Last week, WP Engine employees from all over the U.S. came together at our Austin headquarters for the first biannual All-Hands event of 2019. All Hands is a two-day event in which employees from other offices and teams around the country get the chance to collaborate and strategize with one another. This year’s theme was “Boldly Go” in honor of the famous sci-fi saga Star Trek. This event agenda was full of events to help nurture growth at both the individual level as well as company-wide. Not to mention, we got to have some fun!
Events on the agenda included team lunches, information sessions, inspirational speeches, a Hackathon, advice panels, trivia, and...
The process of disabling the 5.0 editor should not be a hassle. In the coming days, we will be rolling out an admin notice that will display on the Dashboard page* of your site(s). This notice will have information about adopting the new editor and will provide buttons to install/activate the
At the end of September, we held our 2018 WP Engine Summit in Austin, Texas. Last week, agencies, brands, and digital innovators from EMEA came together in London for the WP Engine EU Summit. Attendees discussed the future of digital experiences, Gen Z’s perception of the Internet, and the
At WP Engine, we believe our people are the core of every success, award, milestone and every achievement. That’s because employees who truly feel empowered and validated by their workplace are energized to delight and inspire the customer in every interaction. When new employees walk through the
A Tale of Two Bubbles: Why Cryptocurrency Isn’t the Next Dot-Com
While the dot-com bust had some ripple effects on the world economy, the rise and fall of Silicon Valley was far more localized. Cryptocurrency is traded across the world, and countries are taking vastly different approaches in their adoption and regulation of it. South Korea only recently started
A marketplace solution for IoT development through decentralized smart contract ledger
Smart contracts can alleviate skill shortage by enabling a contract based hiring through a platform where clients can access a number of developers across the world and with whom they can sign up a contract. As IoT development requires input from developers in different domains like cloud, edge and
Freewheeling Freelancers will Dominate the Future Jobs Market
Today, if you need a 2,500 in-depth article about a niche aspect of your industry you only need to look online, and in a matter of clicks, you could be in touch with an individual in possession of all the required knowledge that’s willing to complete your piece. This sort of freelance
Beyond Usability: 3 User Experiences Reshaping Their Industries
Unless you have an unlimited clothes budget, it’s unrealistic (and wasteful) to wear a new outfit for every single occasion, yet social media pressures us into it. Rent a Runway solves this tension elegantly by recycling (expensive) clothes across a large set of women. It’s an example of the
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Experience Design: Bridging Brand Intention and Brand Interpretation
The strengthening of consumer voices across a variety of channels (especially social channels) has led to an increasingly common conversation about who owns Brand: the company or its customers? While public consumer complaints often reach other customers and influence them as much as messages put
Design Thinking 101
Each phase is meant to be iterative and cyclical as opposed to a strictly linear process, as depicted below. It is common to return to the two understanding phases, empathize and define, after an initial prototype is built and tested. This is because it is not until wireframes are prototyped and
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
Help People Create Passwords That They Can Actually Remember
People naturally choose personal information when creating passwords, sometimes so personal—pets’ names, a wedding anniversary and street address—that they become easy to infer and mar the system’s security. But we can encourage people to instead use details that are not easy to guess
What the Erroneous Hawaiian Missile Alert Can Teach Us About Error Prevention
Another application-design heuristic violated by the Hawaiian warning system is the ability to undo an erroneous command. The sending of messages cannot literally be undone, which is why a confirmation step is appropriate before the system starts sending. But one can at least send out a second
M-Commerce: Terrible UX
Ecommerce sites should also be more meticulous in following the UX guidelines for ecommerce design. Doing so would improve sales on both desktop and mobile, but probably generate a bigger lift on mobile. My reason for this belief is that mobile devices are inherently a weaker user-interface
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The Slow Tail: Time Lag Between Visiting and Buying
Dr. Alan Rimm-Kaufman from the Rimm-Kaufman Group recently tracked one million clicks on search ads on Google and Yahoo. These advertising clicks eventually translated into 41,377 conversions on the target websites. Although the clients in question must remain anonymous, they presumably have
Comparison Tables for Products, Services, and Features
With this kind of comparison table implementation, you’ll be able to control how the information is displayed on the page. For example, you can change the copy to fit the space constraints of one cell. Note, however, that this implementation is not as easily scalable as dynamic comparison tables
Killing Off the Global Navigation: One Trend to Avoid | Nielsen Norman Group
The true cost of hiding global navigation categories becomes apparent when we look at lower-level pages such as product description pages. Quite often users arrive directly at these lower-level pages, rather than coming in through the homepage. The exact page content may not be quite what the user
Beware Horizontal Scrolling and Mimicking Swipe on Desktop
Scrolling and “swiping” horizontally on the desktop is a different experience than on touchscreen tablets and mobile devices. This is one more example of why it is important to understand that people use mobile devices, tablets, and desktops differently, and why it’s beneficial to optimize
Web Page Footers 101: Design Patterns and When to Use Each
For the footer to be helpful it needs to be present on all pages of the site. Some sites try to utilize the same footer for both static-length and dynamic-length pages. However, when users attempt to use these footers on sites with infinite scroll, it often becomes a frustrating game of
A 60-Second Trailer of the 60-Day Report on Cybersecurity
She explained that the original design of the Internet was driven more by considerations of interoperability rather than security, and as a result we are now faced with almost insurmountable issues. Some examples include online criminals who steal our information, mass bandits who have the ability
How Blockchain Changes Nowadays Business Security
Blockchain is not only used to enable transparency with smart contracts. This technology plays a crucial role in data storage, revolutionizing the way we keep our data secure from leaks, phishing, and other cybersecurity threats. We all know about cloud computing and centralized servers like Google
How to Upgrade Your Cyber Defenses to Protect Growth
One of the many misconceptions about cybersecurity is that attacks are an all-or-nothing proposition — you either survive or you don’t. But surviving isn’t the same as getting back to full strength. And at a small business, particularly a tech startup with big ambitions, even a minor setback
How to Manage Conflict at Work
You may think that you have the world’s most exceptional colleagues, but sooner or later, you’ll have a conflict at work. Unfortunately, conflict at work and misunderstandings happen all the time, so managing them in a proper way to minimize their effect on your productivity is critical to
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Meet Meural, Fine Art on My Walls at Home
It has been shocking and revealing to realize that I didn’t even really know these people I’ve worked with for years. Stories are told that we have never heard before. “Bro, what did you put a pic of a 1950’s toaster up on the Meural for?” “Well, that was sold in my grandfather’s
Despite What You Hear, You Don’t Need VC Funding
According to the most recent edition of PitchBook’s Venture Monitor, the first half of 2018 saw 94 investment deals surpassing the $100 million mark, continuing a trend in which late-stage successful startups and larger companies receive the lion’s share of VC funding allocations. That’s
WP Engine All Hands Spring 2019: US | The Illusion of Completeness: What It Is and How to Avoid It
The Illusion of Completeness: What It Is and How to Avoid It
The illusion of completeness can occur anywhere on the page, not just at the top (as in the example above). A break in content marked by a horizontal line that spans the width of the page can create a visual barrier and discourage people to scroll further. If users encounter these strong horizontal
Do Government Agencies and Non-Profits Get ROI From Usability?
Most users clicked on the top link, which is a typical response to an unclear set of choices. The top link led to a confusing site that looked as if it were recruiting police officers rather than health care personnel. The previous VA jobs page (above) had told job seekers to "simply" click on the
Customer-Service Information on Websites: The Hub-and-Spoke Model
Many sites label customer-service pages differently, so what is under the Returns link on one site will be found under FAQs on another, or under Customer Service on yet another site. For this reason, users may find themselves making a best guess as to which customer-service page holds the
