Content is the core commodity of the digital economy. It is the gold we fashion into luxury experience, the diamond we encase in loyalty programs and upsells. Yet, as designers, we often plug it in after the fact. We prototype our interaction and visual design to exhaustion, but accept that the “real words” can just be dropped in later. There is a better way.
More and more, the digital... Read More
Publishing content to the web is expensive. I know what you're thinking: no, it's not; it costs nothing, especially when compared to print. And you would be right, from a certain point of view. The problem is that publishing is cheap. This seduces you, encouraging you to put more and more content online.
In fact, the cost is so cheap that many organizations let almost any employee put... Read More
Content is hard. It takes a lot of planning, collaboration and governance to produce high-quality content that meets business needs, speaks in an authentic way and targets an audience effectively.
Whether you’re an agency working with clients, or an in-house team working with others around your organization, getting people onboard with producing content is challenging. Thankfully it isn’t... Read More
To most Web developers, it sounds controversial until you hear the punchline: Last summer, the developers in charge of Google’s Chrome browser floated a proposal that went virtually unnoticed by the technology press, which was to remove support for an established W3C standard that every other browser vendor still supports.
The standard in question? Extensible Stylesheet Language... Read More
The Web is awash in content. A recent Moz article reports that 92,000 new articles are posted online every day. Companies are spending billions on content marketing to enhance credibility, build brand awareness and, especially of late, improve SEO.
Google has always tried to reward great content with high rankings, but today, thanks to vast improvements in its algorithm, Google is... Read More
When Google announced its preference for user-friendly responsive websites in June 2012, I immediately saw an influx of posts that equated responsive design with search engine optimization. This is unfortunate because, while responsive websites can be SEO-friendly, some responsive websites are not.
I’ve detailed some of the common errors that give responsive websites problems in search... Read More
Ever since I’ve been involved in the Web, I’ve been fascinated by little things that make a big impact. It’s one of the reasons why I started collecting and blogging about these details, which could in some way help others grow an audience.
One recurring topic early on was launch and landing pages and the strategies that creators use to expand the reach of their websites, which led to a... Read More
The relationship between copy and design has been covered many times on Smashing Magazine. Working in a content-focused industry, we need to keep this issue pretty close to heart; creating great copy is pointless if it is visually uninspiring or unreadable. Likewise, if the content doesn’t deliver, then even the most attractive page won’t hold the reader’s attention.
Yet much of the... Read More
The recently popularized “flat” interface style is not merely a trend. It is the manifestation of a desire for greater authenticity in design, a desire to curb visual excess and eliminate the fake and the superfluous.
In creating new opportunities, technological progress sometimes leads to areas of excess. In the 19th century, mechanized mass production allowed for ornaments to be... Read More
