Off-Site Services is an award-winning web development and consulting firm providing strategic services to our partners

Squarespace, along with Wix, Simplesite, and many others, is a good way to get your online presence up and running.  All of these services are easy to use, with plenty of templates that make creating visually appealling site easy even for non-technical amongst us.  They also share the same limitations when your website needs to evolve past its original scope and functionality.

Here's our pick of WP plugins, recommended for use in 2018

Caldera Form is a free and powerful plugin that creates responsive forms with a simple drag and drop editor that makes it easy to create forms for WordPress.  The plug-in  includes conditional logic, anti-spam, notification emails, and database entry tracking

Same as anyone remotely involved with IT, I get bombarded with unending streams of daily emails, calls, and feeds promising superior offshoring, nearshoring and all other kinds of remote technical help for fraction of what it should cost.  Being a polite person, I occasionally respond to these sales pitches and over the years have come to gauge fairly well the background of these companies just from the way their sales pitch is crafted.

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is slated to become a legal requirement for websites selling goods or services directly to the public starting in 2018.  There are already plenty of good resources for identifying code-based compliance, but image compliance is a trickier matter.  As a quick solution, we put together a Color Check tool that in two clicks allows you to select foreground and background colors and performs contrast validation on selected colors in accordance with ADA requirements.

Introduction

User experience testing is a crucial element of web quality assurance.   One UX testing solution we use internally is a Selenium IDE plugin for Firefox, which allows you to record interactions with multiple elements and multiple web pages, organize recorded tests into sets (suites) and save them for future use.  Below is a screenshot showing Selenium IDE popup that appears in Firefox after plugin is installed and activated, with test cases organized on the left, playback and recording controls on the top, actions being recorded in the main content area on the left and

— With sufficient resources in place, we can now shorten the "baby" timeline to 1 month!

If you get swamped with tasks, let your slacker colleagues see your workload and take up some of the burden.  Whether they’ll do it is another matter entirely.

Tip of the hat to Bryan Kuester for suggesting this feature.

The answer to question "What is better, Bootstrap or Foundation" is that it depends. Here are a few pointers to make this decision a little easier to make.
 

A colleague recently brought to my attention an article which stated in rather axiomatic fashion that website design is dead, period.  As this would obviously concern many a practicing web designer with existentialist questions - if website design has indeed expired, well then, have I? Are my current projects being shaped by forces beyond the grave? - I figured it might be beneficial to explore the question in depth and offer constructive criticism instead of outright dismissal (spoiler alert: you’re not dead).