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Article Prospect Experience Design Designing Newfangled’s Home Page Slides by Justin Kerr on October 15, 2012 You've probably seen the rotating slide show that sits atop our home page. The slides promote upcoming events, book releases and new services. I've designed most of the slides, with some art direction and feedback from Chris Butler (who's created a few of the slides as well). Since our website will be undergoing a redesign soon, I thought it would be a good time for a retrospective of previous slides as well as a peek at how they're designed... Read Now About
Article Modern Marketing Content Has a Big, Complex Job to Do by Tema Flanagan on October 10, 2012 Much of the angst within agencies around writing web copy, blog posts, and newsletters stems from the fact that many of us aren't yet sure what these content types ought to achieve, especially in the context of the modern marketing website. Unlike traditional print writing or even marketing copy, online marketing content has a big, complex job to do. It has to catch the attention of both search engines and human readers, earn readers’ sustained interest, offer real value and, most importantly, it has to inspire some percentage of those readers to take a specific action that's intentionally built into or around the content itself. This is a lot to ask of our written words, and it takes time, forethought, and a good deal of skill to get it right. The good news is that, with a little guidance and lots of practice, most anyone can master it. Read Now About
Article Usability Testing for Mobile Devices by Christopher Butler on October 9, 2012 It's easy to do usability testing on desktop machines. Laptops with built-in microphones and webcams partnered with screen-recording software make it simple to capture the experience of using a website — from the obvious stuff, like the movements, scrolling, and clicks of a volunteer's mouse, to the subtler stuff of facial expressions and voices. But what about testing user experience on a mobile device? This is a challenge that has resulted in some interesting innovations... 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 Get started with metadata, and be part of the semantic web. published on October 4, 2012 In order to take advantage of Web 3.0 technologies like Google's Knowledge Graph, you need to make your content semantic, and that means metadata. This is a tour of schema.org, and other metadata initiatives for the web. Also discussed is microdata and RDFa encoding standards... Read Now About
Article The Content Commitment published on October 2, 2012 Here I am going to indulge myself, and with language fit for Tarzan, Frankenstein or Tonto, get right to the bottom line about content strategy: "You, write..." Read Now About
Article How to Use Google Analytics by Christopher Butler on September 25, 2012 Have you been avoiding learning how to use Google Analytics because you assume that measurement and analysis is someone else's job? Have the words, "I'm not really a data person," or "I'm not an analyst" left your mouth recently? Well, this month, Chris Butler will share with you a simple, three-step approach to Google Analytics that has been designed to answer five specific questions you should be asking about your website... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Web 3.0? Made with Metadata. published on September 21, 2012 Metadata is useful for more than just SEO, it's also an integral part of where the web is quickly going. The Semantic Web is about linking knowledge, rather than just linking web pages, and using some simple metadata, it's fairly simple to plug into these emerging technologies... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Evolution of the Mood Board by Justin Kerr on September 21, 2012 Mood boards are a key element in the design phase of our web development process and the format for these boards has evolved over the last three years. In this post, I outline some of the key changes and the thinking behind them. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Don’t Be So Linear… Learn how to wrangle! by Christopher Butler on September 18, 2012 In Shaping Things, Bruce Sterling's manifesto for design in a post-gizmo society, the author points out that technologies "do not abolish one another in clean or comprehensive ways." If they did, the designer's job would be far easier. Instead, we must design for the spaces between the old and the new—a challenge that Sterling calls "wrangling"... Read Now About