February 21, 2023
I’m director of strategy at Blend Interactive, a small shop in the heart of the Midwest, where I specialize in content strategy, information architecture, and understanding user needs.
March 15, 2023
Corey asks Deane a brutally honest question: as non-developers, why should we care about hosting at all? Then, Elias Lundmark, product manager for cloud hosting at Optimizely, joins us to talk about website hosting in common terms — cloud versus on-premises, the reality (and politics) of “five 9s” and the things you need to understand before choosing a hosting provider or vendor offering.
February 21, 2023
Corey and Deane talk about a Donald Rumsfeld quote, and about the concept of “unknown unknowns.” Then, Cathy McKnight, Chief Problem Solver and lead analyst for The Content Advisory, joins us to talk about selecting a content management system — the process for choosing a system, how a CMS selection analyst can help keep vendors honest, and what to do if you’re selecting on your own.
January 17, 2023
Corey and Deane discuss the three parts of selecting a CMS: requirements, tool, and development team. Then, Joe Kepley, chief technical officer at Blend Interactive, joins us to discuss the world of translating design and IA into code within a content management system — including balancing groundbreaking design with realistic engineering — and the need to tie high-level project goals into the real nuts and bolts of code.
December 14, 2022
It’s The Web Project Guide Podcast, and we made you a new episode. The most stressful points of any project — at least, any project in which I’ve been a part of that includes technical planning — comes when the integrations are finally surfaced as a priority. Every time, integrations are understood as an important […]
November 16, 2022
It’s The Web Project Guide Podcast, and we made you a new episode. Everything I’ve learned about the nuance of web design I’ve learned from two sources — A Book Apart, the series of short books for designers, and Sam Otis, Blend’s long-time lead designer and front-end developer. I talk about nuance, as if there’s some […]
October 13, 2022
It’s The Web Project Guide Podcast, and we made you a new episode. I learned a big lesson when transitioning from the world of advertising copywriting — where words are tasked with driving a reaction, regardless of how clear that reaction might be — to the world of writing for the web: websites (and web […]
September 15, 2022
It’s The Web Project Guide Podcast, and we made you a new episode. The web is as complicated as we make it. This is because we can make it really really complicated, because we can dream anything. We can imagine the ease of solving edge cases by automagically shoving different aggregations into simple content blocks. […]
August 16, 2022
It’s The Web Project Guide Podcast, and we made you a new episode. A few months ago, I gave an internal “lunch and learn” presentation on a topic that is very personal to me — and, one that may have helped spur my entire career path. I taught everyone how to organize a record collection. […]
July 19, 2022
It’s The Web Project Guide Podcast, and we made you a new episode. Back in 2010, I discovered content strategy. I wrote a blog post, and that blog post was retweeted by someone named Kristina Halvorson. I had no idea who she was, but a quick search revealed she just wasn’t a random person: she […]
June 15, 2022
It’s The Web Project Guide Podcast, and we made you a new episode. I remember when I first attached an analytics suite to my blog. It was 2005, and it was a WordPress app called “Mint” — not the financial tracking service, but an independent analytics tracking service that I barely knew how to use. […]
