Friday, May 1Digital Marketing Journals

Tag: List

How a Busy Candle Maker Doubled Her Email List Without Learning Email Marketing
17Jan By Sean TinneyNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, Internet marketing, Learn, Online Marketing

How a Busy Candle Maker Doubled Her Email List Without Learning Email Marketing

By Sean Tinney January 14, 2026 💼 Meet Melissa Williams of Pea Pod Country When you’re making and selling candles and wax melts, your time goes into what you do best—pouring, scenting, and creating products your customers love. For Melissa Williams, founder of Pea Pod Country, most of her business hours are spent in production mode, crafting the candles and wax melts that keep her customers coming back. She knew email marketing would help her business grow. But between production, fulfillment, and running her business alongside full-time commitments, actually setting it up kept getting pushed to tomorrow. 😫 Challenge: Not Enough Time for Email Marketing For Melissa, the biggest challenge was finding the time to do email marketing. “As a maker...
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Connect Facebook Lead Ads to Your Email List in 5 Minutes (No Zapier Required)
6Nov By Sean TinneyNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email outreach, Internet marketing, Learn, Online Marketing

Connect Facebook Lead Ads to Your Email List in 5 Minutes (No Zapier Required)

By Sean Tinney November 3, 2025 Your Facebook lead just filled out your form. How long until they get your first email? If the answer is “hours” or “when I download the CSV tomorrow,” you’re losing conversions. Speed matters—leads who receive immediate follow-up convert at dramatically higher rates than those who wait. The manual process—downloading CSVs from Facebook Ads Manager, importing to your email platform, triggering your sequence—creates delays that kill conversions. Every hour between signup and first email drops your conversion likelihood. AWeber’s direct Facebook Lead Ads integration eliminates that delay. Connect once, create automation rules that route leads from specific campaigns to specific email sequences, and your Facebook lead ads email notification...
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An Holistic Framework for Shared Design Leadership – A List Apart
22Sep By byNo Comments
building website, business, Career, creating a website, design, google web designer, Industry, internet design, Project Management, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

An Holistic Framework for Shared Design Leadership – A List Apart

Picture this: You’re in a meeting room at your tech company, and two people are having what looks like the same conversation about the same design problem. One is talking about whether the team has the right skills to tackle it. The other is diving deep into whether the solution actually solves the user’s problem. Same room, same problem, completely different lenses. Article Continues Below This is the beautiful, sometimes messy reality of having both a Design Manager and a Lead Designer on the same team. And if you’re wondering how to make this work without creating confusion, overlap, or the dreaded “too many cooks” scenario, you’re asking the right question. The traditional answer has been to draw clean lines on an org chart. The Design Manager handles people, the Lead Desi...
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Build Products that Stick. – A List Apart
6Jun By byNo Comments
building website, business, creating a website, google web designer, Industry, internet design, Usability, User Experience, User Research, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, Web Strategy, website builder, website design

Build Products that Stick. – A List Apart

As a product builder over too many years to mention, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen promising ideas go from zero to hero in a few weeks, only to fizzle out within months. Article Continues Below Financial products, which is the field I work in, are no exception. With people’s real hard-earned money on the line, user expectations running high, and a crowded market, it’s tempting to throw as many features at the wall as possible and hope something sticks. But this approach is a recipe for disaster. Here’s why: The pitfalls of feature-first development#section2 When you start building a financial product from the ground up, or are migrating existing customer journeys from paper or telephony channels onto online banking or mobile apps, it’s easy to get caught ...
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NEW: Grow Your List with AWeber’s Direct Facebook Lead Ads Integration
4Apr By Jesse KennedyNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, Internet marketing, Online Marketing, Updates

NEW: Grow Your List with AWeber’s Direct Facebook Lead Ads Integration

By Jesse Kennedy March 20, 2025 Finding new customers is one of the biggest challenges for small business owners. Facebook Lead Ads are a great way to reach new audiences, but the real work begins after capturing a lead. Without a streamlined way to follow up, those valuable leads can quickly go cold. That’s where AWeber’s new direct Facebook Lead Ads integration comes in. Now, instead of manually downloading and uploading leads or relying on expensive third-party tools, you can seamlessly sync your Facebook leads directly into your AWeber email list, saving time, reducing errors, and increasing conversions.  >> Integrate Facebook Leads Ads with AWeber now Here’s how this new feature helps small businesses grow and engage their audience more efficiently than ever...
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Brutally Short List of WordPress Plugins That Help Local SEO
31Oct By PhilNo Comments
googe optimize, google optimization, google seo, search engine optimisation, search engine optimising, search engine optimization, SEO, seo services

Brutally Short List of WordPress Plugins That Help Local SEO

Like my post? Please share! Most wounds are self-inflicted, at least in local SEO.  A weak site makes it much harder to get visible in the organic results and in the Google Maps results, and to stay there.  But you won’t grow the site to be big and strong if simple tasks are a PITA, or if you spend too much time and energy and money on features that stop working, or if your site gets hacked and you can’t get it out of sickbay fast.  Too many plugins, or the wrong plugins, can cause all of those problems and more. My advice is simple: install as few plugins as possible.  If you pack too heavy, in general you will find it much harder to create and improve pages long-term, more plugins will conflict or stop working, and a vulnerable plugin will result in a hack sooner or later.  All of those ...
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Grow your email list quickly: 43 strategies to add high-quality subscribers
27May By Rhonda BradleyNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, grow email list, Internet marketing, Learn, list building, Online Marketing

Grow your email list quickly: 43 strategies to add high-quality subscribers

By Rhonda Bradley May 24, 2024 Have you hit a speed bump when it comes to growing your email list? If you want to quickly grow your list without compromising its quality,  this guide is for you. There are countless ways to add new people to your email list. However, effective email marketing means building a list of subscribers who will open, read, and engage with your emails. When you’re looking to grow fast,  it’s easy to lose sight of aiming for quality subscribers. We’ve got you covered. This guide shows you 43 strategies to help you rapidly grow your email list without compromising on the quality of your subscribers. Let’s jump in. 8 Multi-channel strategies to add subscribers to your email list fast Here are eight strategies to help you grow you...
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To Ignite a Personalization Practice, Run this Prepersonalization Workshop – A List Apart
16Apr By by ,No Comments
building website, Content Strategy, creating a website, google web designer, Information Architecture, internet design, User Experience, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

To Ignite a Personalization Practice, Run this Prepersonalization Workshop – A List Apart

Picture this. You’ve joined a squad at your company that’s designing new product features with an emphasis on automation or AI. Or your company has just implemented a personalization engine. Either way, you’re designing with data. Now what? When it comes to designing for personalization, there are many cautionary tales, no overnight successes, and few guides for the perplexed.  Article Continues Below Between the fantasy of getting it right and the fear of it going wrong—like when we encounter “persofails” in the vein of a company repeatedly imploring everyday consumers to buy additional toilet seats—the personalization gap is real. It’s an especially confounding place to be a digital professional without a map, a compass, or a plan. For those of you venturing into personaliza...
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The Wax and the Wane of the Web – A List Apart
5Mar By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, responsive web design, State of the Web, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, Web Strategy, website builder, website design

The Wax and the Wane of the Web – A List Apart

I offer a single bit of advice to friends and family when they become new parents: When you start to think that you’ve got everything figured out, everything will change. Just as you start to get the hang of feedings, diapers, and regular naps, it’s time for solid food, potty training, and overnight sleeping. When you figure those out, it’s time for preschool and rare naps. The cycle goes on and on. Article Continues Below The same applies for those of us working in design and development these days. Having worked on the web for almost three decades at this point, I’ve seen the regular wax and wane of ideas, techniques, and technologies. Each time that we as developers and designers get into a regular rhythm, some new idea or technology comes along to shake things up and remake o...
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Opportunities for AI in Accessibility – A List Apart
8Feb By byNo Comments
Accessibility, building website, Code, content, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design, Workflow & Tools

Opportunities for AI in Accessibility – A List Apart

In reading Joe Dolson’s recent piece on the intersection of AI and accessibility, I absolutely appreciated the skepticism that he has for AI in general as well as for the ways that many have been using it. In fact, I’m very skeptical of AI myself, despite my role at Microsoft as an accessibility innovation strategist who helps run the AI for Accessibility grant program. As with any tool, AI can be used in very constructive, inclusive, and accessible ways; and it can also be used in destructive, exclusive, and harmful ones. And there are a ton of uses somewhere in the mediocre middle as well. Article Continues Below I’d like you to consider this a “yes… and” piece to complement Joe’s post. I’m not trying to refute any of what he’s saying but rather provide some visibility to proje...
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#602: Myth Busters Series: “My Email List Is Too Small To Launch My Digital Course” (Ft. Jan Ditchfield) – Amy Porterfield
29Aug By AmyNo Comments
Digital Courses, email list, facebook, facebook marketing, myth buster series, podcast, Social Marketing Strategies, social media, social media marketing, student success

#602: Myth Busters Series: “My Email List Is Too Small To Launch My Digital Course” (Ft. Jan Ditchfield) – Amy Porterfield

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
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How To Change Twitter Handle Without Affecting Your Follower List
22Aug By Chandraveer SinghNo Comments
Blog, How-Tos, Social Marketing Strategies, social media, social media marketing, twitter

How To Change Twitter Handle Without Affecting Your Follower List

Twitter is an excellent avenue for personal and business branding. Having a misaligned username on Twitter that just doesn’t represent your brand anymore can be catastrophic for your branding game. Things get more severe with a Twitter username that is embarrassing, older or has a string of random numbers (marketer’sden698#42) at the back. No one wants such names popping up in the timeline when people mention them in Tweets. Thus, it is crucial to know how to change Twitter handle, or like some say it – how to change your @ on Twitter brand profile. The process of changing your Twitter handle is pretty simple. In this article, we will discuss the step-by-step process of how to change Twitter handle from a mobile device or a desktop. Let’s roll. What is a Twitter handle? Well, if you know, ...
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An Essential Value – A List Apart
27Jun By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, design, google web designer, internet design, responsive web design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

An Essential Value – A List Apart

Humility, a designer’s essential value—that has a nice ring to it. What about humility, an office manager’s essential value? Or a dentist’s? Or a librarian’s? They all sound great. When humility is our guiding light, the path is always open for fulfillment, evolution, connection, and engagement. In this chapter, we’re going to talk about why. Article Continues Below That said, this is a book for designers, and to that end, I’d like to start with a story—well, a journey, really. It’s a personal one, and I’m going to make myself a bit vulnerable along the way. I call it: The Tale of Justin’s Preposterous Pate#section2 When I was coming out of art school, a long-haired, goateed neophyte, print was a known quantity to me; design on the web, however, was rife with complexities t...
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Start an email list: A guide to getting your first 100 subscribers
14Apr By Kaleigh MooreNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email outreach, grow email list, Internet marketing, Learn, Online Marketing

Start an email list: A guide to getting your first 100 subscribers

By Kaleigh Moore April 13, 2023 A thousand subscribers. It’s a heck of a goal. We’ve even outlined a plan to get to a thousand subscribers before. But a round number like a thousand can also be overwhelming. What if you only have 50 combined followers on Twitter and LinkedIn? What if you’re having enough trouble just getting started with this whole newsletter thing?Then it will help if we can break it down even more. The most important subscribers you’ll ever have, after all, are your first ones. They’re the subscribers that gush about your newsletter, tell their friends, and represent the community that new subscribers can join. Let’s tackle the smallest (and most important) step in your newsletter community journey: how to start an email list that attracts your first 100 su...
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#528: From My Students To Your Ears: List Growth Questions Answered – Amy Porterfield
25Dec By AmyNo Comments
email list, facebook, facebook marketing, growth strategies, list builders society, list building, list-building, podcast, Q&A, Social Marketing Strategies, social media, social media marketing

#528: From My Students To Your Ears: List Growth Questions Answered – Amy Porterfield

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
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25 brilliant lead magnet ideas to grow your email list right now
16Dec By Sean TinneyNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, Internet marketing, lead magnets, Learn, Online Marketing

25 brilliant lead magnet ideas to grow your email list right now

By Sean Tinney December 15, 2022 Looking for inspiration for your next lead magnet? Take a look at these clever examples to help grow your email list. Creating a killer lead magnet is one of the best ways to get more email subscribers. And creating that lead magnet will be easier if you have plenty of lead magnet ideas. What’s a lead magnet? A lead magnet is something you give people when they subscribe to your email list. It can be anything – an ebook, an email series, or access to a webinar recording. It just needs to be something your subscribers are willing to exchange their email address for. The question is, then… what do your ideal subscribers want?  A lot of people struggle with this. Maybe you struggle with it, too. Or maybe you’re worried that creating a good le...
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A Framework for Designing with User Data – A List Apart
15Dec By by ,No Comments
building website, content, creating a website, google web designer, Interaction Design, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

A Framework for Designing with User Data – A List Apart

As a UX professional in today’s data-driven landscape, it’s increasingly likely that you’ve been asked to design a personalized digital experience, whether it’s a public website, user portal, or native application. Yet while there continues to be no shortage of marketing hype around personalization platforms, we still have very few standardized approaches for implementing personalized UX. Article Continues Below That’s where we come in. After completing dozens of personalization projects over the past few years, we gave ourselves a goal: could you create a holistic personalization framework specifically for UX practitioners? The Personalization Pyramid is a designer-centric model for standing up human-centered personalization programs, spanning data, segmentation, content deliver...
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#494: {Student Success} From Deleting Her Email List To Doubling It During Her Launch with Isobel Anderson – Amy Porterfield
5Sep By AmyNo Comments
email list, email list growth, facebook, facebook marketing, Live coaching, live launch, mindset, podcast, Social Marketing Strategies, social media, social media marketing, student success, tiered launch

#494: {Student Success} From Deleting Her Email List To Doubling It During Her Launch with Isobel Anderson – Amy Porterfield

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
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See How Paula Rizzo Grow Her List to 13,000+ Subscribers Using AWeber
26Jul By Sean TinneyNo Comments
case study, Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, Internet marketing, Online Marketing, Success

See How Paula Rizzo Grow Her List to 13,000+ Subscribers Using AWeber

By Sean Tinney July 15, 2022 See what steps this entrepreneur took to grow her email list. And see how you can do it too, using AWeber. Paula Rizzo was apartment hunting in New York City. She knew what she wanted in her new space, but she kept getting distracted by non-essential amenities like wine refrigerators. (Although the term “non-essential” is up for debate.) To make her life easier, she made a comprehensive list of everything she needed in an apartment. Her list helped her score the perfect place. It also sparked the idea for Paula’s business, List Producer, and her book, Listful Thinking. 13,000+ subscribers and growing Paula started her blog before she wrote her book to gauge interest in the topic of list-making. Her first task? Making a list, naturally. ...
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The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2022
12Jul By Katrina KirschNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, Internet marketing, Online Marketing

The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2022

Webinars, video campaigns, and social media posts are relatively new channels for marketers to reach their customers. But, your contemporary communication methods shouldn’t distract you from one of the oldest, yet most effective, strategies — email marketing. In fact, email ROI is an impressive $36 for every $1 spent.  (more…)
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Is It Time for a Rethink? – A List Apart
14Jun By byNo Comments
building website, Code, creating a website, CSS, google web designer, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Is It Time for a Rethink? – A List Apart

The mobile-first design methodology is great—it focuses on what really matters to the user, it’s well-practiced, and it’s been a common design pattern for years. So developing your CSS mobile-first should also be great, too…right?  Article Continues Below Well, not necessarily. Classic mobile-first CSS development is based on the principle of overwriting style declarations: you begin your CSS with default style declarations, and overwrite and/or add new styles as you add breakpoints with min-width media queries for larger viewports (for a good overview see “What is Mobile First CSS and Why Does It Rock?”). But all those exceptions create complexity and inefficiency, which in turn can lead to an increased testing effort and a code base that’s harder to maintain. Admit it—how many ...
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How To Grow Your Email List With Social Media: 10 Experts Share Their Best Tip
22May By Pam NeelyNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, Internet marketing, Learn, list building, Online Marketing, social media

How To Grow Your Email List With Social Media: 10 Experts Share Their Best Tip

By Pam Neely May 19, 2022 Social media can be a fantastic way to find more email subscribers – if you use the right tactics. Social media and email marketing… are they two competing channels, completely separate? Or complementary channels that can amplify each other?  We say they can amplify each other. Big time. And so do ten of the top social media experts.  We reached out to each of these influencers because they are experts in a specific social media platform. They know their stuff, cold. We asked them for their best tip on how to grow an email list with social media right now. These aren’t the general, tired tips you’ve heard so many times before. These are the proven, under-the-radar stuff that actually works – the same tactics these influencers have used to gr...
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Designers, (Re)define Success First – A List Apart
16May By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, google web designer, Industry, internet design, User Experience, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design, Workflow & Tools

Designers, (Re)define Success First – A List Apart

About two and a half years ago, I introduced the idea of daily ethical design. It was born out of my frustration with the many obstacles to achieving design that’s usable and equitable; protects people’s privacy, agency, and focus; benefits society; and restores nature. I argued that we need to overcome the inconveniences that prevent us from acting ethically and that we need to elevate design ethics to a more practical level by structurally integrating it into our daily work, processes, and tools. Article Continues Below Unfortunately, we’re still very far from this ideal.  At the time, I didn’t know yet how to structurally integrate ethics. Yes, I had found some tools that had worked for me in previous projects, such as using checklists, assumption tracking, and “dark realit...
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25 Free or Cheap Ways to Build an Email List from Scratch
3May By Kelsey JohnsonNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, grow email list, Internet marketing, Learn, Online Marketing

25 Free or Cheap Ways to Build an Email List from Scratch

By Kelsey Johnson April 26, 2022 Starting an email marketing list? Here are 25 ways to get subscribers without an audience. Building an engaged audience is one of the best marketing strategies around. And email is one of the most effective channels. But what’s the best way to get started? How do you grow an email list without an existing audience to market to? If you’re starting from scratch — or are looking to boost your list growth — we’ve got a slew of list building ideas for you. Read on for 25 free or budget-friendly ways to grow your list, even if you don’t already have followers somewhere else. Note: Ideas that require payment will have a U.S. dollar sign ($) next to them. Jump ahead to your favorite list growth idea: Optimize website signupsWebsite chatb...
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How to Build (and Grow) Your Email List with Facebook
9Mar By Sean TinneyNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, grow email list, Internet marketing, Learn, Online Marketing, social media

How to Build (and Grow) Your Email List with Facebook

By Sean Tinney March 8, 2022 Facebook can be an extremely efficient and cost effective channel to grow your email list. See how easy it can be with these tips. When it comes to building an email list, the challenge is finding people who are interested in your brand. Whether you’re starting from scratch or seeing a plateau in email signups, it’s time to find new marketing tactics to reach customers where they are.  That’s where Facebook comes in.  With over 2.9 billion active monthly users, Facebook is a powerful tool for lead generation. But you don’t want just anyone signing up for your emails. With Facebook, you can define an audience and run targeted campaigns to help find the right audience and grow your list with more relevant leads. Do you have doubts...
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13 Ways to Build Your Email List For Free
2Mar By Ron StefanskiNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, Email Marketing, email outreach, grow email list, Internet marketing, Learn, Online Marketing

13 Ways to Build Your Email List For Free

By Ron Stefanski March 1, 2022 You don’t need a large marketing budget, you just need these strategies for building your email list – at no cost. This article isn’t written to convince you of the benefits of using email marketing. You already know that “the money is in the list,” and that email marketing has an ROI of over $36 for each $1 spent. In this article, we take a look at 13 ways to build an email list so you can communicate more effectively with your customers and get better results from your marketing strategies – all without having to pay a single cent.  Ready? Let’s get into it.  Integrate email sign-up forms on a social landing pagePersonalize your CTAsCapture email after an online saleUse a live chat tool to gather emailsPop-up survey or quizOffer disco...
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Breaking Out of the Box – A List Apart
13Dec By byNo Comments
building website, Code, creating a website, CSS, google web designer, internet design, responsive web design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Breaking Out of the Box – A List Apart

CSS is about styling boxes. In fact, the whole web is made of boxes, from the browser viewport to elements on a page. But every once in a while a new feature comes along that makes us rethink our design approach. Article Continues Below Round displays, for example, make it fun to play with circular clip areas. Mobile screen notches and virtual keyboards offer challenges to best organize content that stays clear of them. And dual screen or foldable devices make us rethink how to best use available space in a number of different device postures. Sketches of a round display, a common rectangular mobile display, and a device with a foldable display. These recent evolutions of the web platform made it both more challenging and more interesting to design products. They’re great o...
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How to Sell UX Research with Two Simple Questions – A List Apart
28Oct By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, User Experience, User Research, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

How to Sell UX Research with Two Simple Questions – A List Apart

Do you find yourself designing screens with only a vague idea of how the things on the screen relate to the things elsewhere in the system? Do you leave stakeholder meetings with unclear directives that often seem to contradict previous conversations? You know a better understanding of user needs would help the team get clear on what you are actually trying to accomplish, but time and budget for research is tight. When it comes to asking for more direct contact with your users, you might feel like poor Oliver Twist, timidly asking, “Please, sir, I want some more.”  Article Continues Below Here’s the trick. You need to get stakeholders themselves to identify high-risk assumptions and hidden complexity, so that they become just as motivated as you to get answers from users. Basical...
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A Content Model Is Not a Design System – A List Apart
30Sep By byNo Comments
building website, content, Content Strategy, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

A Content Model Is Not a Design System – A List Apart

Do you remember when having a great website was enough? Now, people are getting answers from Siri, Google search snippets, and mobile apps, not just our websites. Forward-thinking organizations have adopted an omnichannel content strategy, whose mission is to reach audiences across multiple digital channels and platforms. Article Continues Below But how do you set up a content management system (CMS) to reach your audience now and in the future? I learned the hard way that creating a content model—a definition of content types, attributes, and relationships that let people and systems understand content—with my more familiar design-system thinking would capsize my customer’s omnichannel content strategy. You can avoid that outcome by creating content models that are semantic and ...
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Design for Safety, An Excerpt – A List Apart
29Aug By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, Process, Usability, User Experience, User Research, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Design for Safety, An Excerpt – A List Apart

Antiracist economist Kim Crayton says that “intention without strategy is chaos.” We’ve discussed how our biases, assumptions, and inattention toward marginalized and vulnerable groups lead to dangerous and unethical tech—but what, specifically, do we need to do to fix it? The intention to make our tech safer is not enough; we need a strategy. Article Continues Below This chapter will equip you with that plan of action. It covers how to integrate safety principles into your design work in order to create tech that’s safe, how to convince your stakeholders that this work is necessary, and how to respond to the critique that what we actually need is more diversity. (Spoiler: we do, but diversity alone is not the antidote to fixing unethical, unsafe tech.) The process for inclusi...
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Sustainable Web Design, An Excerpt – A List Apart
17Aug By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, design, google web designer, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, Web Strategy, website builder, website design

Sustainable Web Design, An Excerpt – A List Apart

In the 1950s, many in the elite running community had begun to believe it wasn’t possible to run a mile in less than four minutes. Runners had been attempting it since the late 19th century and were beginning to draw the conclusion that the human body simply wasn’t built for the task.  Article Continues Below But on May 6, 1956, Roger Bannister took everyone by surprise. It was a cold, wet day in Oxford, England—conditions no one expected to lend themselves to record-setting—and yet Bannister did just that, running a mile in 3:59.4 and becoming the first person in the record books to run a mile in under four minutes.  This shift in the benchmark had profound effects; the world now knew that the four-minute mile was possible. Bannister’s record lasted only forty-six days, when ...
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Voice Content and Usability – A List Apart
5Aug By byNo Comments
building website, content, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, Usability, User Experience, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Voice Content and Usability – A List Apart

We’ve been having conversations for thousands of years. Whether to convey information, conduct transactions, or simply to check in on one another, people have yammered away, chattering and gesticulating, through spoken conversation for countless generations. Only in the last few millennia have we begun to commit our conversations to writing, and only in the last few decades have we begun to outsource them to the computer, a machine that shows much more affinity for written correspondence than for the slangy vagaries of spoken language. Article Continues Below Computers have trouble because between spoken and written language, speech is more primordial. To have successful conversations with us, machines must grapple with the messiness of human speech: the disfluencies and pauses, ...
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Designing for the Unexpected – A List Apart
24Jul By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, design, google web designer, internet design, responsive design, responsive web design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Designing for the Unexpected – A List Apart

I’m not sure when I first heard this quote, but it’s something that has stayed with me over the years. How do you create services for situations you can’t imagine? Or design products that work on devices yet to be invented? Article Continues Below Flash, Photoshop, and responsive design#section2 When I first started designing websites, my go-to software was Photoshop. I created a 960px canvas and set about creating a layout that I would later drop content in. The development phase was about attaining pixel-perfect accuracy using fixed widths, fixed heights, and absolute positioning. Ethan Marcotte’s talk at An Event Apart and subsequent article “Responsive Web Design” in A List Apart in 2010 changed all this. I was sold on responsive design as soon as I heard about it, but ...
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How to Grow Your Email List with Instagram
9Jul By Kelly ForstNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, email list growth, Email Marketing, email outreach, instagram, Internet marketing, Learn, Online Marketing

How to Grow Your Email List with Instagram

By Kelly Forst July 6, 2021 Discover the value of Instagram for your business, not just as a social media marketing tool, but a platform for growing your email list. As a small business owner, you already understand the importance of optimizing your marketing budget. And while there’s no denying that Instagram and other social media sites can be excellent platforms for marketing your small business, what many business owners don’t realize is that they can actually use these tools to grow their email lists as well. So, what are some of the advantages of Instagram as a marketing tool and how can you harness its power to grow your email list? We’ve got you covered with some marketing tips and tricks geared specifically towards small business owners like you. If you...
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Getting Feedback – A List Apart
2Jul By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, design, google web designer, internet design, Process, User Experience, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Getting Feedback – A List Apart

“Any comment?” is probably one of the worst ways to ask for feedback. It’s vague and open ended, and it doesn’t provide any indication of what we’re looking for. Getting good feedback starts earlier than we might expect: it starts with the request.  Article Continues Below It might seem counterintuitive to start the process of receiving feedback with a question, but that makes sense if we realize that getting feedback can be thought of as a form of design research. In the same way that we wouldn’t do any research without the right questions to get the insights that we need, the best way to ask for feedback is also to craft sharp questions. Design critique is not a one-shot process. Sure, any good feedback workflow continues until the project is finished, but this is particular...
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Giving Feedback – A List Apart
20Jun By byNo Comments
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Giving Feedback – A List Apart

Feedback, in whichever form it takes, and whatever it may be called, is one of the most effective soft skills that we have at our disposal to collaboratively get our designs to a better place while growing our own skills and perspectives. Article Continues Below Feedback is also one of the most underestimated tools, and often by assuming that we’re already good at it, we settle, forgetting that it’s a skill that can be trained, grown, and improved. Poor feedback can create confusion in projects, bring down morale, and affect trust and team collaboration over the long term. Quality feedback can be a transformative force.  Practicing our skills is surely a good way to improve, but the learning gets even faster when it’s paired with a good foundation that channels and focuses the...
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That’s Not My Burnout – A List Apart
30May By byNo Comments
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That’s Not My Burnout – A List Apart

Are you like me, reading about people fading away as they burn out, and feeling unable to relate? Do you feel like your feelings are invisible to the world because you’re experiencing burnout differently? When burnout starts to push down on us, our core comes through more. Beautiful, peaceful souls get quieter and fade into that distant and distracted burnout we’ve all read about. But some of us, those with fires always burning on the edges of our core, get hotter. In my heart I am fire. When I face burnout I double down, triple down, burning hotter and hotter to try to best the challenge. I don’t fade—I am engulfed in a zealous burnout.  Article Continues Below So what on earth is a zealous burnout?#section2 Imagine a woman determined to do it all. She has two amazing childre...
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The Complete List of Social Media Holidays (2021 Edition)
25May By Katie SehlNo Comments
facebook, facebook marketing, instagram, Social Marketing Strategies, social media, social media marketing, Strategy, tiktok, twitter

The Complete List of Social Media Holidays (2021 Edition)

Organic reach is pretty hard to find for brands in 2021, with the rare exception of social media holidays. When coupled with the right hashtag, these holidays provide businesses with an occasion to reach a like-minded crowd. Who makes social media holidays up? Some days are the byproducts of marketing campaigns. Some were declared by official organizations such as the United Nations. Others seem to have been manifested by the sheer absurdity of the Internet. Some days have multiple holidays, such as May 7, which happens to be National Beer Day in the United States and World Health Day. Some days are about serious issues, other days are National Just Because Day (August 27). Some are strictly social media holidays, while many are holidays off social media, too. Not every social media holida...
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Do You Need to Localize Your Website? – A List Apart
20May By byNo Comments
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Do You Need to Localize Your Website? – A List Apart

Global markets give you access to new customers. All you need to do is inform potential buyers about your product or service.  Article Continues Below Your website is a good place to introduce your product or service outside your locale. Localizing your web content sounds like the right way to reach out to the global market. Localization will bridge the language barriers, or the wider scope of differing cultures.  Before we move on further with the discussion, let’s focus on the definition of “localization.”  What is localization?#section2 According to the Cambridge Dictionary, localization (as a marketing term) is “the process of making a product or service more suitable for a particular country, area, etc.,” while translation is “something that is translated, or the pr...
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Beware the Cut ‘n’ Paste Persona – A List Apart
10May By by ,No Comments
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Beware the Cut ‘n’ Paste Persona – A List Apart

This Person Does Not Exist is a website that generates human faces with a machine learning algorithm. It takes real portraits and recombines them into fake human faces. We recently scrolled past a LinkedIn post stating that this website could be useful “if you are developing a persona and looking for a photo.”  Article Continues Below We agree: the computer-generated faces could be a great match for personas—but not for the reason you might think. Ironically, the website highlights the core issue of this very common design method: the person(a) does not exist. Like the pictures, personas are artificially made. Information is taken out of natural context and recombined into an isolated snapshot that’s detached from reality.  But strangely enough, designers use personas to inspi...
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Immersive Content Strategy – A List Apart
29Apr By byNo Comments
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Immersive Content Strategy – A List Apart

Beyond the severe toll of the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps no other disruption has transformed user experiences quite like how the tethers to our formerly web-biased era of content have frayed. We’re transitioning to a new world of remote work and digital content. We’re also experimenting with unprecedented content channels that, not too long ago, elicited chuckles at the watercooler, like voice interfaces, digital signage, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Article Continues Below Many factors are responsible. Perhaps it’s because we yearn for immersive spaces that temporarily resurrect the Before Times, or maybe it’s due to the boredom and tedium of our now-cemented stuck-at-home routines. But aural user experiences slinging voice content, and immersive user experiences u...
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Now THAT’S What I Call Service Worker! – A List Apart
4Apr By byNo Comments
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Now THAT’S What I Call Service Worker! – A List Apart

The Service Worker API is the Dremel of the web platform. It offers incredibly broad utility while also yielding resiliency and better performance. If you’ve not used Service Worker yet—and you couldn’t be blamed if so, as it hasn’t seen wide adoption as of 2020—it goes something like this: Article Continues Below On the initial visit to a website, the browser registers what amounts to a client-side proxy powered by a comparably paltry amount of JavaScript that—like a Web Worker—runs on its own thread.After the Service Worker’s registration, you can intercept requests and decide how to respond to them in the Service Worker’s fetch() event. What you decide to do with requests you intercept is a) your call and b) depends on your website. You can rewrite requests, precache static...
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A Tale of Two Experts – A List Apart
26Mar By byNo Comments
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A Tale of Two Experts – A List Apart

Everyone wants to be an expert. But what does that even mean? Over the years I’ve seen two types of people who are referred to as “experts.” Expert 1 is someone who knows every tool in the language and makes sure to use every bit of it, whether it helps or not. Expert 2 also knows every piece of syntax, but they’re pickier about what they employ to solve problems, considering a number of factors, both code-related and not.  Article Continues Below Can you take a guess at which expert we want working on our team? If you said Expert 2, you’d be right. They’re a developer focused on delivering readable code—lines of JavaScript others can understand and maintain. Someone who can make the complex simple. But “readable” is rarely definitive—in fact, it’s largely based on the eyes of th...
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Keeping Your Design Mind New and Fresh – A List Apart
16Mar By byNo Comments
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Keeping Your Design Mind New and Fresh – A List Apart

“Only a fool knows everything.” Article Continues Below — African Proverb Since March 2020, most of us have been working from home, and the days blend into each other and look the same. This is not the first time I have experienced this type of feeling.  My commute — New York to New Jersey — is what folks in my area call the reverse commute.While going to the office, my days began to look the same: riding the subway to a bus to a shuttle to get to my job. Have you ever arrived at a destination and not even realized how you got there? This is how I began to experience the world everyday. I stopped paying attention to my surroundings. Because I worked a lot, the only time I would take off was for the holidays. During this time, I was a consultant and was coming to the end of a...
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Why You Should Clean Your Email List (and How to Do It)
11Mar By Kelly ForstNo Comments
clean email list, Deliverability, Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email best practices, Email Deliverability, email hygiene, email list, email list cleaning, Email Marketing, email outreach, Internet marketing, Online Marketing

Why You Should Clean Your Email List (and How to Do It)

By Kelly Forst March 9, 2021 Want to run a successful marketing campaign? Then it’s time to clean house. You built up your list of subscribers. Now it’s time to remove a bunch of them. Because a clean email list can work wonders.  In fact, cleaning your email list can improve three key metrics: deliverability, open rates and click rates. The better these metrics, the more successful your email marketing campaign will be. That’s because a smaller list of engaged subscribers — people who actively read and interact with your content and brand — are more valuable than a larger list of subscribers who never open your content. In fact, lists with numerous inactive email addresses typically have higher rates of bounces, spam complaints and unsubscribes than ones that do...
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How to Get a Dysfunctional Team Back on Track – A List Apart
9Mar By byNo Comments
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How to Get a Dysfunctional Team Back on Track – A List Apart

Maybe you’ve been part of a team that you’ve seen slowly slide into a rut. You didn’t notice it happen, but you’re now not shipping anything, no one’s talking to each other, and the management’s Eye of Sauron has cast its gaze upon you. Article Continues Below Maybe you’ve just joined a team that’s in the doldrums. Maybe the people who used to oil the wheels that kept everyone together have moved on and you’re having to face facts—you all hate each other. However you’ve ended up in this situation, the fact is that you’re now here and it’s up to someone to do something about it. And that person might be you. The first thing to understand is that you’re not the only person to ever encounter problems. Things like this happen all the time at work, but there are simple st...
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The Future of Web Software Is HTML-over-WebSockets – A List Apart
2Mar By byNo Comments
Application Development, building website, Code, creating a website, google web designer, HTML, internet design, responsive web design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

The Future of Web Software Is HTML-over-WebSockets – A List Apart

The future of web-based software architectures is already taking form, and this time it’s server-rendered (again). Papa’s got a brand new bag: HTML-over-WebSockets and broadcast everything all the time. Article Continues Below The dual approach of marrying a Single Page App with an API service has left many dev teams mired in endless JSON wrangling and state discrepancy bugs across two layers. This costs dev time, slows release cycles, and saps the bandwidth for innovation. But a new WebSockets-driven approach is catching web developers’ attention. One that reaffirms the promises of classic server-rendered frameworks: fast prototyping, server-side state management, solid rendering performance, rapid feature development, and straightforward SEO. One that enables multi-user coll...
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Designing Inclusive Content Models – A List Apart
22Feb By by ,No Comments
Accessibility, building website, content, Content Strategy, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Designing Inclusive Content Models – A List Apart

In the 1920s, Robert Moses designed a system of parkways surrounding New York City. His designs, which included overpasses too low for public buses, have become an often-cited example of exclusionary design and are argued by biographer Robert A. Caro to represent a purposeful barrier between the city’s Black and Puerto Rican residents and nearby beaches.  Article Continues Below Regardless of the details of Moses’s parkway project, it’s a particularly memorable reminder of the political power of design and the ways that choices can exclude various groups based on abilities and resources. The growing interest in inclusive design highlights questions of who can participate, and in relation to the web, this has often meant a focus on accessibility and user experience, as well as on ...
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The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems – A List Apart
13Feb By byNo Comments
building website, business, creating a website, design, google web designer, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, Web Strategy, website builder, website design

The Never-Ending Job of Selling Design Systems – A List Apart

I’m willing to bet that you probably didn’t start your web career because you wanted to be a politician or a salesperson. But here’s the cold, hard truth, friend: if you want to work on design systems, you don’t have a choice. Someone has to pay for your time, and that means someone has to sell what you do to an audience that speaks value in an entirely different language.  Article Continues Below It’s not exactly easy to connect the benefits of a design system directly to revenue. With an ecomm site, you can add a feature and measure the impact. With other conversion-based digital experiences, if your work is good, your customers will convert more. But because a design system is (usually) an internal tool, it’s just harder to connect those dots.  This article boils down the m...
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How To Build an Email List With Live Web Chat and Automated Messaging
19Jan By Vince MagalineNo Comments
best chatbot, chatbot, chatbot app, chatbot messenger, chatbot online, chatbot website, creating chatbots, facebook bot, facebook chatbot, facebook messenger bot, Growth Marketing, robot chat

How To Build an Email List With Live Web Chat and Automated Messaging

I learned the basics of how to build an email list from scratch some time ago. But it wasn’t until I needed to know how to build an email list before launching a new product that I learned how to build an email list with a website chatbot. Using a website form to collect emails usually results in a conversion rate between 1% to 10%, and the average website conversion rate is roughly 4%. However, with a chatbot, your email capture conversion rate can skyrocket. In fact, the website chatbot I’m about to show you increased our website conversion rate by over 100%. And this is why we love digital marketing, right? Because there’s always a better way to do what’s already been done thousands of times already.  So, what’s the secret to building a live chat widget that’s great at cap...
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Lead Magnets to Grow Your Email List: 22 Brilliant Ideas
30Dec By Kelly ForstNo Comments
Digital Marketing, digital mkt, email list, email list growth, Email Marketing, email outreach, how to grow email list, Internet marketing, lead magnet, lead magnet examples, lead magnets, Online Marketing

Lead Magnets to Grow Your Email List: 22 Brilliant Ideas

By Kelly Forst December 30, 2020 Need ideas for your lead magnet? Read this post to get 22 of them. If you want to maximize your email list growth, you need a lead magnet. A lead magnet is something you give people when they subscribe to your email list. And really, it can be anything – as long as it’s something your subscribers want. The only problem? Sometimes, it can be really difficult to come up with an idea for your lead magnet. You may struggle to figure out what your audience would want. You may worry that it’ll be too time consuming to create a lead magnet. You might doubt that your ideas are any good. Or, you may just be out of ideas. So what can you do about it? Check out these 22 brilliant lead magnets. Not only will you get proven ideas from...
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Daily Ethical Design – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
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Daily Ethical Design – A List Apart

Suddenly, I realized that the people next to me might be severely impacted by my work. Article Continues Below I was having a quick lunch in the airport. A group of flight attendants sat down at the table next to me and started to prepare for their flight. For a while now, our design team had been working on futuristic concepts for the operations control center of these flight attendants’ airline, pushing ourselves to come up with innovative solutions enabled by the newest technologies. As the control center deals with all activities around flying planes, our concepts touched upon everything and everyone within the airline. How was I to know what the impact of my work would be on the lives of these flight attendants? And what about the lives of all the other people working at the ai...
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Resilient Management, An Excerpt – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
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Resilient Management, An Excerpt – A List Apart

In Tuckman’s Stages of Group Development, the Storming stage happens as a group begins to figure out how to work together. Previously, each person had been doing their own thing as individuals, so necessarily a few things need to be ironed out: how to collaborate, how to hit goals, how to determine priorities. Of course there may be some friction here! Article Continues Below But even if your team doesn’t noticeably demonstrate this kind of internal Storming as they begin to gel, there might be some outside factors at play in your work environment that create friction. During times of team scaling and organizational change—the water we in the web industry are often swimming in—managers are responsible for things like strategy-setting, aligning their team’s work to company object...
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Part II – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
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Part II – A List Apart

You and the rest of the dev team lobbied enthusiastically for a total re-architecture of the company’s aging website. Your pleas were heard by management—even up to the C-suite—who gave the green light. Elated, you and the team started working with the design, copy, and IA teams. Before long, you were banging out new code. Article Continues Below It started out innocently enough with an npm install here and an npm install there. Before you knew it, though, you were installing production dependencies like an undergrad doing keg stands without a care for the morning after. Then you launched. Unlike the aftermath of most copious boozings, the agony didn’t start the morning after. Oh, no. It came months later in the ghastly form of low-grade nausea and headache of product owner...
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Getting to the Heart of Digital Accessibility – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
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Getting to the Heart of Digital Accessibility – A List Apart

Quick! Think of the word “developer” or “coder” — what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Maybe a whiteish male in his twenties living in a busy metropolis, wearing a nerdy t-shirt and hoodie? Someone a bit like Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe a younger Bill Gates or Sergey Brin? Any of the dudes from the HBO series Silicon Valley, perhaps? Certainly no one like me. Article Continues Below By tech standards, I’m old. I’m also female and a mother. I live in a midwestern town you’ve never heard of and will never visit — a town where the cows vastly outnumber the people. My hair color is (almost) natural and is no longer part of the ROYGBIV collection, so I have no perceived conference street cred. I own about a thousand geeky T-shirts, but never actually wear them in public, opting fo...
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An Essential Tool for Capturing Your Career Accomplishments – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
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An Essential Tool for Capturing Your Career Accomplishments – A List Apart

Imagine you’re ready to apply for your next job. Like most busy professionals, you probably haven’t updated your résumé or your portfolio since you looked for your current job.  Article Continues Below Now you need to update both, and you can’t remember what work you’ve done over the past few years. (In fact, you can barely remember what you’ve done over the past few months!) So you scramble to update your résumé with new content. Then you spend all weekend scraping together a new portfolio using screenshots of whatever work evidence you can find on your laptop. You submit the résumé and portfolio with your application, hoping you didn’t forget to include any major career milestones you achieved over the last few years.  This is the process most of us use to approach our jo...
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The Untapped Power of Vulnerability & Transparency in Content Strategy – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
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The Untapped Power of Vulnerability & Transparency in Content Strategy – A List Apart

In marketing, transparency and vulnerability are unjustly stigmatized. The words conjure illusions of being frightened, imperfect, and powerless. And for companies that shove carefully curated personas in front of users, little is more terrifying than losing control of how people perceive the brand. Article Continues Below Let’s shatter this illusioned stigma. Authentic vulnerability and transparency are strengths masquerading as weaknesses. And companies too scared to embrace both traits in their content forfeit bona fide user-brand connections for often shallow, misleading engagement tactics that create fleeting relationships. Transparency and vulnerability are closely entwined concepts, but each one engages users in a unique way. Transparency is how much information you sha...
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Part III – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
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Part III – A List Apart

You’ve done everything you thought was possible to address your website’s JavaScript problem. You relied on the web platform where you could. You sidestepped Babel and found smaller framework alternatives. You whittled your application code down to its most streamlined form possible. Yet, things are just not fast enough. When websites fail to perform the way we as designers and developers expect them to, we inevitably turn on ourselves: Article Continues Below “What are we failing to do?” “What can we do with the code we have written?” “Which parts of our architecture are failing us?” These are valid inquiries, as a fair share of performance woes do originate from our own code. Yet, assigning blame solely to ourselves blinds us to the unvarnished truth that a sizable onslaught...
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Caching Strategies in the Age of PWAs – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
Browsers, building website, Code, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, responsive web design, The Server Side, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Caching Strategies in the Age of PWAs – A List Apart

Once upon a time, we relied on browsers to handle caching for us; as developers in those days, we had very little control. But then came Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), Service Workers, and the Cache API—and suddenly we have expansive power over what gets put in the cache and how it gets put there. We can now cache everything we want to… and therein lies a potential problem. Article Continues Below Media files—especially images—make up the bulk of average page weight these days, and it’s getting worse. In order to improve performance, it’s tempting to cache as much of this content as possible, but should we? In most cases, no. Even with all this newfangled technology at our fingertips, great performance still hinges on a simple rule: request only what you need and make each request ...
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Making Room for Variation – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
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Making Room for Variation – A List Apart

A note from the editors: A List Apart is pleased to present this excerpt chapter from Yesenia Perez-Cruz's new book Expressive Design Systems, available now on A Book Apart. Making a brand feel unified, cohesive, and harmonious while also leaving room for experimentation is a tough balancing act. It’s one of the most challenging aspects of a design system. Article Continues Below Graphic designer and Pentagram partner Paula Scher faced this challenge with the visual identity for the Public Theater in New York. As she explained in a talk at Beyond Tellerrand: I began to realize that if you made everything the same, it was boring after the first year. If you changed it individually for each play, the theater lost recognizability. The thing to do, which I totally got for ...
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Standards for Writing Accessibly – A List Apart
27Dec By by ,No Comments
Accessibility, building website, content, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, User Experience, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design, Writing

Standards for Writing Accessibly – A List Apart

Writing to meet WCAG2 standards can be a challenge, but it’s worthwhile. Albert Einstein, the archetypical genius and physicist, once said, “Any fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.” Article Continues Below Hopefully, this entire book will help you better write for accessibility. So far, you’ve learned: Why clarity is importantHow to structure messages for error states and stress casesHow to test the effectiveness of the words you write All that should help your writing be better for screen readers, give additional context to users who may need it, and be easier to parse. But there are a few specific points that you may not otherwise think about, even after reading ...
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Cross-Cultural Design – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, design, google web designer, internet design, responsive web design, Typography & Web Fonts, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Cross-Cultural Design – A List Apart

When I first traveled to Japan as an exchange student in 2001, I lived in northern Kyoto, a block from the Kitayama subway station. Article Continues Below My first time using the train to get to my university was almost a disaster, even though it was only two subway stops away. I thought I had everything I needed to successfully make the trip. I double- and triple-checked that I had the correct change in one pocket and a computer printout of where I was supposed to go in the other. I was able to make it down into the station, but then I just stood at a ticket machine, dumbfounded, looking at all the flashing lights, buttons, and maps above my head (Fig 5.1). Everything was so impenetrable. I was overwhelmed by the architecture, the sounds, the signs, and the language. Fig 5...
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Usability Testing for Voice Content – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
building website, content, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, Usability, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Usability Testing for Voice Content – A List Apart

It’s an important time to be in voice design. Many of us are turning to voice assistants in these times, whether for comfort, recreation, or staying informed. As the interest in interfaces driven by voice continues to reach new heights around the world, so too will users’ expectations and the best practices that guide their design. Article Continues Below Voice interfaces (also known as voice user interfaces or VUIs) have been reinventing how we approach, evaluate, and interact with user interfaces. The impact of conscious efforts to reduce close contact between people will continue to increase users’ expectations for the availability of a voice component on all devices, whether that entails a microphone icon indicating voice-enabled search or a full-fledged voice assistant waiti...
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Jobs To Be Done – A List Apart
27Dec By byNo Comments
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Jobs To Be Done – A List Apart

In this chapter, you’ll learn about these plays: Article Continues Below How to create a jobs-driven roadmapUsing job stories to solve specific design problemsHow to architect the structure of a solutionTesting assumptions directed by JTBD A software company I once worked for held what were called “hackweeks” once a quarter. This was a time for developers to work on “whatever they wanted,” as it was framed. Give engineers time to play around with technology, and they’re bound to find the next innovation, or so the theory went. Hackweek was a big deal for us. Dozens of people organized it, and every developer in the company stopped work to contribute to the effort. It was costly, but we were committed to hackweek. After all, new software offerings come from new development, ...
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Figure It Out – A List Apart
27Dec By by ,No Comments
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Figure It Out – A List Apart

Color is, without a doubt, the visual element most often misunderstood and misused. Article Continues Below As mentioned earlier, when designing visual representations, color is often the first visual encoding that people use. It’s also quite limited to about a dozen, distinguishable colors. It’s a potent visual element, but one fraught with accessibility and perceptual problems. A general rule of thumb: Save color for things you want to draw people’s attention to. Start with grayscale representations. Add in color only later, where it might be really, really useful. That’s it. We can move along. Except… We need to dispel some popular beliefs about colors, beliefs that are often held up as truth, when, in fact, this is not the case. What’s presented in this short chapter is...
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Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice – A List Apart
26Dec By byNo Comments
Accessibility, building website, creating a website, google web designer, Industry, Industry & Business, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Web Accessibility, Inclusion & Social Justice – A List Apart

What would your life be like without the internet? Not if it didn’t exist at all, but if you were locked out of it? Would your days be different? Unrecognizable, even? Keeping your answers to that in mind, do you think access to the internet is a human right? Do we need to be able to access it to fully participate in modern society? To answer “yes” to these questions would have been unthinkable 20 years ago. Article Continues Below Living without internet#section2 Globally, over 40% of people still do not have access to the internet. That lack of access and the issues it creates have helped motivate digital equity initiatives like Tech Goes Home and the Good Things Foundation. Having no access to the internet creates problems in many parts of modern life. In the UK, bank br...
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A Designer’s Life with Color Vision Deficiency – A List Apart
26Dec By byNo Comments
Accessibility, building website, creating a website, design, google web designer, internet design, User Experience, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

A Designer’s Life with Color Vision Deficiency – A List Apart

So, what is it like to be color blind and also work in the web design and development industry? I’ll answer that question throughout this article, but it’s something that’s always factored into my thoughts, given my passion for design and now my career. I wonder if having “normal” vision would have made me a better artist growing up. Would it make me better at my job now? Would I have pursued a more design-oriented career, as opposed to one that’s more dev-focused? These are just some of the things that pop into my head. Article Continues Below As to my job and my color vision, no, colorblindness doesn’t affect my work as much as you’d think. During design meetings, I can quickly point out areas where we need to reconsider our color palette. While reviewing layouts, I’m able to e...
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Connecting with Technology – A List Apart
26Dec By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, google web designer, Interaction Design, internet design, User Experience, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Connecting with Technology – A List Apart

People don’t always need another human being to experience a sense of connection. The deep emotional bonds many people have with their pets proves this. (So might the popularity of the Pet Rock in the 1970s but that’s just speculation.) Even Link in The Legend of Zelda had an inanimate companion: his trusty sword (see Figure 9.1). Article Continues Below Fig 9.1 Even the company of a wooden sword is better than venturing into Hyrule alone. It’s also possible for people to feel that sense of connection in the context of behavior change without having direct relationships with others. By building your product in a way that mimics some of the characteristics of a person-to-person relationship, you can make it possible for your users to feel connected to it. It is possible to coax...
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Connecting the Dots – A List Apart
26Dec By byNo Comments
building website, Career, creating a website, Creativity, google web designer, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Connecting the Dots – A List Apart

Two plans: one for design, one for culture. Article Continues Below What I’ve found is that the DNA between both dynamics must be inextricable from one another. Creating with compassion in an environment fueled by compassion means we never lose sight of what it’s all about: people. Beyond functioning in this manner because “it’s the right thing to do,” quality of work, loyalty internally (team) and externally (users), and product innovation are all benefits to reap. Earlier we talked through the concept of “simplicity” and its application to creation and environment. Now, let’s revisit a few other examples of healthy benchmarks from a creative culture as we’ve discussed in this book: Slowing down / pausing with intentEveryone has a seat at the tableThe New Day One In tak...
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Webwaste – A List Apart
26Dec By byNo Comments
building website, creating a website, google web designer, Industry, Industry & Business, internet design, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, website builder, website design

Webwaste – A List Apart

A note from the editors: We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Chapter 9 of Gerry McGovern's Book World Wide Waste, from Silver Beach. In 1994, there were 3,000 websites. In 2019, there were estimated to be 1.7 billion, almost one website for every three people on the planet. Not only has the number of websites exploded, the weight of each page has also skyrocketed. Between 2003 and 2019, the average webpage weight grew from about 100 KB to about 4 MB. The results? Article Continues Below “In our analysis of 5.2 million pages,” Brian Dean reported for Backlinko in October 2019, “the average time it takes to fully load a webpage is 10.3 seconds on desktop and 27.3 seconds on mobile.” In 2013, Radware calculated that the average load time for a webpage on mobile was 4.3 se...
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A Framework for Design Conversations – A List Apart
26Dec By byNo Comments
building website, Community, content, creating a website, google web designer, internet design, Process, Project Management, web design, web design company, web designer, web page design, Web Strategy, website builder, website design

A Framework for Design Conversations – A List Apart

We’ve all been there. A client or coworker shows us this amazing thing they (and maybe their entire team) have worked on for hours or weeks. They are so proud of it. It’s new or maybe it just looks new. They may or may not ask you what you think—but you’re there to experience it. And your brain quietly screams. Article Continues Below As an experienced designer, you often have an intuitive reaction and can quickly spot bad designs; they may be visually incongruent, poorly structured, confusing, lack social awareness, or look like they are trying too hard. If your initial response is so negative that it slips through into your expression or voice or body language, it can completely sabotage any possibility of buy-in. And, far more seriously, it can ruin the relationship of trus...
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How to Grow Your Email List With a High-Converting Free Offer : Social Media Examiner
23Dec By Dana MalstaffNo Comments
email list, facebook, facebook marketing, How To, Social Marketing Strategies, Social Meda Strategy, social media, social media marketing

How to Grow Your Email List With a High-Converting Free Offer : Social Media Examiner

Social Media Marketing Industry Report In our 12th annual social media study (46 pages, 60+ charts) of 5,200+ marketers, you'll discover which social networks marketers most plan on using, organic social activities, paid social media plans, and much more! Get this free report and never miss another great article from Social Media Examiner.
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