Thoughts and Articles from Blend Interactive

From early logistics conversations to the book's publishing, distribution, and marketing, it's been a long road to the finish line for The Web Project Guide. Blend's CEO Karla Santi sits down with authors Deane Barker and Corey Vilhauer to discuss the book and the process.

Content and IA  |  Design and Front-End  |  Development  |  Discovery and Scoping  |  Project Management  |  Strategy

Blend’s strategic design philosophy is one of Design Through Discovery: we design in a way that's usable, useful, and collaborative with those who will use and maintain the final product.

Agencies  |  Content and IA  |  Design and Front-End  |  Discovery and Scoping

Building a website is like building a house — each decision is built upon the decisions that came before. Just as an architect doesn’t just throw a number at you and begin working on blueprints, we don’t begin working on a project until we fully understand the scope. We do that through our discovery process.

Content and IA  |  Design and Front-End  |  Discovery and Scoping  |  Strategy

In many projects, you will engage with a services firm to install, configure, and customize a CMS to deliver the website you need.

Development  |  Discovery and Scoping  |  Project Management

Selecting a content management system (CMS) is a combination of research and vendor engagement. You need to identify prospective systems, investigate their capabilities, engage with the vendors for demonstrations or questions, and finally distill and synthesize all that information and come to a decision.

Discovery and Scoping  |  Optimizely  |  Umbraco

At this stage, you have enough information to draw up requirements for what you need in a content management system (CMS).

Development  |  Discovery and Scoping  |  Optimizely  |  Umbraco

One of the challenges in rebuilding any website is figuring out what to do with the existing content. But before you can make any decisions, you simply need to know what it all is. And once it’s unearthed and exposed, then you need to decide what information is relevant and worth recording, determine a method to store this information, and decide how (or if ) you want to keep it updated over time.

Content and IA  |  Discovery and Scoping

Your content and message – and your audiences – live on dozens of paths and hundreds of combinations. Understanding what they’re looking for when they access your project will have a large impact on the steps that follow.

Discovery and Scoping  |  Strategy

We build websites to prompt an action or convey information to humans. Who are your humans? What are their motivations?

Discovery and Scoping  |  Strategy

Web projects are shaped by the people involved in decision-making. You can help prevent latestage rework by making sure the right people are in the room from the beginning.

Discovery and Scoping  |  Project Management  |  Strategy