We’re hiring again! Common Media is looking for an outstanding User Experience Designer to join our team in Hadley, MA. We’re a web design, development and consulting shop with a healthy mix of new and ongoing projects. We’re looking for an experienced UX professional who is passionate about designing beautiful, intuitive and functional websites.
Content precedes design. Design in the absence of content is not design, it's decoration. - Jeffrey Zeldman
We've all heard that content is king, yet when it comes to designing web experiences we're still stuck with lorem ipsum and placeholder images, as though the real content didn't matter.
We're still designing web experiences from the top down, starting with the desktop view of the homepage, even though they're more likely to be experienced from the bottom up - starting with a content detail page on a mobile device.
Today good website search engine optimization relies upon how content is framed and delivered. For Google to properly rank a website, it must interpret the websites context and strength of that context. In SEO we try to effect this by theming.
The website architecture is weak when SEO elements are missing or overly used. The website will bring a weakened theme to Google. SEO will suffer and perhaps can never be maximized. Even if the content is strong, it will always be framed in a weak structure.
Whether you’re using emails for newsletters, promotional content, or event invitations, you need to be able to reach your subscribers on whatever devices, operating systems, or email clients they are using. In this session, we’ll look at some of the challenges of sending responsive HTML emails (e.g., lack of client support for a variety of CSS rules) and how you can apply what you already know about HTML and CSS to overcome them. We’ll also talk about techniques (such as CSS injection) that can make coding your emails much easier.
We all want our Drupal sites to run faster. The need for speed only continues to increase as does the rapid growth of mobile users and the ever-expanding amount of rich content on the web. For many of us, Drupal is at the center – serving up our content to users who expect pages to load FAST. But despite its power, Drupal can be a performance bottleneck. For large projects, the solution may be as simple as provisioning additional hosting resources: more memory, additional server instances, load balancers, etc.
Are you dreading your upcoming web redesign, or so excited that you can't wait to start? Have you discussed it in a dozen committee meetings, or is it the red-headed stepchild, never mentioned? Are you suffering from too many good ideas or too many stakeholders?
In this rapidfire session we'll share 21 tips and tools for effectively designing, and building a website. User personas, sticky buckets, green machines, and many others. Tips on managing the design process, and photography no-nos.
Art is subjective. You like it or you don’t like it. But design is the science of art. It’s art with purpose. Design is about intent.
What do you want people to know, feel, and do?
Have your products been designed with intent? Are you willing to break out of your comfortable thought patterns and stretch your limits? Are you willing to test? To try? To fail?
