Tag: getting started
Questions part 1: Concept |
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How should one start a website or app? Everyone has different questions in the beginning. These are mine. Part one of six. |
5 minutes to read. |
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Lessons from building word clouds |
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5 minutes to read. |
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The difference between copying and stealing |
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What makes copying easier than stealing? Thought and effort separate those who push their medium from their copycats. |
10 minutes to read. |
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The design process vs. design-as-product |
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The trouble with the word “template” is that its meaning depends on one’s point of view. To some, a template is a ticket to an instant website. Many content management systems allow owners to change plug-and-play themes as easily as they change clothes, and inexpensive skins are just a Google search away. To others, templates [...] |
2 minutes to read. |
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When is web design not a product? When it’s a process |
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You can often tell a website whose owner thinks design is a product. They’re the ones with slick edges and generic guts, where paragraphs flow into a given space like gel into a bucket. If the text is well written, you wouldn’t know it from the slapdash presentation. It’s like a $100 Merlot in a [...] |
minutes to read. |
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Using FAQs as content launchpads |
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In the past, I had trouble with vague ideas. Fighting my own limp-wristed attempts to frame content, I discovered that most topics can be phrased as a FAQ. Since questions spawn questions, thinking in FAQs turned out to be a useful mind-mapping-like tool as well. |
minutes to read. |
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I’d never built a word cloud before. A collection of user-entered answers to weekly questions sounded like a maintenance headache if people used it, or a failure if they didn’t. The client set high expectations, but neither of us saw what was coming.