Article Prospect Experience Design The Pros and Cons of Front-End Editing and Modular Content in WordPress published on June 18, 2014 With the imaginations of so many developers trained in WordPress, just about every aspect of its functionality is under scrutiny, and that’s especially true of the functionality used to create and edit content. That same scrutiny has given rise to a number of front-end editing plug-ins... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Casual Fridays: The Agency Homepage by Mark O’Brien on June 6, 2014 In this episode Chris and Mark talk about homepages, with a specific focus on the evolution and future of our homepage, and the way agencies have evolved their homepages as well. This is a nice companion piece to Chris's article on the same topic. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Four Steps to a Better Agency Homepage by Christopher Butler on June 5, 2014 Over the years, there are few aspects of a website that I've come to think about as differently as I have the homepage. What should a homepage do? How should it look? How much information should it contain? These are questions I've answered very differently, sometimes depending on who is asking — and what kind of homepage we're talking about — and sometimes simply depending upon what I've seen work and not work. There are many things we loved to stick on home pages that never worked, just as there are many things that have worked whose time has passed. So here's my latest thinking on this... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Designing CTA Form Fields for a Better User Experience published on June 4, 2014 The design of form fields may not be the most exciting aesthetic challenge around, but making sure that your CTAs are designed to maximize their clarity and usability may have a larger impact on your bottom line that you might think. We'll go over some common user experience pitfalls that come up with the humble form field rectangle. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design How Long Does the Typical Agency Website Last? by Mark O’Brien on May 30, 2014 At some point in the sales process, each of our potential clients eventually asks the same thing: how long does the typical marketing website last? The answer, which we’ve referenced many times elsewhere in our writing, is three to five years. Today, though, I want to spend some time explaining why exactly we expect the typical marketing website to last that long. There are three reasons we’ve settled on the three-to-five-year timeframe, and all of them have to do with the pace of change. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Notes on the Container (and the Content it Holds) by Justin Kerr on May 14, 2014 We’ve written a lot about content, and if you’ve been reading our blog posts and newsletters, you’ve come to understand that we see content as a key component of a dynamic marketing web platform. In this post, though, we'll be looking at the container: the website that presents your content to the world and how its purpose has changed over time in relationship to how content is delivered. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Maintaining Great Information Architecture Over the Lifespan of Your Website published on May 12, 2014 We see it all the time: Your site launched roughly 18 months ago. During the prototyping stage, you worked really hard with our team to devise a truly solid information architecture for your site. But then, your site launched. Over time, you've made ad hoc changes as needed, and suddenly the shine has worn off your information architecture. Here's how to remedy this common situation. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design The Design Method by Christopher Butler on May 1, 2014 If there was a theme to last Fall — at least for me, anyway — it was in negotiating the relationship between expertise and experimentation. Every week, this theme would come up. Whether I was working out new ways of doing things here at Newfangled, or advising clients, or writing or speaking out there in the world, this balancing act was always in the forefront of my mind... Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design A Few Things You Should Know About Working With Web Fonts by Justin Kerr on April 28, 2014 Since the end of the web-safe fonts era, there are now literally thousands of custom web fonts available. With so many choices, it’s important to know where to purchase quality fonts, how to specify fonts for your site, and other typographic considerations like readability, personality, and font pairing. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Experiment Like an Expert by Christopher Butler on April 16, 2014 When was the last time you said “I don't know” in a meeting? Better yet, when was the last time you said it confidently, knowing that this admission was in no way in conflict with your expertise? Probably never... Read Now About