Thoughts and Articles from Blend Interactive

Over its history, Blend has developed a pattern of being an early North American partner for a number of European CMS systems. Blend was an early North America Partner for eZ Publish (now Ibexa), Episerver (now Optimizely), and Umbraco (still Umbraco!).

Development  |  Discovery and Scoping

Corey and Deane talk about the concept of having it "fast, cheap, and good: pick two." Then, we chat with Karen McGrane of Autogram about our role as corporate counselors, dealing with overpromises, and the best mockumentary.

Discovery and Scoping  |  Project Management

Corey and Deane discuss the opening beats of a project. Then, we chat with Bill DeRouchey, former lead product designer for Zendesk, to discuss his history with vetting and researching a new project during the opening salvo, territorialism, and Mike Watt.

Discovery and Scoping  |  Project Management

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