CategoryBusiness

May 12, 2020 — How, then, do we encourage users to act? By establishing trust with small commitments, at the right time, and in the right order. Click! explains how to do just that. Meet our new practical guide on how to build trust, increase conversion and boost business KPIs effectively — without alienating people along the way. Written by Paul Boag. Coming up in June. Jump to table of contents and get the book right away. Read more…

May 5, 2020 — The cat is out of the bag! Meet SmashingConf Live (Aug 20–21), our very first online conference. For SmashingConf Live, our new online conference, we don’t want to replicate in-person experiences online. Instead, we’ve designed an entirely new conference experience, focusing around interactive live sessions and discussion zones where you actively shape what happens next, and learn along the way. Read more…

April 24, 2020 — Whatever stage you’re at in your career, coding collaboratively is one of the best uses of your time. With remote working on the rise, there’s never been a better time to practice pair programming and embrace Agile development. Read more…

April 9, 2020 — All search engines share the same purpose: to organize the web’s content and deliver the most relevant, useful results possible to search queries. How they achieve this has changed enormously since the days of Lycos and Ask Jeeves. Google alone uses more than 200 ranking factors, and those are just the ones we know about. Retrofitting search engine optimization only gets you so far. As metadata gets smarter, it’s more important than ever to build it into the design process from the start. Read more…

February 28, 2020 — The word “SEO” holds a lot of weight. We know how critical it is to the success of a website and, yet, it often becomes one of those things that’s left until the very end of a web design project to deal with. Or, worse, it’s pushed onto one person’s plate who likely isn’t capable of doing all that needs to be done. SEO should be a team sport — and that’s what today’s post is all about. Read more…

February 17, 2020 — Does your website have a mascot that the audience isn’t responding well to or that outright hates it? Or maybe your new client has brought along a mascot that you’re unsure about? If a mascot’s design or messaging isn’t on point with an audience, there’s no sense in keeping it as is and losing business over it. Today, Suzanne Scacca is going to give you four options for turning your hated brand mascot into one the people love. Read more…

January 24, 2020 — How do we know if we are truly impactful as a design team? Are we seen as a vehicle to deliver a solution that moves a needle? The business value of design has been proven at scale by the McKinsey Design Index. and the study shows the best design performers increased their revenues and shareholder returns at nearly twice the rate of their industry counterparts. It’s time to empower our design teams and give them one voice to show how and when design really adds value. Read more…

January 15, 2020 — How do you move faster when adding folks to a project supposedly slows it down? Mailchimp’s CPO takes the reader through some considerations for preserving momentum while scaling up. Software is difficult to build with lots of complex interdependencies. And everyone needs to work together to get it done. As you work to manage dependencies and introduce tools to help scale, make sure you clearly communicate the why behind the practices. Read more…

December 16, 2019 — Having a face-to-face meeting with your client can cause anxiety for those of us that push pixels for a living, but even the simplest kind of sketching can help. The sitemap meeting can be a minefield of multiple stakeholders, multi-dimensional categories, historical analytics, new products and mobile-first demands. Using a live illustration of a customer site journey, you can create a meaningful sitemap with which site visitors will resonate. Read more…

December 12, 2019 — You spend so much time focused on other people’s websites that it’s easy to put yours on the backburner and tell yourself, “I’ll fix it up someday soon.” But do you really want to wait to improve your professional portfolio site? It could be bringing you a lot more business — a lot more quality business, too — if you’d only spend some more time on it. In this article, Suzanne Scacca explains why spending that time turning it into a PWA would be worth your while. Read more…