Article A 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
Article Recognizing 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
Article Should 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
Article Getting 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
Article Start 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
Article Who Are You Speaking To? by Christopher Butler on October 31, 2009 Most 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
Article Building Great Websites–and Keeping them that Way by Mark O’Brien on October 29, 2009 Our journey from consultants to implementors and back to consultants again. Newfangled is a very active place; things are always growing, changing, and being refined. Of all the new things going on, I am most excited about our new support model. Here's why. Read Now About
Article Prospect Experience Design Prototype to Site: Brahmin.com’s Main Nav published on October 28, 2009 Last time I wrote about our recent brahmin.com site build, it was to talk about the advanced product search. This time, I want to focus on some of the decisions we made in structuring the navigation. These topics are closely related because the complement to an easy-to-use search should always be an easy-to-use nav structure; pairing the two lets users take whichever approach they're most comfortable with, making it more likely that they'll find what they're looking for. Read Now About
Article Content Strategy How to Give New Life to Your Old Website published on October 27, 2009 You launched your website a few years ago. At the time, it featured the latest and greatest technology... But now your once-top-notch site seems to be lagging behind... More and more of our clients are finding themselves in this situation. Technology evolves so rapidly that it can be hard to keep up, and a site that's only a couple years old seems ancient! If your site falls into this category, here are a few options you can consider... Read Now About
Article My Newfangled Story published on October 27, 2009 Hi, I'm Briana and I'm the Newfangled Intern. I've been asked to be a guest blogger and I hope to bring you some interesting topics which in turn will lead to some great discussions. Here is the story of how I got here... Read Now About
