This excellent article from Unbounce draws upon the data from a selection of academic studies on copywriting plus persuasion to provide five best practices for improving your writing skills.

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Posted in: Writing for the Web | No comments

If your email design is looking a bit 'flat' you might want to consider using an animated GIF to liven up your design. Although not commonly used in emails due to their impact on email file size and the extra work involved in creating them, animated GIFs can act as 'design delighters' for your subscribers and bring life to your designs.

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Posted in: Email | Showcases | 4 Comments

Jacob Nielsen recently posted an interesting article on how to improve the usability of website search, given that users are typically so poor at using search effectively. In order to design for mediocre searchers, he cited the example of Costco, where for general search terms, such as "television", instead of returning search results, users are redirected to the appropriate category page for that product type.

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Posted in: Usability | 5 Comments

Some years ago, I asked the question are you making the most of your thank you pages? Fortunately, GetElastic has come to the rescue with a useful collection of tips and best practices for optimizing your thank you pages.

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Posted in: Web Design | Web General | 6 Comments

I'm setting up an abandoned shopping cart email program for our website. In developing the copy for the emails, my online research came up with a variety of examples of abandoned cart emails to refer to. The only problem was that they were all images of the actual emails, which made it impossible to extract pieces of copywriting that I liked.

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Posted in: Email | Writing for the Web | 6 Comments

This post by Seth Godin on building your backlist (or as I think of it, building your online reputation) struck a chord with me.

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Posted in: Web General | 7 Comments

Check out this slideshow from Forbes about America's Most Miserable Cities. Other than the paper-thin amount of reporting going on, the main thing that strikes me is the amount of advertising on each page.

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Posted in: Usability | No comments

We've started adding app store badges to the web pages for our products that come with a smartphone app, and I wanted to make it easier to do so. Fortunately, I discovered that Apple and Google now provide badge generation tools to make this process easier than ever.

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Posted in: Web General |

Hot on the heels of the 'awesome' content idea generator, I came across this handy collection of online tools for generating content ideas — a very useful resource for content marketers to crack through stubborn cases of creative block.

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Posted in: Writing for the Web | 1 Comment

This post from Andy Budd on web design trends is fascinating as it shows how once popular terms such as information architecture and interaction design are falling out of favor when compared with UX design and responsive design.

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Posted in: Real Life | Web General | 7 Comments

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