Article Start Creating Content for People, Not Robots by Christopher Butler on November 3, 2009 This month's newsletter is finally out. I waited until today to publish it because I discovered last year that publishing a newsletter a day or two before Halloween resulted in the lowest readership I'd seen in a long time (see the tracking data for yourself). The newsletter's title is Who Are You Speaking To? How does that relate to robots? The gist of it is that we often focus so much on search engine optimization that we end up creating our content more for robots than for people. Then we wonder why our site isn't delivering any return on the investment of time and resources we sink in. Head over and read it in full > Read Now About
Article Who Are You Speaking To? by Christopher Butler on October 31, 2009 Most often when we fail to achieve the results we are after, it is due not to inadequate effort, but to doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. We tend to set goals far more easily than we determine how to actually achieve them. And yet, when we don't reach our objectives, we are confounded as to why. This truth is at the core of why many companies (including Newfangled) struggle with maintaining a web content strategy: We know the results we're after, but we don't go about achieving them in the right way. We know that our goal is to build our businesses, so we must shift our focus to online engagement. But we are often reticent to let the chaos of constant and ubiquitous content remain the status quo and search engine optimization the only means to that goal. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. So we do, creating plenty of meaningless content and burning out in the process. Read Now About
Article Building Great Websites–and Keeping them that Way by Mark O’Brien on October 29, 2009 Our journey from consultants to implementors and back to consultants again. Newfangled is a very active place; things are always growing, changing, and being refined. Of all the new things going on, I am most excited about our new support model. Here's why. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Prototype to Site: Brahmin.com’s Main Nav published on October 28, 2009 Last time I wrote about our recent brahmin.com site build, it was to talk about the advanced product search. This time, I want to focus on some of the decisions we made in structuring the navigation. These topics are closely related because the complement to an easy-to-use search should always be an easy-to-use nav structure; pairing the two lets users take whichever approach they're most comfortable with, making it more likely that they'll find what they're looking for. Read Now About
Article My Newfangled Story published on October 27, 2009 Hi, I'm Briana and I'm the Newfangled Intern. I've been asked to be a guest blogger and I hope to bring you some interesting topics which in turn will lead to some great discussions. Here is the story of how I got here... Read Now About
Article Content Strategy How to Give New Life to Your Old Website published on October 27, 2009 You launched your website a few years ago. At the time, it featured the latest and greatest technology... But now your once-top-notch site seems to be lagging behind... More and more of our clients are finding themselves in this situation. Technology evolves so rapidly that it can be hard to keep up, and a site that's only a couple years old seems ancient! If your site falls into this category, here are a few options you can consider... Read Now About
Article A List of Useful Web Development Blogs published on October 22, 2009 The Internet is a noisy place, with Twitter updates constantly streaming and blogs spewing out second-hand knowledge, making it difficult to find sources that are both credible and consistently good. Here are a few blogs that I follow that keep me informed on what's going on and what's next in Web technology. Read Now About
Article Short or Long-Form Writing? by Christopher Butler on October 22, 2009 Last week I noted a post by John Hagel called Stupidity and the Internet in my post on the The Post-Screen Web. Hagel covered several topics in that post, one of which was the web's effect upon thinking and whether short-form content makes that effect a negative one. He writes... Read Now About
Article Why Did One Campaign Do Better Than Another? by Christopher Butler on October 20, 2009 Over the past several months, I've tried to keep a closer eye on how our newsletter campaigns are performing to see if I can draw any conclusions as to what makes one more successful than another. What I've decided is that it all depends upon what you mean by "successful..." Read Now About
Article The Post-Screen Web by Christopher Butler on October 16, 2009 I just finished reading an insightful post by John Hagel, which he titled Stupidity and the Internet as a response to Nicholas Carr's much-discussed Atlantic piece, Is Google Making Us Stupid? I like the way that Hagel re-frames the discussion based upon form rather than effect. His idea seems to be that "the internet" (I'm going to use "the web" instead) can't be assessed in simple either/or terms of stupifying or edifying, but aught to be considered based upon its currently evolving form... Read Now About
