You’ll learn how to write web copy that addresses your readers’ needs and supports your business goals.Learn from real-world examples and interviews with people who put these ideas into action every day: Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic, Tiffani Jones Brown of Pinterest, Gabrielle Blair of Design Mom, Mandy Brown of Editorially, Randy J. Hunt of Etsy, Sarah Richards of GOV.UK, and more.Topics:* Write marketing copy, interface flows, blog posts, legal policies, and emails* Develop behind-the-scenes documents like mission statements, survey questions, and project briefs* Find your voice and adapt your tone for different situations* Build trust and foster relationships with readers* Make a simple style guide and collaborate with your team

    During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.

    The 100 entries, arranged broadly in chronological order, range from technical (overprinting, rub-on designs, split fountain); to stylistic (swashes on caps, loud typography, and white space); to objects (dust jackets, design handbooks); and methods (paper cut-outs, pixelation).

    In this completely updated edition of our best-selling guide to HTML, Web expert and best-selling author Elizabeth Castro uses crystal-clear instructions and friendly prose to introduce you to all of today's HTML and XHTML essentials. Yoursquo;ll learn how to design, structure, and format your Web site. You'll create and use images, links, styles, lists, tables, frames, and forms, and you'll add sound and movies to your site. Finally, you will test and debug your site, and publish it to the Web. Along the way, you'll find extensive coverage of CSS techniques, current browsers (Opera, Safari, Firefox), creating pages for the mobile Web, and more. Visual QuickStart Guide--the quick and easy way to learn! Easy visual approach uses pictures to guide you through HTML and show you what to do. Concise steps and explanations get you up and running in no time. Page for page, the best content and value around. Companion Web site at www.cookwood.com/html offers examples, a lively question-and-answer area, updates, and more. Need to learn HTML fast? This best-selling reference's visual format and step-by-step, task-based instructions will have you up and running with HTML in no time.

    They yearn to come up with a game—changing innovation like Apple's iPod, or create an entirely new category like Facebook. Many make genuine efforts to be innovative—they spend on R&D, bring in creative designers, hire innovation consultants. But they get disappointing results.Why? In The Design of Business, Roger Martin offers a compelling and provocative answer: we rely far too exclusively on analytical thinking, which merely refines current knowledge, producing small improvements to the status quo.To innovate and win, companies need design thinking. This form of thinking is rooted in how knowledge advances from one stage to another—from mystery (something we can't explain) to heuristic (a rule of thumb that guides us toward solution) to algorithm (a predictable formula for producing an answer) to code (when the formula becomes so predictable it can be fully automated). As knowledge advances across the stages, productivity grows and costs drop-creating massive value for companies.Martin shows how leading companies such as Procter & Gamble, Cirque du Soleil, RIM, and others use design thinking to push knowledge through the stages in ways that produce breakthrough innovations and competitive advantage.Filled with deep insights and fresh perspectives, The Design of Business reveals the true foundation of successful, profitable innovation.

    Everyone wants them, whether to sell more products, spread good ideas, or win more funding. In our busy digital world, the way to results is influencing people on the web. But how?An ad campaign won't cut it. A Twitter account doesn't guarantee it. Manipulative tricks will backfire. Instead, you need quality, compelling web content that attracts people and engages them for the long haul.Clout explains the key principles of influence and how to apply them to web content. Along the way, those principles come to life with lots of practical examples. With this book, you'll: Discover why a technology feature, marketing campaign, SEO effort, or redesign aren't enough to influence online. Understand the business value of compelling web content. Learn 8 principles for influence from the art of rhetoric and the science of psychology. Find out what context is and why it's so important to influence. Jump start your planning for content over time with patterns and diagrams. Learn the basics of evaluation to determine whether your web content is making a difference.

    This indispensible and full-color book provides practical guidance on this growing field and shares valuable UX advice that you can put into practice immediately on your own projects. The authors examine why UX is gaining so much interest from web designers, graduates, and career changers and looks at the new UX tools and ideas that can help you do your job better. In addition, you'll benefit from the unique insight the authors provide from their experiences of working with some of the world's best-known companies, learning how to take ideas from business requirements, user research, and documentation to create and develop your UX vision.Explains how to create documentation that clearly communicates the vision for the UX design and the blueprint for how it's going to be developed Provides practical guidance that you can put to work right away on their own projects Looks at the new UX tools and ideas that are born every day, aimed at helping you do your job better and more efficiently Covers a variety of topics including user journeys, task models, funnel diagrams, content audits, sitemaps, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and more Communicating the User Experience is an ideal resource for getting started with creating UX documentation.

    As the most popular blogging and content management platform available today, WordPress is a powerful tool. This exciting book goes beyond the basics and delves into the heart of the WordPress system, offering overviews of the functional aspects of WordPress as well as plug-in and theme development. What is covered in this book?WordPress as a Content Management System Hosting Options Installing WordPress Files Database Configuration Dashboard Widgets Customizing the Dashboard Creating and Managing Content Categorizing Your Content Working with Media Comments and Discussion Working with Users Managing, Adding, Upgrading, and Using the Theme Editor Working with Widgets Adding and Managing New Plugins Configuring WordPress Exploring the Code Configuring Key Files wp-config.php file Advanced wp-config Options What's in the Core? WordPress Codex and Resources Understanding and customizing the Loop Building A Custom Query Complex Database Operations Dealing With Errors Direct Database Manipulation Building Your Own Taxonomies Plugin Packaging Create a Dashboard Widget Creating a Plugin Example Publish to the Plugin Directory Installing a Theme Creating Your Own Theme How and When to Use Custom Page Templates How to Use Custom Page Templates Pushing Content from WordPress to Other Sites Usability and Usability Testing Getting Your Site Found How Web Standards Get Your Data Discovered Load Balancing Your WordPress Site Securing Your WordPress Site Using WordPress in the Enterprise Is WordPress Right for Your Enterprise? and much more!

    In Speculative Everything, Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby propose a kind of design that is used as a tool to create not only things but ideas. For them, design is a means of speculating about how things could be--to imagine possible futures. This is not the usual sort of predicting or forecasting, spotting trends and extrapolating; these kinds of predictions have been proven wrong, again and again. Instead, Dunne and Raby pose "what if" questions that are intended to open debate and discussion about the kind of future people want (and do not want).Speculative Everything offers a tour through an emerging cultural landscape of design ideas, ideals, and approaches. Dunne and Raby cite examples from their own design and teaching and from other projects from fine art, design, architecture, cinema, and photography. They also draw on futurology, political theory, the philosophy of technology, and literary fiction. They show us, for example, ideas for a solar kitchen restaurant; a flypaper robotic clock; a menstruation machine; a cloud-seeding truck; a phantom-limb sensation recorder; and devices for food foraging that use the tools of synthetic biology. Dunne and Raby contend that if we speculate more--about everything--reality will become more malleable. The ideas freed by speculative design increase the odds of achieving desirable futures.

    Life coaches with new methodologies for living on purpose . . . energy workers who've discovered new ways to prevent disease and teach self-healing . . . everyday heroes and heroines who have made it through difficult circumstances and want to inspire others to do the same. In today's tumultuous world, we need these voices in the marketplace. Moreover, publishing a book has never been so simple, accessible, or affordable as it is today. So why are so many thought leaders, healers, and change-agents stuck at the starting line?This book will light the way--offering a simple, step-by-step path that takes authors from concept to finished book. In it, publishing veteran Kelly Notaras demystifies the publishing process and gives writers the tools, insider information, and inspiration to start strong, keep going, and get across the finish line as quickly as possible.

    Author Steve Souders, in his job as Chief Performance Yahoo!, collected these best practices while optimizing some of the most-visited pages on the Web. Even sites that had already been highly optimized, such as Yahoo! Search and the Yahoo! Front Page, were able to benefit from these surprisingly simple performance guidelines.The rules in High Performance Web Sites explain how you can optimize the performance of the Ajax, CSS, JavaScript, Flash, and images that you've already built into your site -- adjustments that are critical for any rich web application. Other sources of information pay a lot of attention to tuning web servers, databases, and hardware, but the bulk of display time is taken up on the browser side and by the communication between server and browser. High Performance Web Sites covers every aspect of that process.Each performance rule is supported by specific examples, and code snippets are available on the book's companion web site. The rules include how to: Make Fewer HTTP RequestsUse a Content Delivery NetworkAdd an Expires HeaderGzip ComponentsPut Stylesheets at the TopPut Scripts at the BottomAvoid CSS ExpressionsMake JavaScript and CSS ExternalReduce DNS LookupsMinify JavaScriptAvoid RedirectsRemove Duplicates ScriptsConfigure ETagsMake Ajax CacheableIf you're building pages for high traffic destinations and want to optimize the experience of users visiting your site, this book is indispensable.If everyone would implement just 20% of Steve's guidelines, the Web would be adramatically better place. Between this book and Steve's YSlow extension, there's reallyno excuse for having a sluggish web site anymore.-Joe Hewitt, Developer of Firebug debugger and Mozilla's DOM InspectorSteve Souders has done a fantastic job of distilling a massive, semi-arcane art down to a set of concise, actionable, pragmatic engineering steps that will change the world of web performance.-Eric Lawrence, Developer of the Fiddler Web Debugger, Microsoft Corporation

    Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It's a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today's environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations.Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them.In Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

    Nineteen challenging assignments and over one thousand pieces of solution art executed by the authors' students are presented. Each visual problem shows the actual assignment sheet given to the students and includes an analysis of the problem's underlying intent, addressing principles such as framal reference, negative-positive relationships, cropping techniques, and other important issues.

    It’s easy and fun with this practical, hands-on introduction. Author Scott Murray teaches you the fundamental concepts and methods of D3, a JavaScript library that lets you express data visually in a web browser. Along the way, you’ll expand your web programming skills, using tools such as HTML and JavaScript.This step-by-step guide is ideal whether you’re a designer or visual artist with no programming experience, a reporter exploring the new frontier of data journalism, or anyone who wants to visualize and share data.Learn HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and SVG basicsDynamically generate web page elements from your data—and choose visual encoding rules to style themCreate bar charts, scatter plots, pie charts, stacked bar charts, and force-directed layoutsUse smooth, animated transitions to show changes in your dataIntroduce interactivity to help users explore data through different viewsCreate customized geographic maps with dataExplore hands-on with downloadable code and over 100 examples

    This is a practical, hands-on guide for anyone trying to design systems that reflect the way customers want to do their work. The authors developed Contextual Design, the method discussed here, through their work with teams struggling to design products and internal systems. In this book, you'll find the underlying principles of the method and how to apply them to different problems, constraints, and organizational situations.Contextual Design enables you to+ gather detailed data about how people work and use systems + develop a coherent picture of a whole customer population + generate systems designs from a knowledge of customer work+ diagram a set of existing systems, showing their relationships, inconsistencies, redundancies, and omissions