Mockingbird’s Wireframe Tool Now Sings To The Tune Of Real-Time Collaboration
If you’re setting out to design a new website, there are few better starting places than a wireframing service: they let you quickly get a rough idea of what your site will look like, without having to deal with paper cut-outs or endless pencil erasing. And today, one of the better wireframing services is leaving beta with some major new features in tow for its official launch. Meet Mockingbird. The bootstrapped, two-person startup launched around a year ago, offering a clean interface that’s based on the Cappuccino web framework (in other words, it isn’t in Flash, unlike many of its competitors).
A/B testing for headlines: Now available for WordPress
Audience data is the new currency in journalism. I don’t just mean the traditional Costco buy-in-bulk kind — “our readers are 52 percent male, 46 percent over $75,000 household income, 14 percent under age 35,” and so on. I mean data that looks at how individual readers interact with individual pieces of content. And beyond that shift there’s also the move from observational data — watching what your audience does — to experimental data, testing various ways of presenting or structuring content to see what works and what doesn’t. My desire for more experimental data is one reason why I’m very happy to point you to a new resource for sites built on WordPress (like this one): a new Headline Split Tester plugin, built by Brent Halliburton and Peter Bessman, two Baltimore developers.
3 Tips for Maximizing Engagement With Facebook Likes and Shares
David A. Yovanno is the CEO of Gigya, Inc., a leading social optimization platform for online business. He can be found on Twitter at @daveyovanno or e-mail dave(at)gigya(dot)com. When it comes to Facebook, if you’re uncertain where and when to place a “Like” button on your site and when to use “Share,” you’re not alone. Social sharing technologies have evolved significantly in the past several months, but it’s not as complicated as it may seem. Used in concert, "Like" and "Share" are some of the best tools around for driving referral traffic from social networks, opening new communication channels with customers and prospects, and building relationships with your best advocates.
A Beginner’s Guide to Website Feedback
The term “feedback” is coming close to finding itself in clichéd business word category (along with personal favorites “synergy” and “paradigm”). Even if for you the word itself isn’t necessarily something that you expect to see in a Dilbert cartoon, the thought of what feedback entails can be unpleasant. For many it conjures up visions of clueless coworkers asking you to add animated .gifs and flashing purple buttons to a page, or of a client submitting a list of 82 new items to create on their site even though you are on the ninth round of changes. If nothing else, getting feedback stinks because it’s more (usually boring) work for you, and let’s face it, you’d rather be doing something else.
Use Dropbox CDN for Hosting your WordPress Files
You may use Dropbox as a free CDN for hosting your WordPress static content like the JS, CSS and image files. For optimal site performance, it is recommended that you use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to host your website’s static content – like images, CSS and JavaScript files – since it effectively reduces the physical distance between the user’s browser and your content. A CDN is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is the one with the fewest network hops.
Track HTML5 Elements in Google Analytics
This week, I’ve had the opportunity to attend HighEdWeb, the 2010 edition. During this conference, I’ve been excited to hear institutions are experimenting with and leveraging the new technologies available in HTML5. Whether it’s Christopher Schmitt’s presentation, casual conversations in the hall or even discussions with some of the vendors, HTML5 is on the minds of many developers.
How User-Generated Content Is Changing SEO
Cathy Halligan is the senior vice president of sales and marketing for PowerReviews. Prior to joining PowerReviews, she was chief marketing officer and vice president of product management and multichannel integration at Walmart.com. Halligan also held executive positions at Williams-Sonoma, Gymboree and Lands' End. Google is at the social game again with the recent unveiling of Google+, a big bet for the company and an effort to show that it can keep up with Facebook in this increasingly important space. However, it’s important to recognize that the launch of Google+ is not just a run at Facebook — it’s a reflection of the increasing importance the company places on social signals in how it indexes, ranks and presents information to consumers. And despite some well-publicized failures in the past, Google has already had some significant success in social that has eluded the media spotlight.
Useful Free Web UI Elements PSD Packs
Everyone Likes Freebies, and when those freebies saves you a lot of time they surely become priceless and worth a mention, and we are here with a neat and useful roundup of all the web UI Elements every designer/web developer must download. Nothing more useful than saving some time which you were going to spend designing these. Need more? check out other GUI and PSD freebies. Know of any other freebies? share it with our readers in the comments section.
5 Twitter Annoyances - Web, Twitter, Social Networking & Foursquare Thoughts
In all truth there is little point moaning about what you do or don’t like on Twitter as we’ve all got very different tastes. However, I won’t let that stop me! Ok, in no particular order 1) Deafness If you’ve got an active account you should make a point of replying to tweets to you. It’s rude not to.
