like it works. It’s not elegant and that’s sort of like inclusive design, is like taking that extra step to empathize research. Ask folks and adjust your design to be more inclusive. So this can come down to things, like contrast, ratios font weights than this tab flows and stuff, like that, so looking ahead, what do you see the role of components and future Design Systems? I think we’re only going to get more complex as things go on we’re noticing now that our components aren’t good yet still, especially once you get to inclusive design areas where you thought you were done, and then you go test and you’re like.
Oh we’re not done. Sometimes those can shake the whole foundation of your application, and I think it’s healthy, though, that people are investigating that other future things. I would love to see you know voice. We have so much voice interaction coming in. Why don’t? We have a design system for a voice. I think that I’d be really interesting green lines. I would like to see design systems providing green lines.
Green lines are an accessibility indicator, so we’re a red line. Is you just saying I intend for this avatar to be 45 pixels wide and 45 pixels tall with a border radius of 50 percent? So it’s a circle like you’re. It’s a traditional way of marking up a document to encourage or or be precise, about, the presentation that you want. Accessibility is a similar, similar push. We’re like I’m going to go in here and I’m going to look at this little form input.
I’m going to look at this form button I’m going to go and indicate that these three areas should be tab. Indexed this way and it’s sort of a designer taking control of the accessibility, experience and saying, and I’m just being very deliberate and clear about what it is. They expect this to do and yeah it’s nice. It’s the designers making those decisions, as opposed to leaning on front-end, to do it and how about mobile mobile is usually forgotten.
All right, so we’ve got components or it’s funny. Material most of the opposite material is mobile first and then you sort of have to expand on a couple things to get desktop to work most Design Systems. I see these days our desktop focused and then they they start to squish things down as things go. So I’d love to see mobile, included, more components, yeah good call. How do you see the relationship between designer and developer evolving? I want to see them communicating a lot more.
John Maeda recently had a very provocative titled article, but ultimately, what he was pushing for is a switch and strategy where traditionally he was a proponent of design LED. He was like yeah. The designer should be at the top of the company, maybe even like making all the decision it’s like. If you do that, then elegance is sure to be achieved and that’s successful in a lot of ways. But what he’s seeing now after a few years of this is that engineering is really really important to engineering is required in order for elegant design to even be achieved.
So what he’s saying is no designer, I’m probably going to you, know, butcher this title, but no designer will be more successful than another designer unless they’re integrating themselves richly with engineering. The pitch is the designer isn’t necessarily the leader of the show anymore. He kind of says you should be a supporting actor or actress, and even though that might be a little hurt, some hurt some hurting to your ego.
You can still go see a movie where the supporting actor actress was the star of the show. There’s just a relationship that needs to happen here. That’s just richer and deeper integration. Designers needs to be included more across the the wide array of design decisions that are getting made and a lot of those design decisions are made in code, so designers get in there meet those folks sit with them every day and try to have rich conversations about The engineering side of things and getting greens they’ll ask you and they’ll want your opinion.
I think I felt like engineers make a lot of decisions today that they’d rather not make, and it’s just because no one is there to do the decision-making for them or to tell them what it is. So they kind of have to make it up as they go, which puts the front-end engineer into an interesting predicament. Wait. I just thought of something else. This one is this one’s huge for me. Okay, so we have in the front end, especially the dependency graph is getting really popular and we have back-end dependency graphs.
We have CIA CD dependency graphs, there’s no designer dependency graph. So what I want to see is like two really weird things. First off, I want to see design files pub/sub, where I want a design file to publish the colors and publish spacing units and like some of these, like really atomic units like think of tail wind tail. Wind is this: for I’m anali reduced design system, they have a file and I love it because it’s almost like, if you were to did you see the movie perfume the story of a murderer? No, I was a creepy movie, but he did something interesting which he was trying to distill the essence of beauty into like a thing that he could hold.
I feel like tale when did that they took a design system and they looked at all the different pieces and they started just like organizing and and plucking them and putting them into a nice list, and I, like that JSON object. I think it’s not JSON. Actually, it’s JavaScript, which is another cool feature of tooling anyway. It’s JavaScript file that is the most reduced design system into like atomic units that I’ve ever seen, and what I want to see is.
I want to see design files publishing something like that for a front-end to consume, and then I want to front-end to publish data models and other things for the design file to consume. I want to see a bi-directional communication happening between design, apps and front-end development that I want designers in that dependency graph publishing values. This is like why I want them in CI CD, like I want designers reviewing PRS, I want them creating PRS.
I imagine this like you’re in your design file. You changed a base color because it didn’t pass a contrast ratio. You know over here and some other tests, so you push and you save a change. You publish the change, which creates a PR that other people can go review designers, making PRS bypass the developer, bypassed the developer. I think it’s a decision the designers were already making. It just was like this long-winded feedback loop to get that work in they’re like I’ve got other crazy ideas too, or I think your design system should be a dependency graph.
Work clearly articulates what dependencies it has and what dependencies it creates for other things to consume. I’d like to see designers making kubernetes Canary deployments, I don’t even like to see I pitched GCP on this. I think there needs to be a design, focused cloud integration so that you’ve got. You know really rich cloud dev tooling, but we don’t have rich cloud design. Tooling, like their little design tabs over there, that a designer can go in create an a/b test which essentially makes a canary kubernetes container that gets deployed to five percent of the users.
Now designers can be in control of features of the front-end through some epic and really cool cloud integrations yeah. I want designers, I well here’s a challenge. I don’t know how to get designers into the backend dependency graph. I like pretty clear ideas on how to get the front-end and how to get them in CICE, but I’d love it if, like service designers, were included in API design and somehow there was again a pub/sub mechanism between these two or like the API team is publishing Something and the service design team is publishing something there’s just so much so much opportunity in this space for designers to get more richly integrated into the processes that are happening on the development side.
It’s not creepy. It’s super rad, like I want designers doing. Cember their design system should be versions just like the app and optimally they should match. It’d be really cool if, like the design system was out v 1.0 point twenty one, and so was the front end right because it was a consumer of that version. There’s a lot of opportunity. I think developers would like to have relinquished control over things like changing.
Colors and if the system is built well changing the value in one place like this master file and having it applied downstream to every button and everything else that depends on that color. I think they would love that. I I think so too. I think we just need some tooling. I there’s a bunch of people working on apps. I last time I did research. There was like 15 of them, but it’s sort of developers taking a design system building it and then publishing those Legos in like a design app, and so that’s what we’re seeing we’re seeing a bunch of design apps coming out where developers are saying, hey, I’ve exposed The levers to these components for you in this cool tool, where you can now go compose our Legos together and build something new and play in an almost production feeling like design tool, but really it’s still kind of prototyping, because the code it’s making is kind of Anyway, I think we’re headed towards a really cool integration layer there, between designers and developers, where they’re going to be richly working with each other and designers, will start to get more intimate with, like minor details about a component like what a boolean is and why a Boolean is different than an enum and why they should care and because those things are cool, I don’t think they’re scary all does viz bug actually fit into that vision.
This bug yeah. So if is bug school is it’s got a few of them? One of them is designer developer communication. You know a designer is often in their design tool. Land over here they’ve got an art board and everything’s placed XY, which made it really easy for them to. You know, highlight multiple and drag and delete. They had this. Like direct manipulation, but what is a bummer about that world is that it doesn’t translate.
Well, somebody’s, always translating it. So I was like a front-end engineer. I would receive one of those and I start looking at it, nice translating it to code and what viz bug does is it it sort of takes what the developers are making and lets? You inspect their work like it’s an art board and I’m I’m seeing folks that are having better communication with their engineers because they can feel things.
There’s like an empathy, that’s starting to happen, because the complexity that is the front end, is now something that designers can contribute to. They can go poke and inspect and modify and an experience why some of these things are complex or experience. How easy some of the stuff is, and so this book is definitely in there in the game to help designers and developers communicate better. It has some features where you know.
If you modify some CSS, you can show what changed in screenshot that and send it to an engineer so there’s an opportunity to even be like super articulate to a developer about what it is you need, but it’s also this book has to set their goal. So it’s kind of Sophie’s book is kind of like Firebug for designers. Its goal is to provide the same thing that Firebug did for developers, but it’s something for designers.
So give me tooling, that’s familiar to me in the end environment that can help me make better decisions, and it does that I think really. Well it a bunch of cool features too I’ll, just like breeze over and really quick, but there’s there’s guides. So you can hover and see lines and detect measure you can do measurements, you can inch. You can hover and instantly see any styles that are there, and I’ve done a lot of work to make sure that those styles that you see are the ones that designers want to see.
You’re not going to see all the craft. There’s an ally and accessibility inspector same deal. You click it. You just start hovering on stuff and it’ll. Tell you accessibility, details, there’s margin and spacing visualizations now, so you can hover and see, padding and see margin separate, so the dev tools shows them together and mine shows them separate and I support multi select. So you can multi select multiple things and as a designer or an engineer and see how the spacing is creating all that white space like where’s the white space coming from.
Is it a margin? Is it pushing or is it so? Those are interesting? You can also create, or you can’t create well now, you can’t create, but you can delete you can cut, you can copy, you can paste, you can double click, any text to change it. You can change any foreground color, you can change any SVG. You can there’s a position tool, you can just select something and then drag it around the screen and totally ignore the document flow.
So there’s tools to help you work with the flow tools to help you work out of the flow. It’s about, like you, feeling unfettered and getting an idea out right there, and, and it should feel fun like I wanted. It’s almost like. I wanted to break the glass four designers on a web page like we’re, constantly pulling down these magical pieces of paper and they feel so far away for designers like I can’t change that I’ll just go back over I’ll, just screenshot it I’ll come over here.
I’ll add a white box and cover up that – and you know like make this whole Franken thing and then ship that back to the developer and be like. Please like. Can you do this thing here and, and I’m hoping that folks start to do that in the browser which kind of comes into another value prop, but I do want to cover really quickly like this book wants to be more well. I have this phrase: it’s democratized the DOM and really what that means to me is.
I want the web and designing on the web to be more inclusive. I remember when it was easier and you know we were on MySpace and anybody could just go grab some CSS and paste it on the page and be like. Oh that’s, fun. That makes my brain tingle and a nice fun way better and worse for better or worse right. That’s vis bugs the same way. I’ve read or worse, people can go visit a page and play, but I think what that does is it opens up for children and adults too to feel like they can play like there’s like it’s now kind of a sandbox which simultaneously, I think we start to Like when you, when you start to learn by playing it first, there’s there’s just something different about starting that way than like going to school, and I starting all serious.
So I’m hoping that this can help people who are serious but also help people that aren’t that serious, be more inclusive and I forgot whatever. The second thing I was going to say was but yeah I mean, there’s lots of interesting features of his bug, but it’s trying to help wants to wants to be the design, debugging tools des tools. Perhaps oh I like that. So what resources would you recommend for people who want to learn more about design systems and everything else? We talked about yeah Design Systems, okay, so whoo, there’s folks, there’s three folks did I’m a big fan of dan mall.
You know Kravitz and Brad Frost there. They’re super articulate vocal public figures that are passionately talking about these topics and helping you ramp up or ramp down. Dan mall recently has been helping people not over focus on the Atomics of their design system, because you can get super like wrapped up in a button, and he did this really funny thing at a list of part. Recently he showed just was so good.
You should a button on the screen and then showed four companies that that could potentially be the button for and he’s like who’s button. Is that and everyone’s like? Oh, I don’t know, maybe that one, it was a blue button right and so the point was we can over focus on these little things and that’s not your brand and he’s essentially pushing you to real, like step back a little bit and determine like what’s unique About your business and and make make components and designs some out of those like your value prop like how are you different, because the Atomics are atomic, I thought that was really nice.
Yuna has a bunch of really cool things that she’s been pitching as well. She’s. Pitching accessibility in your components, which I think is really healthy and and she’s advocating for maybe you don’t need one so sometimes, and this is something I’m a believer in too, which is often we want to be the top dog like now, and so we go do Whatever the top dog is doing, we’re like alright, I need you know, legendary armor.
I need a sword of the gods of the ten thousand XP right, and so we like, we show up and we’re like level one, but we’ve got all the gear and we’re like this will make me good right and it does to a point. But it can also be a bunch of baggage and, like you, can’t even make it through the door of the first dungeon because you’re like to cover it in gear right. You got like magic shooting out of each fingers.
So I like that advice too, which is like look at the phase that you’re in as a team look at the phase Etrian as a product. You know notice that GCP, which is a very very large product, has an entire team dedicated to this. Now it’s that complex there is absolutely value coming out of a design system, but you got to look at the ROI like how much you putting in versus what you’re getting out, and I think that’s what that warning is it’s like.
You can spend a whole lot of time on the Atomics of your design system. You can spend a whole lot of time, making it really robust and then nobody uses it. So you got to make sure you have customers and anyway. Those three folks are really good to go. Look up and listen to they’ve got plenty of material for you to study. Well Adam. This has been great picks coming on the show, absolutely yeah. I was really fun.
You can check out the links to everything we talked about in the description below thanks for reading and we’ll see you next time.
We have different devices. Different needs even different data requirements, and this is at the core of the PWA attitude to building for the web. We need layouts and content that work across devices if your site doesn’t adapt to the user’s device, you break the illusion and lose trust.
These quotes are from Brad, Frost and Liza danger. Gardner. You should check out that blog post about responsive design, which are linked to from the course materials as Liza says, manage risk focus on content. You know you can make virtually any site usable simply by sizing elements and content correctly. The golden rule for great progressive web app content is not to let content inadvertently overflow horizontally, especially on mobile.
That sounds basic, but lots of sites break this rule by making images inputs and other large elements on the page with fixed sizes. Using relative measurement units and RAM percentages will reduce the severity of this issue. Adding a meta viewport tag will also solve a lot of problems. This tells the browser the size of the virtual viewport on which it renders a web page without setting the viewport meta tag correctly, most browsers scaled down the page to fit a virtual 980 pixel wide viewport.
I’ve seen some great examples of this in action on w3schools, we’ll give you the URLs for that in the course materials. With this article, the initial scale value sets the zoom default. For this page, don’t set a maximum value that will make it impossible for users to zoom and that’s a big problem for accessibility. One other thing you should be aware of the viewport meta tag will mess up the layout for fixed-width sites.
The Mater viewport tag is designed to work with responsive layout. If you use it in a fixed sized layout, it will break things until you convert the site to a responsive, lay out trade document.Documentelement client to see how the viewport meta tag affects the virtual viewport. Here’s another simple technique: this solves many layout problems, you’re setting the preferred size and the maximum size and works for article and audio too so yeah.
You might think that relative sizing would fix everything, in fact, for a while back in the day, some of us thought that relative sizing could solve everything we layout. We had, you know liquid layout, maybe even text could be relatively sized, but relative sizing isn’t enough simplistic. Relative sizing, like this a diagram, means that you have content areas that are too big on desktop and to smaller mobile.
This is why media queries were invented. It’s a simple concept, use different CSS for different sized viewport based on width. That doesn’t just mean making the same layout for every device on a phone. You might want a single column layout, a two column layout on a tablet. Maybe three columns for desktop and so on. You can use media queries to select different layouts depending on the viewport size, here’s a single column layout on mobile to column, on tablet and three columns for desktop.
So do you think about devices, and you might think you could get away with this? Ask yourself what could go wrong with this approach? What about new devices new viewport sizes? What about changing window sizes on desktop we’ll come back to this later now? Is that all there is, of course not. There is a better way go back to our original exercise. Remember content is king devices, keep changing and device, viewports are getting bigger and smaller, not to mention pixel density, pixel, shape, display quality and so on.
Don’t force your designers and developers to make a change every time a new device appears start. The design process with the smallest form factor then add the major breakpoints for the form factors that you work with phone tablets, laptops and widescreen devices. You can then create minor breakpoints to handle specific changes to elements that don’t affect all elements. The final detail to keep in mind is to optimize the content for reading, ideally keep the width of your content to 70 to 80 characters wider than that value makes content hard to read.
Now that doesn’t mean you stop thinking about devices and device classes. You might want one column for phones, two columns for tablets, three columns for desktop, like we’re saying or whatever you can find out more about these recommendations on web fundamentals. Now remember the earlier media queries example in the mobile first world of PWS. We need to turn that around make small viewports the default.
Look at the example here. By the way, there is no fixed rule about whether or not to include media queries, inline or use a separate file. Also, you might want to consider using m’s or REMS for units here, but I won’t go into that now. You’ll also do responsive layout in JavaScript. If you like, this is a simple way to do. Conditional content match media is well supported and there are polyfills. Calc is really useful in responsive design, where you want to use a combination of fixed widths and percentages.
In this example, we have two thumbnail images: side by side: 50 %, the width of the parent element with a 10 pixel margin between them, no matter what size. The viewport responsive design is about more than just changing layouts, as well as changing layouts. You might actually also want to manipulate content, depending on the viewport size and device type, for example, on a phone you might want to make sure page content is visible when the user goes to your home page, so you might opt for a hamburger menu for navigation And put banner ads lower on the page.
Also, if need be, you can just get rid of stuff on desktop. Your users will want full functionality, but not on mobile right wrong. Don’t guess your users needs based on viewport size, plan, content and functionality carefully and don’t assume users want less content or functionality on phones than desktop, for example. Again, this is a crucial part of the PWA attitude. Understand your users, don’t second-guess them.
Data-Driven design, design, content, layouts and transaction processes, so users can get to what they want as quickly as possible. Our data shows that every step to get to content loses 20 % of users rather than removing content. A more sensible option can be to choose different content. Now for images this is called art direction, choosing different images or different image crops and I’ll show an example of this later.
You might even want to provide different text for different viewports such as shorter headlines, but yeah be careful again not to assume that mobile users want less content for article. The general rule is to use a smaller resolution for smaller viewports. This can result in massive reductions in bite, size, playback performance and proven sand, also reduced streaming cost. The best way to do this is with adaptive streaming or HLS, not just media queries and yeah.
You can find out more about that more about adaptive streaming in the course materials. But just to reiterate, the key point here is that when you’re delivering article to mobile, don’t use resolutions larger than you need and talking about article content, don’t forget to caption articles using the track element. It’s really easy. Let’s take a look at the relatively new technique for creating responsive layouts, CSS flexbox provides flexible sizing and alignment element reordering and better performance than floats.
Css flexbox is well supported and we strongly recommend it easy centering is the holy grail of CSS. Take a look at the code here. It is incredibly simple. I still find it slightly thrilling by the way the materials that accompany this article have links to lots of flexbox examples, including this one. Let’s look at the CSS for the examples here. This uses CSS flexbox for three different layouts depending on the viewport width.
Let’s start with the defaults for smaller viewports, remember, mobile-first, the container is declared to use CSS flex. The flex flow property means child elements can wrap. Rather than being squashed onto the same line. You can also use inline flex, that’s shorthand for flex direction and flex wrap properties. The default is ro, no rap 100 % width for each div in the container add a different layout for slightly larger viewport and different again, once the width hits 800 pixels.
The container is now a fixed width and centered horizontally using margins. Let’s take a look at the example here. Once again, this uses CSS flexbox for three different layouts, depending on the viewport width and again, let’s start with the defaults for smaller viewports. For view puts over 600 pixels in width. The order is changed on the smaller viewports. We wanted to give child 1 full width, but for a slightly larger viewport, we can put it next to child 2.
I could go on anyway, to other properties. I’d like to draw your attention to justify content, how items are packed and aligned items how items are aligned. Css grid is in some ways related to the grid system concept, familiar to graphic designers. A page is thought of in terms of lines tracks between lines, cells and areas. Css grid is coming, and it’s already behind a flag in Chrome and Firefox you’ll find more information in the resources for this article.
The lab exercises that accompany this article will help you get started with media queries, breakpoints grids and with flexbox
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