Article Prospect Experience Design Casual Fridays: The Propriety of Proprietary – How Portable is Your CMS? by Mark O’Brien on March 21, 2014 Is WordPress the only viable CMS choice? When you make a decision about who's going to build your next website, are you making a technology decision, a relationship decision, or both? How portable is a site that's perfectly tailored to your needs? In this installment of Casual Fridays, Chris and I might bring up more questions than we answer, but at least they're interesting questions. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Web design has changed. Have you? by Christopher Butler on March 18, 2014 Web design is changing. Of course, that's always been true. This month, Chris Butler looks at what's changing now, starting with modular content and how it changes our design practice, and then works his way back to some of the things that have become "fundamental" to web design... Read Now About
Article Why We’re Offering Content Strategy Consulting Services by Tema Flanagan on March 17, 2014 I recently wrote a piece for our blog about the changes we’ve made over the past several months to Newfangled’s internal content production processes — changes which amount to a new system for managing our content marketing and which have already proven themselves. Since putting this new system in place, our output has increased by 85%. Now that our system is solidified and proven, we want to offer it to you. Read Now About
Article CRM Salesforce Fundamentals published on March 14, 2014 Newfangled has been talking a lot recently about Lead Development Ecosystems, which consist of a conversion-focused website, a marketing automation tool, and a customer relationship management tool. I want to focus on the third part of the ecosystem: the CRM. We recommend Salesforce to our clients; it’s the most widely adopted CRM on the market, and it integrates with just about anything you can think of. Often, our clients purchase a Salesforce license but never manage to get their CRM implementation off the ground. Salesforce is an enterprise-level tool, with the ability to scale for massive implementations. It’s chock-full of functionality. But never fear: you don’t need to understand everything Salesforce can do in order to use it successfully. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Before You Report that Bug, Use this Pre-Contact Self-Diagnosis published on March 10, 2014 There's nothing fun about finding bugs on your website. While we strive to diagnose and fix issues as quickly as possible, our developers usually need to know more than "X or Y isn't working" in order to do so. There are a few things in particular that our developers usually need to know in order to diagnose a bug, and these are the things we’re likely to come back and ask you about if you haven’t already provided them. So, to ensure we can help you as quickly as possible, here's a pre-contact, self-diagnosis routine to help guide you in reporting problems. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Inside the Redesign of Merge Records by Justin Kerr on March 7, 2014 Last summer, Newfangled was hired to develop a new website platform for Merge Records, an established indie music label headquartered in Durham, NC. Read about some of the challenges that arose during the design process and how we tackled them. 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 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 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