Reading Time: < 1 min If 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 […]
Websites
There’s room for your own island
Reading Time: < 1 min When 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 min When 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 min When 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 min If 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 min At 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 min Over 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 min When 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 […]
Finding old versions of any site
Reading Time: 2 min From time to time, it can be useful (or even just fun) to find an old version of a website. Perhaps you need to grab some content from an old version of your site, or maybe you want to see how ESPN looked 15 years ago. If that’s what you need, there are a few […]
Obscurity is still your biggest threat
Reading Time: 2 min There’s an old quote from Tim O’Reilly that I really love, and it seems to be getting better with age. Tim simply said: Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy. While you can worry about people copying your content or stealing your ideas, your far bigger concern is having […]