SXSW 2019 is just days away. Beginning this Friday , digital pioneers, business leaders, and artists from around the world will head to Austin for the annual festival. For ten days, the capital city will be bustling with the best of music, technology, and film.
WP Engine is proud to take part in SXSW 2019, and this year, WP Engine CEO Heather Brunner will take part in two different panel discussions. WP Engine will also host two networking events alongside tech partners AWS and Google Cloud. Additionally, we will host a party for our WP Engine affiliates. Finally, in partnership with our digital marketing magazine Velocitize , thought leaders from...
The Stevie Awards are a set of hundreds of business awards given annually by the American Business Awards organization. They were created in 2002 to recognize the accomplishments and contributions of companies and business people worldwide. Gold, Silver, and Bronze Stevie Awards are given to
Last week, our first hackathon of the year kicked off with more than a dozen teams and respective projects. After the 48-hour build period was up, those groups presented their cutting edge ideas to a packed audience of WP Engine employees. The presentations lasted an entire day, and only after all
What is a child theme? A child theme works in combination with the parent theme. With regards to Genesis, child themes serve as a sort of skin that can change the way a theme looks, while relying on the functionality of its parent theme (in this case, Genesis). Child themes offer users the added
9 Blockchains Transforming the Way We Pay, Play, and Work
Look past digital currencies’ nosebleed pricing volatility, and you’ll discover a robust, decentralized, secure database. Brands and technologists are quickly figuring out how to put this powerful ledger to good use. Here are several real-world examples that demonstrate cryptos’
3 Reasons Decentralization is the Future of Currency
Governments have all sorts of tools at their disposal affect currency rates. If they merely print more money—as they did during the recovery from the last crash—the value of the currency will fall. If they change interest rates, they affect the supply of money available, also changing its
Blockchain-Based Data Security Taking Over Key Industries
One of the leading innovators in blockchain technology has been ALTR. In June 2018, ALTR made a splash in the healthcare scene with its announcement of multi-million-dollar funding to advance is blockchain cybersecurity initiative. The company’s proprietary Altrchain technology, a blockchain
The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques
Banner ads, ads that could be dismissed through a user action, and video ads that could be skipped received some positive comments, although most of the comments were negative in affect. The distinction here is that users positively viewed advertisements which could be skipped or ignored, in which
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Alternative Payment Methods Enable International Purchases
In Chile, consumers who want to pay with their debit card must carry around a special key fob, also known as a “disconnected token” that generates one-time passwords, which users then manually input into a website’s checkout flow to complete the purchase. While secure, this method has several
The Most Hated Online Advertising Techniques
To understand how ads compared with each other, we ran multiple comparison tests (using Tukey contrasts). We found that, for most advertisement types, the mobile and the desktop counterparts did not differ significantly, with the exception of related links and the prevideo advertisement (p<
Progress Indicators Make a Slow System Less Insufferable
Start the progressive animation slower and allow it to move faster as it approaches the end. This way you don’t risk establishing a faster expectation than the system can maintain. Exceeding customer expectations always creates more satisfaction than disappointing customers by delivering less
10 Best Application UIs
When it comes to modal dialog boxes, our winners have very distinct ideologies. At one extreme is Seating Management. As a real-time application monitoring a physical environment, Seating Management didn't set out to interrupt hostess work in any way. If a hostess wants to seat 5 guests at a table
When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods
While most usability studies should rely more on behavior, methods that use self-reported information can still be quite useful to designers. For example, card sorting provides insights about users' mental model of an information space, and can help determine the best information architecture
After Healthcare.gov was rescued, the United States Digital Service (USDS), 18F, and Code for America formed to address US government digital transformation and usable services, following in the footsteps of the U.K. government Digital Service. The 18F sign-in form pattern (shown above
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Accot-Zhai Steering Law: Implications for UI Design
Many users will attempt to move diagonally from Find to an item in the child menu, but, because in doing so their mouse will cross the area for Spelling and Grammar, the target submenu will be lost and instead the Spelling and Grammar one will be opened. (Note that older versions of MacOS
Applying Discounts and Promotions on Ecommerce Websites
If you must support coupon codes in situations when a coupon may not be available on the site, it’s best not to provide an open text field. A better solution is to provide a text link to expose a text field. This design is less likely to prime users and send them on a coupon quest as many
Fight Against “Right-Rail Blindness”
Users are extremely goal oriented. They look for information they care about and ignore anything others want to push on them. In fact, users have evolved an active system of self-defense against ads. That’s because on the web they are constantly barraged with attempts to capture their attention
Exhaustive Review or "I Can't Believe It's Not There" Phenomenon
She first looked in the main content area, a grey rectangle with text, positioned in the upper left, just below the navigation. Here was his full name, that he batted right and threw left, weighed 200 pounds and stood at 6 feet tall. It included important dates, like his birthday, major-league
Adding an Item to a Shopping Cart: Provide Clear, Persistent Feedback
This is a relatively old usability problem for ecommerce websites — we reported on it in in a previous round of ecommerce user research, and we warned publicly about this design flaw as one of the top-3 bad new ecommerce design trends in 2014. I guess we warned in vain, because the same problem
JS-Kit Score: Turn Your Site into a Localized Digg
Widget provider JS-Kit has released their latest widget this morning, Score. Score adds a thumbs up/thumbs down-style ratings widget to any page content, and then aggregates the data across the entire web site into an info box that can highlight a site’s top content. It can also integrate
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. “We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,” she added. It requires “leading from the top” from
Smart data exchange will bring value to smart city innovation
This kind of technology in progress and shared data would increase opportunities for innovation in this space. For example, smart app, Just Park, that sells parking spaces that guide you not only to the stadium but your seat. Smart stadiums can also benefit staff and officials through accurate
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Finally, Hathaway sees this as a unique opportunity for the United States to work with countries around the world, and with organizations on an extremely local level. “We cannot succeed if our government works in isolation,” she added. It requires “leading from the top” from
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The Role of IT or an IT Consultant Provider for Business Growth
A business that continually has network problems or connectivity problems will lose business. An employee can’t work effectively when they don’t have the correct tools or appropriate access to the online information is lowered prices. If all of the work is managed by one IT person or
9 Steps to Assess Whether a Startup is Suitable for Investment
Also, keep in mind the presence of earning potential, sustainable competitive advantage and potential market share. Finally, the “what” is focusing on the questions regarding the list of top customers, strategic relationships. Suppliers need to be considered, as well as on the thorough analysis
Join WP Engine at SXSW 2019 | Photos as Web Content
Photos as Web Content
This is a good example of why it's not always good to copy the biggest sites' designs. Because Amazon hawks a monstrously wide product range, they use a standardized gallery layout that sort of works for many different category pages, without being optimized for any individual category. In
Video Usability
Video is everywhere. We’re watching it on our laptops, desktops, tablets and phones. Video can entertain and inform us, show us how a fabric flows, how a product works, how to tie a knot, where we can go on vacation, or even demonstrate how to think aloud during a usability study. But this format
Priming and User Interfaces
The aesthetics and look-and-feel of a page also create first impressions about a website and a business. Below, you can see the websites for two different Chinese-restaurants. You can probably easily identify which of the two restaurants is a chain just by looking at the homepage. Although users
