Thoughts and Articles from Blend Interactive

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

Congratulations to Blend CEO Karla Santi on being named one of the Small Business Association's People of the Year for 2022!

Corey and Deane talk about understanding the audiences of the The Web Project Guide book, and the concept of predicate knowledge. Then, C. David Gammel, author of Online and On Mission, joins the podcast to talk about how to prioritize outcomes when stakeholders all have their own interests, understanding the expectations of those who use your website, and how to best introduce domain knowledge.

Discovery and Scoping  |  Strategy

Chances are, you’ve found yourself in the sticky situation of adapting a default search engine. But, there are options beyond the default, starting with an open source solution called Apache Solr. Here's how to get started.

Development

Corey and Deane talk about Bleachers, music producers, and how understanding your audience increases effectiveness. Then, Erika Hall, author of Just Enough Research, joins the podcast to talk about interviewing the people who will visit your site — how to frame interviews, effective incentives, and the difference between researching assumptions versus learning about your users.

Discovery and Scoping  |  Strategy

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