Topic: Web Strategy
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W3C is Getting Some Work Done
In 2014, W3C turns 20. In web years that's something like 200. We last redesigned the W3C homepage and other top pages in 2008 to provide more content, clearer navigation, and other conventions of site design. But a lot has changed in five years, and we want to revamp the site in time for our twentieth birthday.
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See What I Mean
We’re pleased to share an excerpt from Kevin Cheng’s new book, See What I Mean: How to Use Comics to Communicate Ideas, available now from Rosenfeld Media.
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Looking Beyond User-Centered Design
User-centered design has served the digital community well. So well, in fact, that I'm worried its dominance may actually be limiting our field. The terms “user experience design” (UX) and “user-centered design” (UCD) are often used interchangeably. But there's an important distinction.
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Usable yet Useless: Why Every Business Needs Product Discovery
Brasília is a remarkable, bizarre city. An architectural gem built to be Brazil’s “shiny citadel,” it’s now known as a violent, crime-ridden, and congested city—because the architects who designed it weren’t thinking about the millions of people who would live there. This myopia echoes across today’s web landscape as well, where we see monuments erected not for their users, but for the people who built them—and the VCs who are scouting them. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Rian van der Merwe shows us how to discover before we build.
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Product Management for the Web
Whether we prototype, write, design, develop, or test as part of building the web, we're creating something hundreds, thousands, or maybe even millions of people will use. But how do we know that we're creating the right enhancements for the web, at the right time, and for the right customers? Because our client or boss asked us to? And how do they know? Enter product management for the web, bridging the gap between leadership and customers on one side, and the user experience, content strategy, design, and development team on the other. Learn to set priorities that gradually but steadily make your product (and the web) better.
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For a Future-Friendly Web
It is time to move toward a future-friendly web. Our current device landscape is a plethora of desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, feature phones, smartphones, and more, but this is just the beginning. The rapid pace of technological change is accelerating, and our current processes, standards, and infrastructure are quickly reaching their breaking points. How can we deal with increasing device diversity and decreasing attention spans? Brad Frost of futurefriend.ly explains how, while this era of ubiquitous connectivity creates new challenges, it also creates tremendous opportunities to reach people wherever they may be.
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Web Governance: Becoming an Agent of Change
Shipping is easy, making real change is hard. To do meaningful web work, we need to educate clients on how their websites influence their business and the legal, regulatory, brand, and financial risks they face without strong web governance. Learn why web governance is important to us as web professionals and how to influence your clients to think carefully about how to align their websites to their business strategy.
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Strategic Content Management
Any web project more complex than a blog requires custom CMS design work. It’s tempting to use familiar tools and try to shoehorn content in—but we can’t select the appropriate tool until we’ve figured out the project’s specific needs. So what should a CMS give us, apart from a bunch of features? How can we choose and customize a CMS to fit a project’s needs? How can content strategy help us understand what those needs really are? And what happens a day, a week, or a year after we’ve installed and customized the CMS?
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Erskine Design Redesign
In a mere two years, Erskine Design grew from two people working at home into a full-fledged agency of eight, working with major clients. Their website needed to better reflect their achievements, abilities, and team strengths. They also sought to improve the quality of data collected during client inquiries. Simon Collison explores the agency’s thought processes, and the decisions they made as their own client.
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Get Out from Behind the Curtain
Client input: positive process or creative noose? Many designers would probably say the latter. But it needn't be that way. Adaptive Path's Sarah Nelson shows how to create collaborative work sessions that take the clients' needs in hand while leaving creative control in yours.
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Never Get Involved in a Land War in Asia (or Build a Website for No Reason)
If you don't know what the website you're working on is supposed to _do_, it's going to be really hard to succeed. Greg Storey offers a simple web strategy development process for everyone.
