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ArticleOptimize Your Website: Users First, Google Second by Mark O’Brien on November 17, 2009A user-centric view towards your site's content, information architecture, and calls to action are the best path toward optimization. Read Now About
ArticleShow Me the Data! by Christopher Butler on November 16, 2009 If I had to identify one of the biggest themes from the past year at Newfangled, one of them would definitely be measurement. In fact, ever since we started a serious resourcing effort back in 2007, we've been learning just how valuable data is to us in general. Having access to real data is necessary to evaluating just about anything--whether it's the performance of a newlsetter campaign, the pages of your website, or even the people at your firm. Without it, you wouldn't be able to answer the questions that really matter, like, "What is this worth?" "Is this working?" "What should we change?" Read Now About
ArticleEditing for the Nonprofessional Editor by Sarah Dooley on November 16, 2009As a secret grammar nerd working at a place where a lot of writing takes place, I end up doing a fair amount of editing. Chris has recently provided a lot of good advice on professional writing; this is my take on the other side of the process. Read Now About
ArticleThe History of Our Office by Mark O’Brien on November 13, 2009I just read/listened to Sarah's great post about the soundscape of the Newfangled office and got inspired to write down a few things I've recently learned about our historic digs. When we had our last front porch social with BlogAds (our upstairs neighbors) the mayor showed up, and he told me the history of our building. Our building was actually the first public building in Carrboro. It was built because the train tracks happened to end at this location. They were supposed to continue on a half mile into Chapel Hill, but they ran out of funding so they stopped where they happened to leave off. The original use for the rail line was as a drop-off point for the local farmers to bring their cotton and tobacco. The man that happened to own the few hundred acre farm that abutted the tracks decided to build a building (our glorious office) to hold the offloaded wares overnight. Before long, he decided to outfit the building with the area's first steam engine. This was first used to power a cotton gin and later a grist mill--both of which resided inside the building. At some point between then and now more funding was acquired and today the rail continues on that half mile to a plant that powers UNC. The line is mostly used for coal transport to that plant. Read Now About
ArticleA Year of Ideas by Christopher Butler on November 12, 2009 Is it preferable to read long format content on a screen or on the printed page? This is a question that I think we're going to be wrestling with as a culture for some time to come. In the meantime our tendency is probably to do much of our day-to-day reading online (I've seen plenty of posts lately declaring all kinds of ridiculous things to the tune of "I don't read books anymore, therefore books must be dead"), though I know there are still plenty of people holding out for actual books. I read quite a bit, both online and in books. In fact, I often bookmark articles that I know I'd be more likely to read if they were in print than I am with them on a screen. This is particularly true of longer content (much of it written by my favorite publications like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and WIRED). So, after reading a post by Emmet Connolly, I began collecting those longer articles and creating printed anthologies of them on Lulu.com. The one pictured above is my third, which I just printed last week. This time, I kept a bookmarks folder of articles that I felt represented the most important ideas I'd encountered in 2009- so I called it "A Year of Ideas"... Read Now About
ArticleRecognizing the Complexity and Value of Transferring Information by Christopher Butler on November 11, 2009 This is a New York Times newspaper vending box located right near my office in the parking lot of a wonderful coffee shop called Jessee's. The other day I noticed the box and it occurred to me how radically things have changed in terms of how we transfer information in our culture. Consider how a newspaper ends up in a box like this one: Newspapers are bundled after print and available for delivery collection at a distribution center starting at midnight the morning of publication. Drivers pick up their day's delivery and spend the next eight hours depositing them in vending boxes on their route and collecting coins and the unsold papers from the previous day. Considering how most of us consume news information today--instantly and online--this process seems obviously inefficient and antiquated (the boxes can weigh up to 100 pounds and cost $450 each)... Read Now About
ArticleShould You Work for Free to Get Your Foot in the Door? by Christopher Butler on November 10, 2009 My Opinion: No, You Shouldn't Back in early April, I read a post by Peter Madden on the Advertising Age "Small Agency Diary" blog about the benefits of doing pro-bono work during the idle time brought on by an economic recession (pictured in the screenshot to the left). What I think Peter was really trying to hone in on was the idea that though doing pro-bono work may have its good, altruistic purposes, it can also be a practical means to keeping minds and faculties productive and busy when they'd be otherwise unused. I completely agree with that sentiment; for a designer, staying in practice is well worth the investment. However, I did comment on his post in order to note one reservation I would have... Read Now About
ArticleGetting to Know George, Newfangled Developer published on November 5, 2009 Web developers are the backbone of the web design world but are almost always behind the scenes....coding. For any of us who have or have tried to learn programming languages and how to utilize them, knows how truly amazing web developers are. George Wamichi is one of these and happens to be my deskmate. Lucky Me!!Here is a little more about George... Read Now About
ArticleStart 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
ArticleWho Are You Speaking To? by Christopher Butler on October 31, 2009Most 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
