Dev Blog

One of the concerns I often hear about accessibility is that it’s hard to implement and expensive. It’s true that retrofitting accessibility requirements on an existing website can be expensive. But that’s because it’s too late. Plan accessibility from the start and ensure that it’s embedded in the culture of your organization. This will make …

Mid February, we announced our cooperation with the Dutch web agency MaxServ. Together we’ve been working on two new versions of Yoast SEO: Yoast SEO for TYPO3 and Yoast SEO for Magento 2. After an intense period of developing and testing we tagged our first stable version of Yoast SEO for TYPO3 last week. Such …

So, you hear about this neat little library called Redux. A lot of people in the React community use it, so you decide to check it out. As you start reading the README, you discover that it probably wouldn’t be much use to you. But you realize something else: it’s only 2kB. What is this …

This is the story of a little switch toggle, a custom HTML control we’ve recently implemented here at Yoast for our projects. Native HTML controls are always preferable, but we try to experiment and have a good balance between accessibility and good design. Wondering what custom controls are? Curious to see how modern design and …

People call me an accessibility expert, but I don’t see myself as an expert. I do know quite a few things about HTML5, WAI-ARIA, browsers, and screen readers. I live in a small country, which is well known for its arts, food, and fashion. However, it is not famous for its information technology industry. So …

While the original intended use of HTML tables was tabular data, tables are also used as aids for page layout. This was especially true some years ago when browsers hardly supported CSS. Tables were necessary to overcome limitations in visual presentation. Today, there is much more flexibility in controlling page layout using CSS. Does it …

I think it is important to keep learning new things. To encourage myself to keep doing that, I have two different ways to learn new things. On the one hand, I follow people that consistently produce quality content which I can learn from. On the other hand, I explore other interests to meet new people …

In the last couple years, we’ve seen an increased adoption of JavaScript libraries and frameworks to build web applications. At Yoast, some important parts of our applications, such as our Yoast SEO plugin, have already moved to JavaScript. In the future, we’ll build most of our interfaces using React components. This shift to JavaScript is …

Today, we are releasing a new Premium feature for doing internal linking suggestions. Last week, I wrote a post on the SEO blog explaining how we can do this fast and without using up a lot of resources on the server side. Building this would not have been possible without much of the work we …

On Friday, Irene and I visited the Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop to learn more about information retrieval and to meet the Dutch/Belgian Information Retrieval community. Before going to this conference, I didn’t know what Information Retrieval was. Now I know what it comprises and how it relates to software development at Yoast. In our recently released …