Reading Time: 2 minI’ve said on here quite a few times that most everyone should have their own blog, and they should use it as the central place to share their ideas. I still fully believe that, but a recent post from Manuel Moreale has me rethinking my perspective a little bit. Here was his main point: No […]
Websites
The history of the 72 dpi myth
Reading Time: < 1 minMost designers were taught in school that images for print should be 300 dpi (or “ppi” if you prefer – I use them interchangeably), and images for the web should be 72 dpi. While the print number is accurate in most cases, the web number is completely unnecessary as I explained in detail nearly a […]
Google launches “Search Console Insights”, and it’s excellent
Reading Time: < 1 minIf you have a website, Google has long offered two great (free!) tools to help you understand the visitors on your site. Google Analytics: Shows you information about the people on your site; how they got there, a bit about them, and what they looked at. Google Search Console: This is the view of your […]
There’s room for your own island
Reading Time: < 1 minWhen people talk about the big companies online (like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, etc), it’s easy to think that they make up most of the internet. And while they’re indeed massive, they still only take up small chunks of space compared to the entire web. To help visualize this, Martin Vargic created a map of […]
Planning saves money
Reading Time: < 1 minWhen building a website, we always create at least a handful of wireframes so we can sort out what we’re doing before we really dig in. If you’re not familiar with the concept of a wireframe when it comes to websites, Brooke wrote an excellent post that explains them here. Beyond the great reasons that […]
Be predictable, not polite
Reading Time: 2 minWhen you’re driving a car, the best thing you can do is to be predictable with your actions. If others know what you plan to do next, the odds of staying safe remain quite high. Conversely, if you do unpredictable things, even with good intentions, things can go wrong quickly. As a quick example, see […]
Every web page should have a goal
Reading Time: 2 minIf you have a website for your business, you almost certainly have a solid goal for the site. It might be to gain subscribers to your email list, encourage people to reach out to you for more information, or even to purchase a product directly on your site. Going a bit deeper, though, every page […]
Branding, Traffic, and Conversions
Reading Time: < 1 minAt our Meetup yesterday, Jamie Howard of Hey Thunderbird gave us a great presentation about using metaphors in business. In fact, his entire presentation was about using the idea of property management (“renovations”, “foot-traffic”, “location”, etc) as it relates to digital marketing, and it was excellent! You can view his slides here. What really struck […]
Don’t break the back button
Reading Time: < 1 minOver the years, the “back” button on web browsers has consistently been shown to be one of the most-used features on a web browser. As time as gone on, though, websites have found increasingly creative ways to break that core functionality. The folks at the Baymard Institute have showed four design patterns that violate what […]
Google ranks pages, not sites
Reading Time: 2 minWhen you’re working to improve your rankings in Google, it’s easy to slip into the idea of trying to improve the rankings for your entire website at once. While there is a bit of benefit to that, generally speaking Google looks more closely at individual pages than they do at entire sites. In fact, most […]