Article Prospect Experience Design Calls to Action and Usability: How to Make CTAs That Work published on February 19, 2014 Having strong calls-to-action that are easy to notice, understand, and fill out is absolutely crucial for your site's conversion rate. However, don't fall into some common usability traps! Here's a simple usability guide to creating compelling, clear, concise CTAs. Read Now About
Article Fixing Bugs and the “Five Whys” of the Toyota Production System by Dave Mello on February 17, 2014 Tracking down and fixing bugs is hard. A non-developer might assume the opposite — if there’s an issue that the client/end user sees, the developer just needs to “go in and fix it.” The reality, though, is that the process of isolating the actual issue that needs correcting can often be rather winding — full of dead ends and false starts. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design How to Test a Website in Ten Seconds by Christopher Butler on February 11, 2014 A few weeks ago I wrote up a quick explanation of how to test a website in ten minutes. Quick and easy. But did you know that you can test a web page in ten seconds? Believe it. I started doing this after I read a page abandonment study by Jakob Nielsen, and have put together a method you can use right now... Read Now About
Article Email Marketing Why Marketing Automation Programs Fail, Part 2: Training and Guidance published on February 10, 2014 As a follow-up post to last week's look at why marketing automation implementations can fail, I wanted to highlight another common recipe for failure - having great robust marketing automation tools, but not knowing how to use them and not having the proper training and guidance to use the effectively. Read Now About
Article Casual Fridays: Content Marketing …since Always by Christopher Butler on February 7, 2014 Join us this week as we discuss the validity of content marketing. Will it live forever? Is it already dead? Find out here. Read Now About
Article How We Built the Merge Records Website to Handle All Those Digital Music Files published on February 5, 2014 Merge Records, an independent record label in Durham, NC, is the home of critically acclaimed and popular artists like Arcade Fire, Spoon, the Magnetic Fields, Neutral Milk Hotel, and many more. Theirs is also one of our latest website builds — one that presented a few interesting development challenges. While we’ve written at length about the overall Merge site build elsewhere, we thought it would be helpful to look specifically and in greater detail at the development side of what was a particularly complex project. Read Now About
Article Email Marketing Why Marketing Automation Programs Fail: it’s Not the Software, it’s Your Expectations published on February 3, 2014 I recently read that three out of five marketing automation implementations fail. Three out of five! That’s a 60% failure rate. That is alarming, but I don’t think that the reason that most of those fail is due to the software itself — there is some great MAT software on the market right now. The reason they usually fail is ultimately due to misguided expectations on the part of companies using that software. Here's a quick look at how to set your expectations realistically and set yourself up for success. Read Now About
Article How to Know if Your Content is Working by Tema Flanagan on January 29, 2014 We recently published a piece on our blog laying out the reasons you should produce content for your business’s site: SEO, lead development, and sale. Assuming you're in agreement, the question then becomes: how can you tell — concretely, on the basis of data — whether your content is actually serving those goals? Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design The Future of Web Development is Information Logistics by Christopher Butler on January 27, 2014 Last week, Mark and I had the pleasure of speaking at Valuable Content's Bristol Content Group event — virtually! Thanks to the technical wizardry of Sonja and Matt from Desynit, we spoke to a packed crowd in Bristol, UK, from the comfort of our Chapel Hill offices. After reading our article last fall on why "We Don't Build Websites Anymore," Sonja was eager to find a way to present this material to her community and put together the event in pretty short order. Mark and I spent an hour presenting on the lead development ecosystem and the future of web development and then took questions from the crowd. It was a great event, and hopefully a step toward an in-person event in the UK sometime soon. Below is a transcript of my portion of the material... Read Now About
Article What Makes Newfangled Newfangled: Our Agency Friends by Mark O’Brien on January 27, 2014 This is part one of a three-part series on a few thoughts I'd like to share on what makes Newfangled tick: our clients, our people, and our space. Read Now About