Industry News

An old topic of web design by or site credit links - should you put them on web sites and if so, should they pass link juice?

So if I design a web site for you, can I put "site designed by Barry" and link that to my site...

Yahoo’s share of search in the United States has dropped for the first time since it signed a deal to be the default search engine in Firefox. The drop follows two months of impressive gains. The loss suggests that a “high water mark” has been reached for gains the deal can produce for Yahoo and that “switchback” by Google users may now slowly cause Yahoo to give back share. A Small Drop For Yahoo

In the middle of last November, Yahoo because the default search provider for Firefox users...

To no ones surprise, Google announced mobile-friendly is becoming a ranking factor in the mobile search results in the near future. Google said it will happen on April 21...

The Paradox of Empathy is such a great post by Scott Jenson that I pretty much want to quote the whole thing. But I’ll stick with just this one gem, and encourage you to read it in full. It is a fantastic exploration of empathy in design, and includes a framework for making empathy part of our everyday work in a very practical way:

Designers will be the first to admit that not every empathic observation leads to a miraculous insight. However, it’s called “Design Thinking” for a...

I’m increasingly conflicted about roundup posts. You know, the kind where 23 experts answer one burning question and their answers are all put together in one long blog post. Instant content! I don’t produce roundup posts, rarely read them and infrequently contribute to them. Roundup Dynamics



The dynamics of a roundup post are pretty clear. The person aggregating the answers gets what is essentially free content for their site. Yes, I know you had to email people and potentially...

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how product design decisions aren’t neutral. The way we design a product has a direct effect on how people use it. This is obvious, but I think we often forget the real implication: Design wants something from its users. And we are the architects of those wants. We have a direct impact on user behavior, and we need to recognize the weight of that responsibility.

Let’s look at some recent product changes on Twitter as an example.

In...

A couple weeks ago we posted how Google's John Mueller said he would avoid link building in general, but in that, he said you can enable people to easily link to you by offering a widget or something.
John was asked about widgets for link building...

Rune Madsen wrote a really interesting post on how our design methods need to change when we work in software (as opposed to print). He explains in the post On meta-design and algorithmic design systems:

So what is meta-design? In a traditional design practice, the designer works directly on a design product. Be it a logo, website, or a set of posters, the designer is the instrument to produce the final artifact. A meta-designer works to distill this instrumentation into a design...