Article How We Invest in Our People – Education! by Christopher Butler on July 16, 2009 I just saw this post from Matt at the 37 Signals blog about the benefit of "playtime" on innovation in the workplace. It's a brief thought but a very important one. Matt pulls a quote from Jim Coudal that is right on: Most of the smart, creative, successful people I know spend a good deal of time looking for inspiration, tracking down ideas and doing research. We do all those things too, we just don’t have a problem with calling it what it is, “goofing around.” Play is essential, it’s through play that you find connections between things that might not be at all obvious through logic or practicality. If you don’t have any accidents how are you ever going to have happy ones? He goes on to mention other examples of how companies invest in innovation by giving their employees some free time. How does Newfangled do this? Well, we do this in several different ways that I think accumulate to a holistic investment in our people and their minds... Read Now About
Article Email Marketing Planning for Ecommerce by Christopher Butler on July 15, 2009 "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." - John Gall (http://www.daringfireball.net/2009/04/complex) This is an excellent quote that could probably be applied to many different points, but I'm including it here because I think it applies nicely to a trend I've observed with ecommerce development. For the most part, any project we do that involves ecommerce tends to fit into one of the following three categories... Read Now About
Article A Value-Based Content Strategy by Christopher Butler on July 14, 2009 Are you overwhelmed by the web? I am. You probably are, too, but are a little afraid to admit it. Perhaps the better question would be, "How overwhelmed are you by the web?" The rate at which the web grows in content is astounding, and for those who try to keep up with a lot of content whether personally or professionally, it can feel frustrating, exhausting, even futile. That's because it's all of those things. Really, something's got to give. So, I want to get real with our content: with the newsletters, the blog, my use of social media on behalf of Newfangled, all of it... Read Now About
Article CRM The Whitescreen QA Process published on July 10, 2009 As the newest member of the Newfangled team, I've been experiencing quite a few "firsts" over the past four months. Right now, the first website project that I will see through from conception to completion has reached the Whitescreen QA (Quality Assurance) phase. The programming is in place on the staging/development site, but the design hasn't been applied and the content hasn't been entered. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Mood Board Observations by Justin Kerr on July 10, 2009 Steve Grothmann, one of our project managers, recently wrote a good introduction to mood boards and explained how we have folded them into our design process. I'm going to expand a bit on Steve's post since I'm the one responsible for producing the mood boards and, now that I have a dozen or so of them under my belt, I can assess their impact on Newfangled's web development... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Emusic makes Scheduled Downtime a little more Courteous published on July 9, 2009 A number of us Newfanglers are big fans of eMusic. They do a lot of things right, like DRM free music, an amazing selection, great design and social media tools. Despite the flack they've received for their acquisition to Sony, they still consistently deliver one of the best usability/customer experiences I've come across online... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Managing the Design Process by Christopher Butler on July 8, 2009 Yesterday, the Project Management team gathered in our newly renovated conference room at the North Carolina office for a professional development session on managing the design process. We covered a ton of information, ranging from the basic elements and principles of design to strategies for framing design discussions with clients. I think it was a really productive experience for everyone, and I was excited to witness the inner design critics emerge from our PM's as we reviewed some design case studies together. Here are some of the key points we kept returning to... Read Now About
Article Creating great web content at the intersection of writing, inspiration and expertise. by Mark O’Brien on July 6, 2009 What makes great web content? For the purpose of this post I am referring to content that marketers add to their site for the purpose of furthering their particular content strategy. I think the best content written for this purpose is found at the intersection of writing, inspiration and expertise... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Thoughts on the 2009 HOW Design Conference by Mark O’Brien on July 2, 2009 Last week I was in Austin, TX. to present a few sessions at the annual HOW Design Conference. There were a few things that really knocked my socks off that are worth mentioning. Read Now About
Article Another Advance Toward Conversational Synthesis by Christopher Butler on July 1, 2009 In this month's newsletter, The Future of the Web, Part 1, I spent some time talking about how in the future, we will manage data using conversational synthesis technology. By "conversational synthesis," I'm envisioning tools that receive data from various sources and condense it into one easily manageable stream. The conversational piece refers to how these tools will allow users to query the database with natural language, creating new types of reports on an ad hoc basis and not having to parse through pre-configued report results and combine them to get the answers they really need. This kind of advance is going to take some work in various areas, so I'm not expecting this kind of experience anytime soon... Read Now About
