Happy December! This hasn’t been the year any of us expected, but I hope you’re well and healthy and looking forward to 2021 as I am. We are closing out All About…Web for the year with a couple blogs and articles with best practices for web projects and content strategy, along with a Drupal upgrade announcement, and some useful web tools.
Stay safe over the holiday season and I look forward to working together closely in the new year.
– Erin Rickard, Digital Services Manager
BLOG: 6 Web Development Pitfalls to Avoid
In make-believe land, technology projects come in under-budget, ahead of schedule, and without any unforeseen issues. Let’s be honest here…in the real world, tech projects can be challenging. In this blog, Fíonta developer Lisa Godare covers six ways you can inadvertently be putting the health of your website at risk, along with simple fixes or strategies to avoid doing so in the future.
DRUPAL UPDATE: Drupal 9.1.0 is Available
This minor release provides new improvements and functionality without breaking backward compatibility (BC) for public APIs and is now available for use on production (live) sites. The update includes a new beta experimental frontend theme called Olivero which will, in the future, replace the default Bartik theme. Drupal 9.1 is now fully compatible with Composer 2 – let us know if you’d like information about upgrading from 1.0. and PHP 8 is also supported in Drupal 9.1. A nice touch is the addition of “lazy-load” of images (with known dimensions) which means browsers will only load them at the time when the user reaches them on the page, i.e. not load images below the fold (or scroll) until the user scrolls down to that section. This results in an overall fast page load and improved user experience.
The full release notes are available on the Drupal website if you’d like to dig deeper.
EVENT: DrupalCon Europe (Virtual thanks to COVID)
DrupalCon Europe, December 8-11, is fully digital this year and is an excellent resource for Drupal community members of all experience and interest levels. There are five tracks (Agency & Business, Clients & Industry Experiences, Makers & Builders, Open Web & Community, and Users & Editors) and almost 150 sessions over four days along with workshops and Birds of a Feather gatherings. Take advantage of this virtual opportunity to build your Drupal community and maybe next year you can get your boss to send you to Europe! Registration is open and the cost is 200 euro (around $300USD).
ARTICLE: 3 Habits of Associations That Are Thriving in the Digital Age
From Association Success, this article offers three habits to adopt to ensure that your content stands out to members. With access to ungated / free content more available than ever, the onus is on the content team to make sure they’re providing value with every published blog, resource, webinar, etc.
TOOL: What’s That Cool Font?
This is a handy tool that scans a site and displays all of its font styles. If you’re a technical user, you’ll have the know-how to inspect the CSS. This tool is for designers or marketers who don’t care to go searching under the hood. Think of it like a reverse style guide for sites who are killing the font game!
TOOL: New Googlebots Crawl Stats
The new Crawl stats report will help you understand how Googlebot crawls your site over time which can help your web admins detect whether Google has encountered problems when crawling your site. Why does this matter? If Google can’t read new content, it can’t index it and add it to its search results. Spot issues early in Crawl Stats rather than weeks or months down the road when you’re wondering why your organic search isn’t performing as well as expected.
TOOL: Yoast SEO Enhanced Slack Link Sharing
Yoast Premium has added a neat element to link shares in Slack – when you paste a link into a Slack chat, Yoast will include information about the author of the article and an estimated reading time. This extra information gives the reader greater context and hopefully incentivizes them to click through to your website.