Last year, my husband and I read Marie Kondo’s “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing.“ To say this book was life changing isn’t an exaggeration. Besieged by clutter, we went about decluttering our books, clothes, papers, kitchen accessories, and on and on. We gave away over 1,000 books, I […]
I read a lot of RFPs and I attend a lot of website redesign kickoff meetings. The most important questions I ask are, “Why redesign? Why now?” I usually get answers like: Our website needs to mobile-friendly The website needs a faceted search Our site search sucks The website isn’t user-friendly While these are all […]
A couple of weeks ago, I attended a meeting with a client who was interested in redesigning their website. “Why?” I asked. The site looks pretty good, the site is mobile-friendly, and the analytics are pretty good. So what’s driving the desire for a redesign? The answer: They wanted to make a few changes to the home […]
Here at Matrix Group, we use a variety of platforms and frameworks to build client applications. On the content management system (CMS) side, we really like Sitefinity and WordPress for building websites, although we have worked with other platforms, including DNN, Expression Engine, and Kentico. WordPress has come a long way in recent years, and […]
I opened up a mailing from our 401(k) provider and was overwhelmed by the tiny type and the options available as investment funds. Ugh. I decided to call my financial planner instead. I was driving around in a parking garage and as usual, I fretted that once parked, I would never be able to find […]
Every once in a while, I hear from a prospect who says his organization is considering redesigning their site and they’d like to do the design and CMS implementation on their own. They either want to use in-house resources or they intend to use an off the shelf template for design and styling. Sure, this […]
Whenever I meet with clients about their websites, the conversation inevitably turns to the topic of stock photos. Most companies are photo challenged, so they ask us to help them find good stock imagery. My answer? Just say NO! to stock photography, especially of people! I feel hypocritical even writing this blog post because this […]
A few weeks ago, I conduced a webinar on implementing a “Mobile First” strategy. By mobile first, my co-host Alex Pineda and I mean a strategy where you consider the needs of mobile users first. Why? Because mobile usage is growing faster than desktop usage, because mobile usage is greater than desktop in some countries […]
I upgraded my iPhone to iOS 7 over the weekend and immediately realized why the Internet is buzzing about this OS upgrade. I did a webinar last week on mobile strategy and one of the attendees asked, “how will iOS 7 affect web design?” Once again, it seems Apple is leading the way and creating […]
So your organization has decided to redesign its website. Who should be involved? Who should be in charge? And who should make the decisions? I get these questions a lot from senior executives who want to know how to structure their web team, who should be ultimately responsible for the success of the project, and […]