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Article My Four Kids by Mark O’Brien on February 27, 2014 Right now, I'm supposed to be on a plane to Hawaii, where I'll be staying at a spectacular resort. I'm supposed to speak to a group of 40 agencies who are part of the Magnet Agency Network, a group I've wanted to speak to for years. I'm one of only two speakers; the other is a Senior Editor at Wired. My expenses are covered, I'm getting paid well in addition, and I'm willing to bet that this is going to have a considerable impact on Newfangled's business over the course of the next three years. This sounds like a dream scenario, and two weeks ago it was. Now, though, I've got a 10-week-old baby in the hospital who's been there for eight days and counting. What to do? The answer may seem obvious — family first — but as a business owner, it's not always quite so cut and dried. Read Now About
Article How We Increased Content Production by 85% Last Quarter — And Got More Efficient, Too by Tema Flanagan on February 27, 2014 Newfangled produces a lot of content of each month. I mean, really — a lot. That’s been the case for a long time, but we’ve recently experienced a pretty significant jump in output. Let me quantify that a little more concretely. Last month (January 2014), we published a whopping 20,000 words of content comprised of one newsletter, one case study, and ten blog posts. How on earth does a company of our size (there are about twenty of us on staff), with exactly zero full-time, dedicated writers manage to produce that much content? Well, we recently made some pretty significant changes in how we manage our content strategy. The payoff has been increased output and a more sustainable model. Here's what we've done to increase production by 85% and get more efficient, too... Read Now About
Article Content Strategy What is an API, and What Do You Need To Know About Them? published on February 26, 2014 Every site we build begins with the NewfangledCMS. This sophisticated core of code is customized to meet each client’s specific needs, and it handles the vast majority of each website’s function. But most every site we build also includes at least one or two integrations with other software products or services that complement or augment the functionality found in the CMS. We connect the CMS with these third-party systems using Application Programming Interfaces, also called APIs. This article explains what an API is and also talks about what the developer needs in order to successfully complete an API integration. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design You Can Design a Better Store than Amazon by Christopher Butler on February 24, 2014 Amazon already has your customer in their store. Your customer is already browsing their aisles. Amazon will beat you, not because they have a better store than you, but because they have a bigger store than you. They sell enough things to already have your customer’s attention. It doesn’t matter if they came in to buy socks, if they’re at all likely to buy your thing, Amazon will have an easier time selling it to them because they are already there. So what do we do? Give up? Not just yet... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Calls to Action and Usability: How to Make CTAs That Work published on February 19, 2014 Having strong calls-to-action that are easy to notice, understand, and fill out is absolutely crucial for your site's conversion rate. However, don't fall into some common usability traps! Here's a simple usability guide to creating compelling, clear, concise CTAs. Read Now About
Article Fixing Bugs and the “Five Whys” of the Toyota Production System by Dave Mello on February 17, 2014 Tracking down and fixing bugs is hard. A non-developer might assume the opposite — if there’s an issue that the client/end user sees, the developer just needs to “go in and fix it.” The reality, though, is that the process of isolating the actual issue that needs correcting can often be rather winding — full of dead ends and false starts. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design How to Test a Website in Ten Seconds by Christopher Butler on February 11, 2014 A few weeks ago I wrote up a quick explanation of how to test a website in ten minutes. Quick and easy. But did you know that you can test a web page in ten seconds? Believe it. I started doing this after I read a page abandonment study by Jakob Nielsen, and have put together a method you can use right now... Read Now About
Article Email Marketing Why Marketing Automation Programs Fail, Part 2: Training and Guidance published on February 10, 2014 As a follow-up post to last week's look at why marketing automation implementations can fail, I wanted to highlight another common recipe for failure - having great robust marketing automation tools, but not knowing how to use them and not having the proper training and guidance to use the effectively. Read Now About
Article Casual Fridays: Content Marketing …since Always by Christopher Butler on February 7, 2014 Join us this week as we discuss the validity of content marketing. Will it live forever? Is it already dead? Find out here. Read Now About
Article How We Built the Merge Records Website to Handle All Those Digital Music Files published on February 5, 2014 Merge Records, an independent record label in Durham, NC, is the home of critically acclaimed and popular artists like Arcade Fire, Spoon, the Magnetic Fields, Neutral Milk Hotel, and many more. Theirs is also one of our latest website builds — one that presented a few interesting development challenges. While we’ve written at length about the overall Merge site build elsewhere, we thought it would be helpful to look specifically and in greater detail at the development side of what was a particularly complex project. Read Now About