Article Content Strategy After Content Marketing by Christopher Butler on August 15, 2013 Today I joined Blair Enns as a guest for a Win Without Pitching webcast on the future of content marketing. I spoke for a little over half an hour, which I've transcribed below and made nice for reading. (Long reading, I should say. This beast is almost 6,000 words, which should take you about 25 minutes to read. Pour some coffee. Find a nice chair.) Afterward, Blair and I chatted and took questions for a bit, which is not included below. I did include some thoughts on that portion at the end of the transcription... Read Now About
Article Content Strategy Craft by Christopher Butler on June 28, 2013 At some point today, take a few minutes to watch one of the short (3 min max) videos in this collection. These shorts reminded me of how critical a sense of craft is, even to us in the digital world. Craft remains relevant, even if what we make only exists on a screen. It's in how we simplify our code, how we word an email, how we share a new idea with a client, or even in how we respond with care when things don't go well... Read Now About
Article Content Strategy Responsive Design on the Ground by Christopher Butler on June 21, 2013 Last month I spoke at the UCDA Design Summit — called The Empowered Designer — in Asheville, NC. I did two sessions, both on responsive design. Below is the second part, in which I focused on some of the nitty gritty, implementation-oriented issues with responsive design. In part 1, I covered responsive from a more strategic, high-level perspective... Read Now About
Article Content Strategy Rethinking the Case Study by Christopher Butler on June 12, 2013 Over the past year, we've been carefully studying the stages of the buying cycle, getting better acquainted with our audience, and thinking deeply about how they inform our content strategy. As a result, we've emerged at the other side with the strong opinion that the case study is uniquely suited to speak powerfully to the most discerning prospects' concerns, and should be among the most important content we create. And yet, it's often the most ignored. Chris Butler thinks it's time we changed that, and in this article, offers a plan you can put in place today to write great, sales-focused case studies... Read Now About
Article Content Strategy Cooking Up a Content Strategy: Recipe-Writing Instructions by Tema Flanagan on February 12, 2013 I sometimes moonlight as a food writer, and it recently occurred to me (d’oh!) that formulating a really good content strategy is a lot like cooking or, more precisely, like developing a recipe. In both cases, you begin with a goal and a bit of educated guesswork, embark on a process of careful planning and trial and error, documenting and tweaking as you go, and come away with a tasty reward — as well as a blueprint for future success. Read Now About
Article Content Strategy Why You Should Optimize Your Site for Retina Displays by Justin Kerr on December 10, 2012 You may have heard of Apple's Retina display, featured in several of their most recent products such as the iPhone 5 (and 4s), 3rd generation iPad and the latest MacBook Pro laptops. And you may be thinking, "Yeah, that's great. But I don't even use a Mac so what does this have to do with me?" Glad you asked. Retina, Apple's branded term for high density displays, will become the norm within a few years and those of us who develop for the web would be wise to address this change now rather than play catch-up later. Read Now About
Article Content Strategy Adaptive Production by Christopher Butler on October 5, 2012 For the better part of the last decade, we've followed the same process for virtually every website we've built. As depicted by this Gannt chart, it all looks pretty neat and tidy, doesn't it? The problem is that reality isn't neat and tidy. Far from it. Reality is messy — stretchy, bendy, overlappy, and running-out-of-timey. You get the idea. Even so, this process worked well for us for so long, that it took running into some serious problems too many times in a row to realize that the dissonance between our neat and tidy starting place and the messy reality of a normal project demanded that we change things up. So after a long run of doing things the way we've always done them, we decided to roll up our sleeves and remap our process... Read Now About
Article Content Strategy What Should A CMS Do? by Mark O’Brien on August 30, 2012 At Newfangled, we've been building sites exclusively on CMS platforms since 2000, so we've had an up-close view of the comings and going of the CMS market for just about as long as it's existed. In some way, content management is unrecognizable compared to what it was in 2000, in other ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same. This month, Mark O'Brien pushes to redefine CMS, from content management system to conversion management system... Read Now About
Article Content Strategy Google Analytics in 15 Minutes Per Week by Mark O’Brien on July 26, 2012 Consider that you take the bait and install Google Analytics, and you set up one goal for each call to action on your site. Now what? Read Now About
Article Content Strategy Website Design Style Guide by Justin Kerr on July 26, 2012 Last year, I produced a short tutorial video on how to prepare Photoshop (PSD) files for web production. It's a quick overview of the process I use to properly set up and organize template files so that Newfangled's developers can use them to apply the visual design to the site architecture. One of the template types mentioned in the video is a style guide; a very useful "cheat sheet" containing text styles, colors, notations and key design elements that comprise the majority of a site's design. Since posting the video, I've recevied requests to provide an example file that our agency partners (or anyone) could download and use as a reference for creating their own style guide. Read Now About