Article Prospect Experience Design The New My.Newfangled.Com published on December 22, 2009 Two weeks ago, after much planning but with little fanfare, we rolled out the new My.Newfangled.Com! We previewed the new My.Newfangled.Com and explored how it fits into our overall website management strategy in our Coping with Complexity newsletter - but here's a real behind-the-scenes tour, now that the upgrade is live. My.Newfangled.Com is a special portal that consolidates our clients' information in one place, under one login. The "new and improved" site offers immediate access to the prototype, design profile and layouts, staging site, live site, and Google Analytics through tabs at the top of the page... Read Now About
Article Reading Highlights from 2009 by Christopher Butler on December 22, 2009 Today is the last day I'll be in the Newfangled office in 2009. What a year it's been! Over the last week, I've had numerous opportunities to reflect upon the year with Mark and other coworkers, which has been a very enlightening and edifying experience; we've all certainly learned a lot. Then, this morning I saw Michael Surtee's interview with Inaki Escudero, who read 52 books in 2009 (one per week). Though I read quite a bit, I honestly can't imagine reading that much. In responding to the interview, I was able to look over and count the list of books I read this year, which totaled 32--much more than I thought. I'll reserve final judgement as to whether I can add another twenty this coming year for sometime later, but at this point I'm doubtful.But in reviewing my list, I realized that I had read a few really great things this year. Here are seven books that really impacted how I think and work this year... Read Now About
Article My Love-Hate Relationship with Email published on December 10, 2009 Chris passed along an article this morning called 10 Proposals for Fixing the E-Mail Glut" by Nick Bilton and it made me think about the issues I have with email in the workplace. For me, email is like what Winston Churchill said about democracy, "democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." Email, for me, is the worst form of communication, except for all the others... Read Now About
Article The Right Fit by Mark O’Brien on December 8, 2009 I thought I was just fine at cooking scrambled eggs--until I had to make them for Julia Child on her 86th birthday.The restaurant I managed the kitchen for wasn't open for breakfast. But when Mrs. Child decided that she'd like to have breakfast with twenty or so of her closest friends at our place, well, we opened for breakfast. Cooking for The Queen was an honor, a lifelong memory, and a great opportunity to learn how to make perfect scrambled eggs (medium-low heat, be sparing and gentle in your interactions with the eggs, and leave them more than a little runny).Somewhere between making those eggs and speaking with Wolfgang Puck about the grilled pizza I had just made for him, I came to two realizations: One, I had made it! I was cooking at the best place for the best customers--and not just cooking, but actually managing the entire kitchen. Two, if this is what "making it" feels like, life isn't quite what I had hoped it would be. Read Now About
Article Self-Editing for the Nonprofessional Writer published on December 4, 2009 Recently, in a post about editing professional writing, I broke down the revision process into 3 general stages, which I'll repeat in this post. Here, following those same three revision stages, I want to give a few concrete tips for people who are editing their own writing. Not all of these methods will fit everybody's style, but these are some of the ones I like. Read Now About
Article Screencast : Tracking internal site search with Google Analytics published on December 4, 2009 I am starting a bi-weekly screencast surrounding topics involving Google Analytics. The topic for today is internal site search.Why you should set up internal site search tracking?How to set up internal site search tracking?are discussed in the screencast.Please use the comments section for any feedback / recommendations or questions you may have for me. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design 4 Ways to Improve Your Email Newsletters by Christopher Butler on December 4, 2009 Many clients ask what a good click-through rate is for an email newsletter campaign. Keeping in mind that 1% is generally considered to be a respectable response rate for direct mail, I would say that you should generally shoot for somewhere between a 10-20% click-through rate for an email. The appropriate desired response to an email newsletter should be for subscribers to simply continue reading the material on your website, a much lower level of commitment than is usually implied with direct mail campaigns. That said, achieving this response isn't the easiest thing to do. We've grown accustomed to being quite aggressive with email- particularly with deleting email that we find irrelevant at that moment. But over the past couple of years, I've noticed that certain tweaks can enable a higher and more stable click-through rate from one campaign to the next. Here are four ideas... Read Now About
Article Google Analytics: Getting Out of the Way in a Good Way published on December 1, 2009 Loading third-party JavaScript (which is code usually loaded from a domain on another server) can often do bad things to your pages' performance. Putting JavaScript on a page blocks, which in software-speak means that nothing else can happen while it is loading and executing. The reason for this is that JavaScript can change the page after it executes which means that the browser needs to wait until the code is done executing before it go on to the next thing. Why is this a problem? Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design 2010: The Year of Better Web Fonts by Justin Kerr on December 1, 2009 As the first decade of the 21st century draws to a close, many look with anticipation towards 2010. Working for world peace, a cleaner environment or a cure for cancer are all noble pursuits, but there's only one thing I wish for in the coming new year.More choices for web typography. Read Now About
Article Short and Sweet Website Copy published on November 30, 2009 Less is more when it comes to website copy.Think about it. When you visit a website, do you carefully read every single word on the page? I doubt it. Very few people do! In fact, according to research on useit.com, "users will read about 20% of the text on the average page."To combat this problem, your website needs strong, concise copy... Read Now About
