Best design and web development posts from April 2025

April 29th, 2025
News

Our monthly roundup returns stay ahead in design and web development with this months highlights from smarter blog strategies and coding agents in VS Code to fresh CSS tricks and practical dev insights. Dive in and get inspired!

Design and Web development tutorials

How To Create a Blog Content Strategy That Works (In-Depth Guide)

This article discusses blog content strategy: Define your goals, understand your audience, analyze the competition, conduct a content audit, identify target keywords, and create an editorial calendar. Explore ways to write and promote content to drive engagement and growth!

Agent mode: available to all users and supports MCP

Agent mode is rolling out to all VS Code users! The agent acts as an autonomous pair programmer that performs multi-step coding tasks at your command, such as analyzing your codebase, proposing file edits, and running terminal commands. It responds to compile and lint errors, monitors terminal output, and auto-corrects in a loop until the task is completed. The agent can also use contributed tools, allowing it to interact with external MCP servers or VS Code extensions to perform a wide variety of tasks.

The blissful zen of a good side project

Yesterday, like just about every other evening, my wife and I put our kid to bed, and sat down on the couch together. But for the first time in months, I picked up my laptop instead of my Switch.

Astro 5.7

Astro 5.7 has a basketload of treats, including stable Sessions and SVG components and a new Experimental Fonts API.

Using currentColor in 2025

Gotta give props to currentColor. It’s a keyword in CSS that is the OG variable. It wasn’t always there, but it was relatively usable in browsers by, say, 2010.

How to write error messages that actually help users rather than frustrate them

One of the most consistently neglected parts of today’s user experiences is our handling of errors. We’re so busy designing the happy paths through our products that we often forget to give the same care and attention to the times when things will go wrong.

4 practical lessons from dealing with feature creep

A JavaScript developer focused on building human-centric products with HTML, CSS, React, Node.js, and MongoDB.

Background Image Opacity in CSS

Feature creep is one of the most common and serious issues in product development. It tends to begin with something small like an extra button here, or a small setting option there, and then suddenly you find that your product has become complicated and difficult to maintain.

Default styles for h1 elements are changing

Browsers are starting to roll out changes in default UA styles for nested section headings. Developers should check that their sites don’t rely on UA styles for certain cases to avoid unexpected results and failing Lighthouse checks. In this post, we’ll have a look at what the incoming changes are, how to identify if it’s an issue on your pages, and some hints for conformant and better-structured websites.