Are you ready for 2019? More importantly, is your website? Web Week is designed to help you take advantage of low traffic and inactivity by encouraging you to make changes to your site, try out new things, and revamp for the new year.
During Web Week, we encourage our customers to take advantage of this low-stress time of year to create more personalized, dynamic, and better-performing digital experiences. For brands and agencies, this is the perfect time to kick your feet up, re-access, and get creative. It’s the ideal time to get inspired and do all the things you’ve been neglecting during the hectic holiday season.
I had never experienced a work culture as wonderful as the WP Engine culture before,” said Darren O’Dwyer, a Senior Talent Advisor at WP Engine’s Limerick office. “I love it here, the people genuinely enjoy working here, which makes the work environment a great place to be, and we have
Sifting through the thousands of themes in existence today is a daunting task, and finding the right one for your website is just part of the challenge. No one wants to trust their portfolio, online magazine, or e-commerce site to just any formulaic theme. Making sure it’s well designed, well
Heather’s leadership at WP Engine has been instrumental in helping the company build an enduring, predictable business, particularly after a key investment from Silver Lake last January, as well as the recent acquisition of StudioPress. Heather also heads a diverse leadership team and has
Robotics and Big Data are Transforming Nursing: 4 Key Insights
Sensors, apps, video chat, and other data-based healthcare tools allow nurses, doctors, and loved ones to monitor patients outside of the hospital. The FDA approved the adoption of a swallow-able pill — a digital smart pill — that stays in the system — monitoring any medications
CSS conversion of my Radio weblog
I’ve done a re-design of my Radio weblog, using CSS. Look ma, no tables! Yes, it’s now a tableless design. I’m doing my bit for the web standards cause, although I haven’t yet achieved 100% XHTML validation. For my re-design I used a CSS Zen Garden design by Michael Landis
Freewheeling Freelancers will Dominate the Future Jobs Market
The freedom of completing tasks on flexible terms is a critical appeal for the gig economy and has begun to draw nine to five workers bewildered at the pace of modern office-based life — and the expenses of the cities where they’re situated. Medium off-shoot The Startup has found that
Design Thinking 101
You can also repeat phases. It’s often necessary to do an exercise within a phase multiple times in order to arrive at the outcome needed to move forward. For example, in the define phase, different team members will have different backgrounds and expertise, and thus different approaches to
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Experience Design: Bridging Brand Intention and Brand Interpretation
Too often, teams will stop after the articulation of Brand attributes, with no understanding of what those words really mean, or how to apply those concepts to product or interface design. Create a framework to support the meaning of Brand attributes and extend them to different areas of experience
Cognitive Maps, Mind Maps, and Concept Maps: Definitions
Taking fuzzy, abstract concepts and making them tangible enhance team communication and creates common ground. It’s also make it easy for a team member to immediately spot something on the map and say, “that’s not right.” Maybe your colleague is right, and something wasn’t captured
The Anti-Mac User Interface (Don Gentner and Jakob Nielsen)
Bruce Tognazzini's Starfire film [19] was an attempt to show how a high-end workstation might look in the year 2004. The interface visualized in the film has several similarities to our Anti-Mac design: The system understands objects well enough to integrate them seamlessly (it can construct a 3-D
7 Tips for Successful Customization
Users often won’t bother to customize the site, even if the system is clear and simple to use. Because of this, don’t depend on customization to make a good experience. Generic site experiences, with no customization, should be strong enough to support users. You do not want a user staring at
Date-Input Form Fields: UX Design Guidelines
Formatting a date-entry field may seem like a minor detail; however, even small interactions can draw a process to a standstill if implemented improperly. Poorly designed date input leads to distressed or annoyed users — risking the abandonment of the form altogether. Even worse, if the user
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
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'About Us' Information on Corporate Websites - User Research Findings
Although this sounds obvious, for many organizations it’s quite difficult to do. We saw journalists, investors, and general web users baffled by numerous websites and unable to figure out what the organization did. Too often, companies erroneously assume that people understand their business and
Decision Making in the Ecommerce Shopping Cart: 4 Tips For Supporting Users
The shopping cart is not the only part of the ecommerce site that needs to support decision-making, but it is a frequently overlooked one. Websites should allow users to store future purchases in their carts too. Some people shop one day and pay a few days later, after they decide. It's not
Contextual Menus: Delivering Relevant Tools for Tasks
Having the right tools available in any given situation makes all the difference, especially when it comes to correctly and efficiently getting things done. Without the relevant tools, we waste time and are left feeling frustrated, lost, and confused. Just as bad: when there are too many tools
Brand Is Experience in the Digital Age
Brand is a tool for influencing choice. Brand is not made of visuals or words alone — it’s not a logo or a slogan. Nor is it a figurehead, such as Steve Jobs. Those things are simply ways to communicate the brand. Although a figurehead such as Elon Musk or a logo such as McDonald’s golden
The Role of Enhancement in Web Design
Occasionally, users can be familiar with a gesture but may have trouble performing it accurately. For example, scrolling down using a vertical scrollbar is a feature most adults are familiar with; however, keeping the mouse within that narrow bar is not an easy motor feat. As a result, most modern
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Melissa Hathaway came across our radar recently when President Obama tasked the former Bush administration aide with leading a 60-day review of Bush’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative; a largely classified, purported $30 billion, multi phase plan to address cybersecurity issues
The Potential “Holy Shit” Threats Surrounding AI and ML
Greats like Stephen Hawking warns that when people become unable to compete with advanced AI, “it could spell the end of the human race.” “I would say that one of the things we ought not to do is to press full steam ahead on building superintelligence without giving thought to the potential
In Mark Zuckerberg We Trust? The State and Future of Facebook, User Data, Cambridge Analytica, Fake News, Elections, Russia and You
Not everything is Facebook’s fault, according to Facebook. Mark places some of the onus ofresponsibility on Facebook userswho didn’t read the ToS, manage their data settings or fully understand what happens when you put your entire life online. In his view, and it’s a tough pill to
How To Validate Your Startup Idea
Idea Validation Landing Page It is an easy way to validate your startup idea. Because building a prototype takes less time and effort than creating a complete product. You can create multiple prototypes for better future development using customer reviews and basic market research. Some important
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A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Melissa Hathaway came across our radar recently when President Obama tasked the former Bush administration aide with leading a 60-day review of Bush’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative; a largely classified, purported $30 billion, multi phase plan to address cybersecurity issues
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
Melissa Hathaway came across our radar recently when President Obama tasked the former Bush administration aide with leading a 60-day review of Bush’s Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative; a largely classified, purported $30 billion, multi phase plan to address cybersecurity issues
Join WP Engine in Web Week 2018 | Maximize Content-to-Chrome Ratio, Not the Amount of Content on Screen
Maximize Content-to-Chrome Ratio, Not the Amount of Content on Screen
Eliminating the search box and replacing it with a magnifying-glass icon has become almost standard on mobile. It doesn’t work as well on the desktop: the space is simply too large and users don’t have the patience to hunt for a small search icon. If you consider using it on the desktop, keep
Priming and User Interfaces
Priming has been extensively studied in cognitive and social psychology, and such priming examples are pervasive in almost all aspects of everyday life; priming shapes our behaviors and reactions to the environment and is an often an effective shortcut that allows us to take quick decisions. It is
Usability Testing of Advanced Homepage Concepts (by Jakob Nielsen)
Users generally liked having news stories on the home page as opposed to reserving the page strictly for navigation. Some users expressed a preference for limiting the news coverage to a small number of stories in order to avoid scrolling. Several users related recent experiences where they had had
