Thoughts and Articles from Blend Interactive

In her original book, Little Miss Sunshine asks “Wouldn’t you like to be happy?” We’re expanding our team, and we want to help you answer that question with a “Yes.”

Coaching

Corey and Deane chat about Information Architecture for the World Wide Web — ”The Polar Bear Book” — and then our experiences with information organization in real life. Then, Lisa Maria Marquis, author of Everyday Information Architecture and You Should Write a Book, joins to discuss how to frame information architecture for those who aren’t web people, the hidden biases in organizing content, and a bit about why you should write your own book. (We also take a critical look at Lisa Maria’s bookshelf.)

Content and IA  |  Strategy

Corey and Deane talk a little about that time Kristina Halvorson (founder of Brain Traffic, co-author of Content Strategy for the Web, and executive producer of Confab and Button) visited Sioux Falls. Then, Kristina chats with us about content strategy — defining content strategy vs. content design, what tasks are often overlooked, and some basics on spinning up an internal web content team — including a bit of conference talk about the upcoming Button Conference.

Content and IA  |  Strategy

Corey and Deane talk about the first time they tracked analytics on their blogs in the early 2000s. Then, Jon Crowley, Senior Vice President of Strategy at Diamond Marketing Group, talks to us about the balance between data and insights — how to focus on questions rather than raw numbers, how to look for answers rather than “trying to be correct,” and a when we can take data at face value. (He also gives us a tour of his shoe collection.)

Discovery and Scoping  |  Strategy

There’s a lot more to building a mobile-friendly and responsive site than just saying the words “mobile-first” and willing it into being. What does it mean? How is it done? In this article, we take a look at the process behind designing for mobile.

Content and IA  |  Design and Front-End

Corey and Deane talk about Blend CEO Karla Santi’s recent selection as Small Business Person of the Year for South Dakota. Then, Paula Ladenburg Land, author of The Content Inventory and Audit Handbook and principal at Strategic Content LLC, joins the podcast to talk about content inventories and content audits, including what separates the two, when and how to worry about auditing, and her first ever content inventory, which arrived as a spreadsheet on one-and-a-half inches of printed paper.

Discovery and Scoping  |  Strategy

Talk around content management systems so often focuses on features and technological advances. But there’s another side to the equation: the people who use the content management system as an editorial tool.

Umbraco

At Blend, we’ve created our own utilities and shortcuts for helping every project become a success — and we’ve released two new ones to the Umbraco community: Blend.Sitemap and Blend.RobotsTxt.

Development  |  Umbraco

In project management, the process of Agile development is dependent on a pretty important element: the “scrum” — a quick meeting designed to level-set before work begins. Here's how Blend puts it to use.

Project Management

Announcing release of Blend.Optimizely, a collection of helpful utilities for Optimizely CMS 12 sites from the development team at Blend.

Development  |  Optimizely