Jack Dillard

Picking a back-end language is one of the most consequential decisions you will make when starting a new web project. The wrong choice can slow down development, inflate hosting bills, and create maintenance headaches for years. The right one accelerates delivery and keeps your team productive. In this guide, we walk you through how to […]

If you’re a freelancer, a solo designer, or part of a small in-house team, you already know the pain: your client or manager wants proof that the design works, but the budget for a full-blown research platform is nowhere to be found. The good news? You don’t need a $25,000 annual subscription to gather meaningful

Most website style guides fail for the same reason: they try to document everything and end up documenting nothing useful. Designers ignore them, developers bypass them, and content writers keep asking the same questions in Slack. If you want to know how to create a style guide for a website that people actually open on

Running a small business website in 2026 means juggling design, content, marketing, and (often forgotten) security. Yet most websites that get hacked aren’t targeted because they’re valuable. They’re targeted because they’re easy. Bots scan the web 24/7 looking for low-hanging fruit, and small business sites are often exactly that. In this guide, we break down

If your mobile conversion rate is stuck while desktop hums along, your checkout flow is almost certainly the bottleneck. Baymard Institute pegs the average mobile cart abandonment rate at around 85%, and most of that loss happens between “Add to Cart” and “Place Order.” The good news: small UX changes deliver outsized returns. This guide

If you are part of a small product or design team, you have probably felt the pain: buttons that look slightly different on every screen, six shades of “brand blue”, and engineers rebuilding the same card component for the third time. The fix is a design system, but most guides assume you have a dedicated

If you run a Shopify store, you’ve probably opened PageSpeed Insights, seen a sea of red, and wondered if passing Core Web Vitals is even possible on the platform. The short answer: yes, it is, but most generic advice (“compress your images!”) only gets you halfway there. This guide is a practical walkthrough built for

When you land on a website and instantly know where to look first, that is not luck. That is visual hierarchy in web design doing its job. It is the invisible system designers use to control the order in which your eyes scan a page, and it is one of the most important skills any

Building a freelance web design portfolio is the single most important step between calling yourself a designer and actually getting paid like one. The problem? Most new freelancers fill their portfolio with random mockups, hope for the best, and then wonder why their inbox stays empty. This guide is different. It is a practical, 2026-ready

If you build WordPress sites for clients, working directly on a production server is a recipe for late-night panic calls. A local WordPress development environment lets you design, test plugins, debug themes, and break things on purpose without ever touching the live site. In this guide, we’ll walk through setting up Local by Flywheel (now