Content matters! Unfortunately, when it comes to informational websites, content quality is often poor. There is no magic answer to fix that. However, there are practical techniques you can use to improve the copy on your websites and ensure your users find the content they are looking for.
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In this article, we’ll walk through the process of taking a seemingly simple design for a text-and-media component and deciding how best to translate it into code, keeping in mind the needs of both users and content authors.
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SEO is an ever-changing world. Blink and you’ll miss the latest best practices, thought leaders, and tools. Feeling out of touch is natural. This guide is your way back into the groove, baby.
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Writing for a publication such as Smashing Magazine can help to build your reputation as an expert. In this article, Editor in Chief Rachel Andrew explains how to pitch to publications, and how to have the best chance of an accepted proposal.
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Content marketing is the practice of creating a piece of content. This piece of content is generally free, though it may be hidden behind a simple email/lead-capture form, and it usually is meant to be found through search or through free/low-budget distribution methods It is tough, but with the right WP plugins, you can turn your website into a content marketing machine, one that actually performs for your business. Here are some stellar plugins that will ensure your efforts aren’t falling short.
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The way many of us create content-driven websites isn’t quite optimal, and we need to do something about it. When designing a website, it’s important to focus on better understanding the folks who will visit the website. If you haven’t allowed user feedback to influence the design and content of your website, then it’s probably time you did. Paul Boag explains why.
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Systems build on systems, and those simple systems can provide a key to designing for more complex spaces. In the space of digital design, if you ensure that your simplest dynamic systems of content, structure and meaning-making work as intended at a foundational level, then you can lay the groundwork for larger, more complex systems that also work as intended. In this article, Andy Fitzgerald will show you how to use a simple set of open-source tools to introduce real, dynamic content into your prototyping process from day one. This approach allows you to focus on how users understand your content from the very start of a project and to subsequently build structural, visual and technical elements atop that foundation of understanding.
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Was there a tool Steve Hickey could use to help people quickly model content in a platform-agnostic manner and simultaneously build an artifact that was ideal for communicating intent to a client or team? There are some great further features that can established by digging into the Jekyll docs in more detail, but what we have here are the basics of a good content modeling prototype: the ability to define different types of objects, the attributes attached to those objects, and IDs that allow us to call specific objects from anywhere. Best of all, the whole system is simple and human-readable, and outputs plain HTML for use elsewhere if necessary.
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Publishing is cheap. This seduces you, encouraging you to put more and more content online. But you will soon discover hidden costs. Costs that are crippling larger organizations. Dealing with ROT can feel intimidating on a large site. In fact, it can feel impossible. But it isn’t. Often it is just a matter of putting some processes in place to deal with it. If you create a prototype that gives people a sense of how much better the site could be, they are often more amenable than you think. Now is not the time to be timid. Now is the time to confront the ROT.
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