A Small Team’s Big Spring Clean: Navigation, Workshops, and Performance
The entire Smashing Family is a compact team of 15 people, and they've been working remotely for nearly a decade. While that setup usually means a smooth routine, the last few months have been intense. The crew has been running online workshops, overhauling the site's taxonomy, refactoring components, and tightening performance and accessibility. More subtle UX changes are on the way, but here’s a look at what’s already shipped.
Live, Multi-Session Workshops
The online workshop program has now run 40 sessions with 2,600 attendees. The team has used that experience to refine their format. These aren't pre-recorded talks; they are live, spanning multiple days across weeks, split into 2.5-hour sessions. Every workshop includes video recordings, slides, and a dedicated Q&A period. A Smashing Membership can save you up to 25% on registration.
The upcoming schedule covers front-end and design, from performance to interface patterns:
April–May
- Web Performance Masterclass (Dev) with Harry Roberts. Apr 20 – May 5.
- Smart Interface Design Patterns (UX) with Vitaly Friedman. Apr 22 – May 6.
- Make Design Systems People Want to Use (Workflow) with Dan Mall. May 3–11.
- Psychology For UX and Product Design (UX) with Joe Leech. May 6–14.
- The React Performance Masterclass (Dev) with Ivan Akulov. May 20 – June 4.
- Dynamic CSS Masterclass (Dev) with Lea Verou. May 25 – June 8.
June–July
- New Adventures in Front-End, 2021 (Dev) with Vitaly Friedman. Jun 9–23.
- Successful Design Systems (Dev Workflow) with Brad Frost. June 29 – July 13.
- Level-Up With Modern CSS (Dev) with Stephanie Eckles. July 8–22.
- Designing Websites That Convert (UX) with Paul Boag. July 22–30.
A Manually Curated Navigation
With over 15 years of articles on the site, finding the right one has become a challenge. To fix that, the team has spent weeks manually sorting through 3,500 articles, refining and standardizing the underlying taxonomy.
It was a slow, painstaking process, but the result is a new navigation that surfaces important options prominently across the entire site. The hope is that the updated menu—visible at the top of the page—makes browsing significantly more intuitive.
