If you want to skip the design phase of a website development project, you can choose to buy a ready-made website, also called a theme or template. Thousands of these are available at very affordable prices. How that works You choose a ready-made website from a template directory (links below). I will connect the chosen template to my CMS. This ensures that you can update the content without accidentally breaking the design. I will then improve the performance (and SEO) of the website templat...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Hiroshi Abe (阿部 寛, born June 22, 1964) is a Japanese actor. He became known for his role in TRICK and Godzilla 2000. Wikipedia The Japanese actor’s website is known in Japan for its simple design. It’s often said to resemble the internet of the 1990s in Japan. It’s also used by fans to benchmark consoles and hardware. It has become an ‘internet challenge’ to open this site in the most random apps and games.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Wordpress breaks often. A 2023 WP survey found that 52% of Wordpress professionals had experienced their site breaking due to a plugin or theme update in the past year. Even small updates can trigger the White Screen of Death if code conflicts with other plugins or the PHP version. Major core releases sometimes introduce compatibility issues with older plugins or themes. WPBeginner estimates that after every major release, hundreds of thousands of sites experience breakage, or at least visibl...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I am a Dutch guy running a web development company in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. I am pretty tall, I love ‘bitterballen’ and when I say ‘grachten’ (canals) it sounds like I am clearing my throat. Yup… I am as Dutch as it gets. Yet, in my work I follow a lot of Japanese principles. Kanso / Zen aesthetics Eliminate clutter, keep only what’s essential. Minimalist UI design with clean layouts. Clear navigation and reduced cognitive load. Lightweight code and optimized performance. Wa...| Usecue web development
I read this on Reddit [redacted]: “Why do most programmers that I talk to, who have more experience than me, seem to not care about performance as much? Why does a web page takes 3s to load? Why can’t you learn develop a fully functioning web app without a ton of libraries? And don’t get me started on frameworks. Does anyone relate?” Here is my reply: If you are talking about web applications: A simple LAMP stack performs crazy good, but is not not ‘sexy’. Newer stacks are much ...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
The Stockholm Wordpress theme, available on Envato, recently caught my eye. It has an astonishing 35k sales and has some very nice looking examples. However, I noticed a lot of one star reviews in the last few months. According to the reviews the theme is lacking support, is not properly responsive and is full of bugs. Yet, the makers must have earned 35k times 69 dollar… so more than 2 million dollar. How can this possibly (still) be bad?| Blog articles on Usecue web development
How to avoid getting scammed when hiring a developer? I saw this question on Reddit (r/web_design) and below you will find what I replied. I am a business owner and web developer at usecue.com. This is my approach: I will build your first project for free or for a reduced price, to keep your risk low. This gives us both the opportunity to get to know each other and see if we are a fit. If we are, I will make sure we both profit equally from every project. I will keep conversation about this t...| Usecue web development
“Takumi” is a name of Japanese origin and is typically given to boys. The name reflects a person who is talented, creative, and possesses a high level of skill in a particular craft or art form. The word Takumi is composed of two kanji characters: “Taku” (匠) meaning artisan or craftsman, and “Mi” (美) meaning beautiful or skilled. When combined, the name Takumi translates to “artisan” or “skilled craftsman”. Traditionally, artisans in Japanese society held a revered pos...| Usecue web development
Ukko is a WordPress theme designed specifically for personal portfolios. It is a modern and stylish theme with a clean and minimalist design. Ukko is perfect for showcasing your work, skills, and experience. WordPress version React version HTML version The above versions are all available on Themeforest. They have been sold more than 800 times. I bought the React version, but found out it was not optimized at all. Therefore I created a better version using Hugo and my own CMS. The optimized v...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
“Isn’t that a song?” I hear you think. You are right. ‘Big in Japan’ was the debut single of the German synth-pop band Alphaville. It reached a number 1 position in the European charts in 1984. This cover is also worth listening to. Marian Gold (the original lead singer and author) says about this song: It’s the lie/fantasy of the loser. He says he is not a loser, because in Japan he is really big.| Usecue web development
I am sort of famous. At least… that is what I like to think after sifting through all my backlinks in Google Search Console. Sure, I was a speaker at JekyllConf 2019, HugoConf 2022 and HugoConf 2023 and I am the organizer of the Jamstack Amsterdam Meetup group. I am also the author of Jekyll Codex, Hugo Codex and Hugobricks and I run my own CMS with almost 100 client websites. But I have also gained some internet fame by writing articles. Something I value just as much. Here is a list of pe...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Switching to a static site is like upgrading from a clunky old car to a sleek electric vehicle—faster, safer, and more efficient. Static sites deliver content directly to users without relying on server-side processing, offering lightning-fast load times and enhanced security. What is a static site generator? A static site generator is your digital transformation tool. It takes your WordPress content and converts it into a set of static files, ready to be served to users. Think of it as a m...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
“A static website? No way, I don’t want that.” I get that. ‘Static’ sounds boring, unchangeable, and passive. A static website cannot change at any moment. It can only change if the owner actively updates the website (by adding new text or new images). That might sound a lot less “unchangeable” than you initially thought. Because when else would you want a website to change? Well.. the best example I can think of is Facebook’s ever-changing timeline. But that’s not a website...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I tried BunnyCDN on behalf of some of my clients who wanted to achieve better performance on their international e-commerce projects. BunnyCDN looked good, at first… I got fast speeds from almost any location, as reported by BunnyCDN. BunnyCDN reported loading times of milliseconds instead of seconds. This made me very happy. Additionally, my Web Core Vitals improved significantly. The price tag was also very reasonable. I received a bunch of free credits from BunnyCDN and my monthly traffi...| Usecue web development
I get asked this question a lot. But before I can answer it, I have to paint you a picture. Most of the web runs on WordPress, and most of those websites use a page builder. There were around 33 page builders for the WordPress platform in 2017. A few years later, Gutenberg launched, and as Todd E. Jones put it: “It changed the landscape of page builders, but not the need to use them. Page builders can (still) help you build custom pages in minutes versus hours.”| Usecue web development
My website was loading instantly… but mostly from within Europe, as it did not use a CDN. Recently I have switched to BunnyCDN and now the website loads instantly from almost any location. In the image above you see the loading times. Dubai is still bad, but the rest is all below 300 miliseconds. Note that this is a self-test from BunnyCDN. This might positively influence the data, as they get to choose the test locations. Also note that this is not measuring the last mile delay, which you ...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
We probably all know a lot of ‘Yo mama’ jokes. Simple and silly, yet funny. It is time for some slow website jokes. Here are some examples. Your website is so slow… … even sloths do not wait for it to finish loading. … it should have waiting music. … even ordering take-out has a lower TTFB. … gtmetrix.com crashes when you enter the URL. … it has a sub-zero score in Google Pagespeed. … Google ranks it last in its search engine. … it messes with the space-time continuum. …...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
“Some webpages use so much unnessecary code, they could as well (down)load the whole Bible.” This was a thought I had. I tried it out and attached the complete Bible text to the content of this page. And guess what? It is still fast! Although the source code contains the complete Bible text, this page still has an 89 performance score on desktop and a 59 performance score on mobile. I added the Bible in plain text and I did not use any monkey business. Go ahead and inspect the page! You w...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I am always amazed by peoples choices… especially when they cost them a lot of money. Why would you use an iframe as a form when that can lead to this (your most important content not loading on a 3k product)? Why would you use Wordpress when you know the average Wordpress website is 33% heavier, which leads to slow loads and poor conversion? Why would you use a slow and heavy Javascript or CSS framework?| Usecue web development
A single line of CSS can enable slick multi-page transitions for web applications (and websites for those who maintain there’s a difference), opening up new possibilities for web app architectures, and website experiences. @view-transition {navigation: auto;} The upcoming of native apps The launch of the iPhone in 2008 coincided with (and likely ignited) a resurgence of the web. Native iPhone apps arrived, with their smooth, animated state transitions between views, panels and widgets slidi...| Usecue web development
I bought a React portfolio template at Themeforest for 14 dollar, but is it any good? Well it looks very stylish, but what about the code? To analyze the code I ported the template to Hugo. Here are the results. Much faster The difference between the Hugo version and the React version can best be seen when you load the homepage. The React version loads 1.8Mb and the similarly looking Hugo version loads just 0.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
When I looked at my Google Search Console today, it seemed like my traffic had dropped to zero! I watch my traffic closely as I am trying to learn what influences visibility in Google. I recently found out that Site Vitality seems to have a big impact on your visibility. But in order to be able to see your site vitality you have to be in the CrUX report. And in order to get there you have to have a minimum amount of traffic (I assume).| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I normally do not like to toot my own horn… but I have ported over 25 client websites from Jekyll to Hugo to make them faster. I ported another handful from Wordpress to Hugo. They now all have sub-second deploys and instant loading and I am very proud of that. I have built another 50 websites in the last 3 years and connected them to my Hugo-only CMS. This means that this CMS now serves around 85 websites.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
There is a whole generation of developers who no longer know how to build simple websites and web applications. I am not the only one who thinks so. I read the following on reddit: “I do client side heavy websites for a living. React, Vue etc. Even properly optimised they are all garbage and the DX of supporting them long term is insane. This whole way of building websites needs to go the way of the Dodo.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Last June, before the whole WordPress drama with WPEngine, Matt Mullenweg held a speech at WordCamp Europe in Turin. He said WordPress scales well, its code is poetry and ‘dynamic sites are better’. First of all, saying that WordPress scales well is weird. He literally said ‘it is incredible how much this can scale’, referring to hosting a WordPress website, as he talks about page views. It does not make sense because WordPress uses up to 100 times more resources than a static website...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I just read on the website of James Smith that align-content works in the default layout in 2024. This allows vertical centering with 1 CSS property. <div style="align-content: center; height: 100px;"> align-content just works! </div> align-content just works! Supported since: Chrome: 123 | Firefox: 125 | Safari: 17.4| Blog articles on Usecue web development
There are only four thing you have to know when you want to build fast website. They are equally important and relatively simple. I know this, because all my websites have a near perfect Google Lighthouse score. Forget about the endless lists of optimizations you may have seen before. These four guidelines will make your website load instantly. 1. Make your website small When I say small I mean really small (in terms of page weight).| Blog articles on Usecue web development
WP Engine disabled revisions and Matt Mullenweg is furious about it, for all the wrong reasons. He wrote an article called WP Engine is not WordPress where he argues that revisions are essential to Wordpress. “WordPress is architected and designed to never lose anything”, he writes. If only half of that was true, most people would not be in the mess they are currently in. Wordpress stores its content in the same place where it runs the scripts that operate your website.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
This website has a perfect Google Lighthouse score. To keep this website state-of-the-art, I have done a lot of micro optimizations lately. These micro optimizations make this website probably the fastest website in the world, as this website consists of very few bytes, very few requests and very small images (typically 40kb each). Stylesheets and Javascript files are now minified and combined The SVG logo in the top left corner is now inlined The favicon is now an SVG image The double arrow ...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
This website was recently added to the CrUX report, meaning you can now see this websites real-world performance, because the CrUX report shows data from Real User Monitoring (RUM). Real-world performance metrics for usecue.com RUM differs from synthetic monitoring in that it relies on actual people clicking on the page to take measurements rather than automated tests going over a given set of steps, like a standard Google Lighthouse test.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Should you care about a non-perfect Google Lighthouse score? In my opinion a good website should have a perfect or near-perfect score. It is a sign of good code. As argued before, there are multiple reasons to aim for a lightning fast website. It gives you a better ranking, improved conversion and a better UX. Surely, you can cheat to get to this perfect score, especially as long as you are not in the Chrome User Experience (CrUX) Report.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Have your Lighthouse scores dropped? Did your green circles turn orange? Here are the three most likely reasons. 1. New rules from Google In March 12, 2024 Google changed replaced First Input Delay with Interaction to Next Paint. This means that the Performance score is now based on different measurements and thus leads to different results. 2. Different code If your website has A/B tests active, or changed the ads or scripts that are loaded (through a tag manager) you can expect a completely...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
People often uploads photo albums to their website. I always downsize and thumbnail those images with Hugo’s image processing. However, Hugo sometimes misinterprets the exif rotation on images. This can be solved by resetting the exif rotation and rotating the images the right way up. This is a lot of work. Fortunately, when you are using Linux, you can rely on exiftran, which does exactly that. The command is pretty straight-forward.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
The recent EU legislation requires all banks and other payment service providers (PSPs) to offer instant payment services, ensuring that transactions are completed within 10 seconds. These services will be available 24/7 and 365 days a year. Given the stringent timelines, banks undergoing transformation projects to meet this new regulation must act quickly. Banks and PSPs will need to be ready to receive instant credit transfers in euros by 9 January 2025, and send instant credit transfers by...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
The latest release from Hugo (the static site generator) brings a long-awaited Hugo feature that has had many names. This feature allows you to create pages from data. You can read all about it in the documentation where it’s titled Content Adapters. Also worth mentioning in this release are the new Extras Goldmark Extensions, which allows you to enable Markdown syntax for inserted text, mark text, subscript and superscript. You can now write stuff like ‘H2O and 1st’ without using HTML ...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
There is a website online that is called worldsfastest.com. It claims to be the fastest website in the world, but there are a lot of things wrong with it. Let me explain. Truth be told: it is VERY fast First of all, I have to admit that it is very fast. The initial page load consists of only one request, which is only 13.4 kilobytes large and has a data-transfer of only 8 kilobytes.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
To understand the environmental impact of a website, it is best to compare it with a paper magazine. The magazine has an editor and this editor tries to sell as many copies as possible every month. They do this through a kiosk on the street. I know… it’s a bit of an old-fashioned concept, but stay with me. We compare this kiosk with a server and the editor with the website owner.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I was looking at thefutureofjamstack.org. On this website you will find a shared vision that is being written, transparently and collectively. I tells stories of the people who live and breathe ‘Jamstack’. But why is there a website about the future of Jamstack? When the Jamstack began, it was promoting simplicity, security, scalability, and performance. However, over time this changed. You could say that the Jamstack evolved. You could also say that it got hijacked by javascript frameworks.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
There are probably many different web studios in Japan, but there is only one Webstudio S. This studio, founded in 2017, is run by Yuma Chiaki. He or she works and lives in the Fukui region in Japan and does web design and production, UI/UX design and online marketing. Yuma wrote an article about my website called The fastest homepage, which resulted in a lot of extra traffic from Japan and a better ranking on these terms in the search engine from Google.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
No seriously… They let you save up to $290+ per month per site. They even gave a list of what those non-developer costs looked like. Here it is: Cloudflare Enterprise $250+ Rocket CDN $8.99 WP Rocket $4 BlogVault $7.41 UpdraftPlus $5.83 Pingdom $10 SSL.com $4 Those costs are insanely high, don’t you think? That is because all these prices are for unlimited websites. So ONLY when you are an agency with just one website, this calculation makes any sense.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I had been searching for the most perfect color for my website for a while… when I ran into Lapis Lazuli I fell in love. Lapis Lazuli is not actually a color, it is a stone. My youngest son pointed me at it while playing Minecraft. The stone has been used to create gems and pigments. The color is called ‘ultramarine’. It made me think about Yves Klein’s blue, worth millions.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
‘If you can think it, you can build it.’ WordPress uses great slogans to promote its free software. But free is not free at all. It is actually more expensive than most paid alternatives, especially when we compare it to Hugo. Lower conversion WordPress has a lower page speed than most alternative solutions. This is very clear when you compare WordPress to Hugo websites. We know that conversion rates will drop significantly on slower pages.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I use Hugo to build websites. But is Hugo popular? When you look at the top one million websites (according to BuiltWith) I would say: No. After WordPress, Drupal is the first system that is widely known for website building and it has only 2.5% market share. Joomla has less than half of that and Hugo has only one tenth of the amount of Drupal. Hugo is not popular… this may be clear.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
It has been an honor to speak at HugoConf 2023. My talk was about Hugobricks, a theme/concept for stackable content blocks in Hugo. If you want to see my 7 minute (pre-recorded) talk, check it out on Vimeo or Youtube. This was my third conference talk. I have also been presenting at JekyllConf 2019 and HugoConf 2022. I was accompanied by some great speakers, like Joe Mooring (famous in the Hugo community for his excellent support).| Blog articles on Usecue web development
The Netlify CEO made an announcement to the Netlify team. He did not say it with so many words, but they fired 25% of their employees over a strategy change. They changed from being developer oriented to being enterprise oriented. My big hero Kyle Mathews also got fired, so I asked him about it… Joost: Hey Kyle, they ‘bought’ Gatsby and fired you? Or am I missing something here? Kyle: They bought us mostly for the Gatsby data layer which we’ve been spinning out into a standalone API (...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
In today’s digital landscape, having a fast, efficient, and scalable website is crucial for businesses and individuals alike. With numerous options available, choosing the right static site generator can be a daunting task. In this blog post, we will explore why Hugo stands out among the crowd and why it should be your preferred choice when building static websites. Blazing fast performance Hugo is renowned for its exceptional speed and performance.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
So I build (a lot of) websites. During this process I often receive a folder with a LOT of (large) images. These images sometimes exceed 10MB each, which is ridiculous when it comes to web. My websites resize all images on build, so the website visitors do not notice these gigantic file sizes. However, during build time these huge files have to be read and processed. This causes a longer (initial) build time, while I always aim for instant deploys.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I am looking forward to the day that everybody will switch to WebP without fallback. The reason for not changing to WebP-only is Safari, both on desktop and mobile, as you can see in caniuse. In my last post on WebP, from October ‘22, I reported a 5% usage of Safari 16 (desktop). That number has grown to 60%. That is not yet the 90% I said that was required to convince everybody to change to WebP-only.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Managed hosting usually means ‘website hosting including support’. You can see managed hosting as a website as a service, while regular hosting can be better compared to hardware as a service. The advantage of managed hosting is that you are not responsible for the operation of your website. It seems as if parties such as MijnDomein, Hostnet and Antagonist also take all the work off your hands, but in reality that is absolutely not the case.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
So you want a clean, good looking, free Instagram widget on your website? I used to have the perfect solution for it. It was called Profile Page Images (PPI) and loaded your latest Instagram posts. It was quite a success with LOTS of traffic and 200+ users. However, Facebook kept removing the app permissions. So I decided to look at the ‘competition’. They offered similar stuff, and also for free. I used the free Instagram widget from SnapWidget to create a good looking and very clean wid...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I am quite active on Stack Overflow. However, the atmosphere on Stack Overflow can be pretty hostile. I have experienced this multiple times. Today was another one of those days. I asked the question whether two tags should be merged. I copied a piece of an external article in to my a question (first two paragraphs) to show why I thought they should be merged, along with the link to the original article.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Netlify CMS has long been a flexible content management system for users, but opportunities still exist to further customize and extend its capabilities. To ensure continued support, investments, and maintenance both the product and the community deserve, Netlify has decided to transfer ownership of Netlify CMS to one of their trusted agency partners, PM. This move is part of Netlify’s broader strategic shift towards becoming a more versatile platform for composable architecture.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I watched this video in which Colby Fayock explains how ButterCMS works. I really like the concept (and looks) of ButterCMS. However… at 5:19 minutes and at 25:33 minutes Colby edited out the wait for the deploy on Vercel. I wrote about deployment delays before. I think it is critical to have instant deploys and so does Kyle Matthews (CTO of Gatsby). If Colby would have deployed to Gatsby Cloud, instead of Vercel, the deploy should have been instant due to Reactive Site Generation.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
People who know me, know that I am a fan of Google Lighthouse, and especially the perfomance statistics. Well, fan… ‘obsessed’ may be a better word. I rely on Google when it comes to website statistics. This is why I was shocked when I got an email from Google, about the performance of one of my websites, that was clearly wrong. It showed me the following statistics (from Google Analytics):| Blog articles on Usecue web development
One day(!) after my previous article about WebP, Safari launched Safari 16 for macOS… and… you guessed it: Safari 16 fully supports WebP. This is big news, because it means that we will all be using WebP as the preferred pixel format for images very soon. But what is ‘very soon’? We are currently a little more than one month in and Safari 16 is already used by approximately 5% of the Safari users on macOS.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
The instructions for using Google Fonts tell you to do something that is clearly illegal in the EU. This has been confirmed more than six months ago by the German court. In the aforementioned case the website owner had to pay 100 euro to the complainer and faced a penalty payment of up to 250k euro if failing to comply. It is remarkable that Google does not warn developers for this infringement, as it has been illegal for years (and Google should know that).| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I found the words ‘code is poetry’ in the footer of the new Wordpress frontpage, that has been launched recently. I fully agree that code is poetry! I love to read and write beautiful and concise code. In a few days I will even be joining CloudCannon on their Youtube show ‘Static Feedback’ to talk about Artisanal Web Development. This is my hand-crafted take on building sites with absolute knowledge about every line of code.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
“This is the fastest website in the world. Don’t even try, you will not be able to find anything as fast as this website!” This is what Mfon Abel Ekene wrote on this website. He continues: “I am tired of people, clients, and developers being too much obsessed with speed. The only way to have a super-fast website is to have a website with almost nothing!” I do not agree with that… and yes, I am obsessed with speed.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I added a mascot to my posts. It is a small (living) bot, made of simple HTML characters. It lives in the footer of each blog post and is part of my (new) signature. The bot will react (differently) to moving your mouse over the bot, pressing the left mouse button (outside of the bot) and moving the mouse around the screen. When the bot is looking at you it will wink every now and then.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
In February I created a post where I told the Jamstack ’to grow up’. I stated that waiting more than a few seconds for a site to deploy is not acceptable, while that is still normal for most non-technical SSG users. Kyle Mathews (CTO of Gatsby) has acknowledged this recenty and solved it in Gatsby Cloud. Kyle says: “Site owners need one second publishes. Whether they’re previewing changes, publishing a typo fix for a news article from a CMS, or there’s real-time pricing or inventory...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Are you using Hugo (the static site generator)? Then there is a CMS that exceeds all your expectations. It’s a one-stop shop with everything your website needs: a CMS, hosting, form handling, statistics and more. This not only saves you time and costs, but also reduces the complexity of your setup. zero-config, so connect and go never wait again (<1 second deploys) image resizing in Hugo formbuilder in Hugo failover with dynamic DNS GDPR compliant form handling GDPR compliant captcha GDPR c...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I had to work on a clients Wordpress website and it was SLOOOOOWWWWW. You could get a fresh cup of coffee between page loads… well… almost. I asked this client why she would not use a cache plugin. ‘We tried’, she said… but all dynamic stuff broke when she turned it on. Obviously she did not know how to configure it correctly. Ouch… Sometimes you just want a website that works.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Jamstack is showing rapid growth these days. Much has been said about the benefits of the Jamstack (SEO, speed, security). However, having a statically generated site comes with at least one significant drawback: build time. Every update requires your static site generator to recreate all pages. A (single) change on a 100+ page website takes somewhere between 2 and 16 minutes on your average Jamstack platform. Waiting that long before your change goes live is almost unusable!| Blog articles on Usecue web development
CloudCannon made a list of questions a (stereotypical) client might ask about the Jamstack. I listed their questions and answers below. I wrote a comment on each question/answer. ‘Static sites’? Isn’t that the way the web used to work? It sounds like it’s not exactly, well… dynamic. CloudCannon: The difference between a static site and a dynamic site is a little technical, but worth understanding. With a dynamic site, the server gets the content from a database and builds the page f...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I have build almost 300 websites on the CloudCannon platform and CloudCannon featured Usecue on their website. They wrote a nice piece about me. You can read the text the full text below. Building quality solutions and transparency with clients Technical excellence, beautiful design, integrity. All of these are important for Joost van der Schee, owner and operator of Usecue B.V., to deliver amazing web solutions to clients, who can rest assured that speed and quality are a focus and not based...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I got an email from Kev Quirk. He pointed me at my missing RSS feed, which he apprently does frequently. I added it immediately. We exchanged a few emails and I got fascinated by his blog. Thanks to Kev Quirk, I: now have an RRS feed on my website am now part of the 512kb club know that 300 euro a year is reasonable for WP hosting got to know some great blogs and podcasts got inspired to write a ’things I use daily’ list (see below) am curious to learn more about Fosstadon had fun with hi...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Michelle Barker featured the website carbon calculator on CSS-Tricks today. She wrote a nice piece about the application of such a tool. Her suggestion to add it to the Google Lighthouse Score is a good one. Google claims to have a PUE of 1.1. Adding the ‘carbon score’ to Lighthouse is a great way to further green wash their data hungry business model. However, I agree with Michelle that adding a ‘carbon score’ could have a positive effect and is actually a good idea.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Websites get bigger every year. We can verify that by looking at the state of the web by the HTTP Archive. People like Maciej Cegłowski and Jeremy Keith are pushing to fight this. Average versus median An interesting thing is that the measurement changed from the average page weight to the median page weight somewhere around 2017, which shifted the perception enormously. Prior to 2016 people talked about the average page size exceeding 3MB, while we are currently talking about median page we...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I wrote about Netlify pricing when Netlify introduced analytics for 9 dollars a month per website, back in 2019. I compared it to the CloudCannon pricing and called Netlify ‘irrelevant’. A lot has changed since then. Netlify has added a ‘unlimited’ plan to their offerings at 99 dollars a month. This was a little higher than the ‘unlimited’ plan from CloudCannon at 75 dollars a month (both plan included unlimited websites and analytics).| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Wait!? I thought the Cloudflare’s CDN was good? Is it not responsible for fast loading times, server-side caching and local nodes, providing low response times? And is Cloudflare not the hero of the internet, saving us from DDOS attacks and securing our websites? I hate to tell you this… but no, Cloudflare is not that great. Slow First of all Cloudflare might slow down your website. Yup… not speed up, but slow down.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
The Stackless Way wants to give beginners a gradual path from simple HTML into more power without encountering frameworks or build tools as a barrier. It shares my conviction that there are no shortcuts and you need to master your sword. Good old HTML The Stackless Way uses standard HTML elements. Daniel Kehoe, who inspired me to write something about Stackless, proposes to use custom HTML elements that are enriched with javascript, but I am a purist: loading unknown code from a package manag...| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Anonymous has warned Elon Musk. Elon has been telling us that technology will save our planet, while he recently invested heavily in (and profitted from) the most polluting business on earth today: the bitcoin. That has infuriated quite a lot of people. Hypocracy like that (and at this scale) is exactly what baffles Greta Tunberg. I just watched her speak at TED and her words hit me like a hammer. ‘There is no hope’, she said.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Paul Kinlan sent me a video message when I joined WebDev Insights. As a Google employee working in the Chrome team, he asked: How can we make Chrome, web development and the web better? I took the time to answer his question and focussed on the ‘making the web better’ part. You can find my answer below. Hi Paul, Thank you for your warm welcome. You say you want to make the web better (twice).| Blog articles on Usecue web development
Scroll snap is a relative new feature in CSS, that recenty got pretty decent support. It was ‘good for nothing’, if you believed these folks in 2016. But three years later Nolan Lawsons carousel with scroll snap was received much better. But it was not Nolan, but the Google Scroll Survey that inspired me. The perfect use case for scroll snapping is a standard header carousel. I found Nolans work while doing research for building one.| Blog articles on Usecue web development
I’m a big fan of Japanese graphic design. The design of my website is (not coincidentally) a reference to this style: the website is minimalist, geometric and contains natural elements (the leaves). My love for Japan also shows in my project Zen garden websites. In this project I create existing websites with only one HTML file and one CSS file. I follow the Japanese pursuit of ‘harmonious simplicity’. These websites do not require a web server and still follow the DRY principle.| Usecue web development
Google launched its ‘Learn Performance’ course. The course is designed for those new to web performance. It covers key web performance concepts and techniques for improving performance. At least… that is what the label says. Not SEO related? It tells you that website performance is about retaining users, improving conversions and improving the overall user experience. The relationship between performance and business outcomes is clear. It is remarkable, and typical for Google, to not sa...| Usecue web development
I came across a website called Hugo Blox and it immediately reminded me of my Hugobricks concept. Soon I realized I had seen this website before… but then with the name ‘Wowchemy’. Now let me explain why Hugo Blox is a great idea, but with sub-optimal execution. Stackable content blocks make it easy for editors to customize their website. This is a very powerful concept and because these websites are modular, they can be a great fit for many different people.| Usecue web development
Static site generators took off in the year 2008 with Jekyll and Tom Preston-Werner. He simplified website data, by storing it in flat files. These files could then be managed by Git, meaning full ownership and control over all changes. You probably expect me to tell you that now, 15 years later, it is time to move on… but I will do exactly the opposite: NOW is the time to adopt static site generation.| Usecue web development
I build a lot of Hugo websites. Currently we are (re)building 8 different websites. If you look at the BuiltWith list for Hugo websites from our region in the Netherlands, you will find 2 websites that we have built: aadprins.nl and search.nl. It is funny to see your own websites in website lists. Especially the Aad Prins project, because it is based on our recently launched open-source Hugo theme called ‘Hugobricks’.| Usecue web development
Google will soon shame slow websites. A good reason to take a good look at your Google Lighthouse score right now. You might feel that it is nearly impossible to get to a perfect 100% score. You minified your Javascript, properly scaled your images and even combined some requests, but that did not help nearly enough. The problem is: you might be looking at it from the wrong angle. I build 100% scoring websites on a daily basis, so obviously it is very well possible to get a perfect score on a...| Usecue web development
In 2008 Google promised us websites that would load as quick as shooting a potato through a slicer with explosives. In other words, in one or two tenths of a second, or as I like to call it: ‘instantly’. Video of Chrome loading instantly and beating the potato gun. Their campaign revolved around the introduction of v8, a new Javascript engine. This turned out to be a game changer and made Chrome significantly faster than any other browser at the time. The campaign was a big hit and Chrome...| Usecue web development
Good websites load instantly. Almost everybody who wants a faster loading website uses a CDN (Content Delivery Network). This is a network of servers, distrubuted around the world, where every websites is available on every server. What does a CDN do? A CDN does two things: it caches your files/requests (make them static and keep them in memory) and it serves them from a server near your geographical location. This should normally save time.| Usecue web development
As a heavy user of Jamstack CMS systems (and the author of a Hugo CMS) I am very interested in everything that is going on in this scene. Netlify CMS (an open-source project by Netlify), has been deemed ‘dead’ for a while. Issues were no longer resolved and no new versions were published… untill now. Netlify CMS has been ‘acquired’ by PM, a marketing agency with a techhub. On their website (PM Techhub) I found the following:| Usecue web development
Facebook disabled my web app (profile page images) and sent me the following message: When reviewing your app, we weren’t able to find any Facebook integration or verify the permission use case that you provided during App Review, but don’t panic - we just need the following information from you: Your app’s use case for the integration, such as Facebook Login, Invite Friends, Like, Share buttons. Detailed instructions on where we can find and verify the integration/permissions in your app.| Usecue web development
Sometimes people ask me to deploy their websites to a free hosting platform, like Cloudflare Pages, Github Pages, Netlify or Vercel. Their reasoning is often that these platforms can handle endless amounts of requests and that they are cheaper to use. But is this really true? Not immune to the Digg effect The Digg effect is the effect that a spike in traffic brings a website down. You would think that most of these (free) big static hosting platforms are immune to the Digg effect, because the...| Usecue web development
Recently CloudCannon introduced Hugo shortcodes. Shortcodes were already supported, but CloudCannon made them even more accessible to content editors by adding some buttons in the editor. Buttons for shortcodes is a good idea, because it guides editors on how to write these shortcodes. However, I was less enthousiastic about the implementation CloudCannon chose. They clearly copied the shortcode implementation from Gutenberg (Wordpress), which makes it feel clunky. They also require you to co...| Usecue web development
The following text is a Twitter thread from Thomas Fuchs. Every web developer should have read this. He posted it in November 2017 and it becomes more valuable every year. Chris Ferdinandy even wrote a whole book about it. Thomas ended the thread with the title of this post: ‘Long live the lean web’. It’s a weird dichotomy: the more capable underlying web tech gets (CSS features, HTML canvas, etc.) the more larger and more complex frameworks on top of it become.| Usecue web development
In the beginning Jamstack was fun. The main SSG was Jekyll, which was simple and open-source. It was not only free to use, but also free to host (on Github). Jamstack websites were blazing fast and scored high in Google Lighthouse. There were plenty of free CMS options to choose from. The Jamstack looked very promising! But times have changed… Jekyll is dead Sure… you can still use Jekyll. But Jekyll lost its most important developer and Github decided to freeze their Jekyll version.| Usecue web development
Those who know me, know I care about DX just as much as UX. I will not use a feature that requires prefixes, polyfills or other wizardry. I can wait for a feature to land in your browser. The question I asked myself today (from this perspective) was: Has WebP landed yet? Although it is supported in almost any browser, it is not fully supported in Safari on macOS. Safari supports WebP, but it is not working on macOS versions below Big Sur (macOS 11).| Usecue web development
There are a lot of misconceptions about website performance. I run into them on a daily basis. This time I found an article on the awwwards website about performance with a lot of misconceptions. According to this article your design should be minimalistic. However, design and performance are barely related at all. I build perfectly scoring webpages on a daily basis without putting ANY restraint on the designers involved. This (strong) relation between design and performance is a misconception.| Usecue web development
In november I wrote a negative comment under a Youtube video from the Chrome team. I did not agree with its content. I felt like we were being manipulated by the way things were presented. I was happy to find that I was not alone. A lot of people found the video bad and clicked the ’thumbs down’ button. The dislike counter was just as high as the ‘thumbs up’ counter.| Usecue web development
This is the title of an article on the web.dev blog I came across. It is written by Patrick Kettner. The fact that this article is published on web.dev angers/annoys me. Let me explain why. Speed and conversion are highly correlated. This is generally known. However, Patricks suggestion that the amount of images and conversion are correlated comes out of thin air. Yes, speed is important, but big images are not the main culprits.| Usecue web development
Halfway my study, around the year 2002, I was part of the website committee of the student association of Industrial Design (in Delft). At the time, we were having a discussion about a new concept for the main website of our student association. An extreme idea The idea was to make all content on the website judgeable/rateable. We had taken this idea from a controversial and popular website, called: ‘Rate my face’.| Usecue web development
As far as I know there is only one other business that is also good at getting a perfect Lighthouse Score: Delete Agency. At the beginning of 2018 they challenged themselves to get a 100% score on their own website, but without changing how the site looked or functioned… and they succeeded! Optimizing everything They optimized their website in every way possible. They created the following checklist: use small Javascript files tree shaking code splitting use ES2015 modules preload and prefe...| Usecue web development
“Jamstack has revolutionized the way we think about building for the web by providing a simpler developer experience, better performance, lower cost and greater scalability”, acccording to Jamstack.wtf. Most of us already know these claims. However, the HTTP Almanac has released its yearly analysis of the state of the web, which is a great chance to verify them. But, first some disclaimers on the research. There are (only) 8,198,531 websites in the dataset.| Usecue web development
At the end of 2021 CSS tricks Chris Coyier asked web builders he admires: ‘What is one thing people can do to make their website better?’ I have highlighted two answers below. “Just take a minute to consider the implications of that: any third-party script on your site is allowing someone else to execute code on your web pages. That’s astonishingly unsafe.” I like this one from Jeremy Keith. He argues that removing third party scripts is hard, but my feeling is quite the opposite.| Usecue web development
Paul Irish did a nice thing. He created a lighter Youtube embed. His solution does no longer slow your website down, like normal Youtube embeds do. There is only one downside: it loads content from Youtube without consent, while Youtube (Google) is a company that is known for tracking and profiling. This is not very privacy friendly. The solution is to host the poster yourself and link it to Youtube. When you load the Hugo Lightbox the link will automatically get a class ’lightbox-youtube...| Usecue web development
Netlify ran the 2021 developers survey and received over 7,000 responses, more than twice as many as last year. The community seems to have grown, adding not only experienced developers, but also becoming the first stop for those just breaking into the industry. Jamstack seems to be a rising technology, especially among students. You can review the methodology document for a detailed breakdown of the demographics and accuracy of the survey sample and results.| Usecue web development
I started building Jamstack websites in 2015. In the past 7 years I never experienced any downtime. I have built 250 websites with Jekyll on CloudCannon. The speed of the websites and the CMS was quite good, especially when you compare it to WordPress on shared hosting. I also had relatively little maintenance work on my websites and not a single one got hacked and/or got infected with malware. “Don’t change a winning team”, is what they say.| Usecue web development
I posted a critical comment under this Keynote video of the Chrome Dev Summit. I got deleted immediately by the Google team, which made me write this post. But first some context. We are talking about this video. Did you watch it? Below you will find a transcript of the parts that I commented on. 3:28 Barb: Thank you, Ben. We believe it’s important for people to be in control of their information, including their online activity.| Usecue web development