6Wunderkinder does stuff right. They have had the amazing task management app Wunderlist around for several years now and they've just now come out with an overarching app called Wunderkit.
Wunderkit takes the best of Wunderlist, and adds two apps and makes it easier to use for teams. In other words, it extends Wunderlist from an individual task-management app into a team-based project management app.
The apps included are Dashboard, tasks, and notes.
The app runs on a freemium basis. The free version allows you to create and access all of your own tasks, notes and dashboard while the paid version ($4.99/month) allows you to access and edit other people's projects.
How to Stop Google from Customizing your Results
As we've talked about before on this blog, Google customizes your results based on your search history, social media history, and various other factors. they say that this makes your experience more intuitive and easier to use, but some people have serious issues with Google tracking all of your use across platforms.
In addition, this customization can actually serve to pigeon-hole your world. Imagine yourself looking for information on Egypt last year on Google and finding nothing but tourist guides instead of news on the Arab Spring revolts. Quite an unfortunate side-effect.
So, how do you turn off the results customization so that your results remain "pure"? Visit the site below:
This page contains the links to manage both your logged-in and logged-out search preferences that determine your personal search results.
Monday, January 30th, 2012
10 Awesome Lorem Ipsum Alternatives
If you’ve ever seen or worked on a site-in-progress, you’ve seen loremipsum text, the Latin filler text that has been around for ages as the standard in filler text. It’s quite useful as a universal signal for “content needed”, but it can get quite old to look at the same old text again and again. So, we have 10 awesome alternatives to the normal, boring lipsum generator. (Courtesy of http://www.awwwards.com/10-great-alternatives-to-lorem-ipsum.html)
http://notloremipsum.com/
Not LoremIpsum is probably the most useful alternative here. It’s industry-specific filler text that actually makes sense if someone stumbles across your site. Have an app-development site? Banking site? Photography site? Not LoremIpsum has text for it.
http://html-ipsum.com/
Same boring ipsum, but it’s got styles of lipsum already coded out with proper tags. Lists, paragraphs, etc. Copy and paste and no coding. Brilliant!
http://www.fillerati.com/ Fillerati is definitely one of the more fun ones, it provides lipsum-alternative text from famous authors. Want HG Wells text? You got it. We recommend throwing some Moby Dick in there.
http://veganipsum.com/
We wish we were kidding here. Like vegetables? Well, we have a site for you! This lipsum-alternative made up entirely of nutritious vegetables.
slipsum.com/ Samuel-L-Ipsum. You could spend hours looking through the various quotes here. Without a doubt one of the best generators of them all.
Disclaimer: These are Samuel L Jackson quotes. Ie: could be offensive to some audiences.
Google updated it's privacy policy yesterday, with some pretty big hints at where the company is going next.
The best thing about the new policy is that it's all consolidated into one document, instead of 70 different ones spanning across all of it's products. This makes your life significantly easier if you plan on reading it and figuring out exactly what your privileges are.
Perhaps the most interesting thing though, is that they will be combining your data across all of the services to provide a "simpler, more intuitive experience". We obviously have yet to see exactly how it will play out, but it looks like a huge leap in the already interactive and customized Google. The examples in the video below hold a lot of promise, and we're actually quite excited to see how it plays out in reality!
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012
Tip: Clear you Cache to Speed up Browsing
Every now and again, our browsers slow down to a crawl on almost every single website. You might think this is your Internet provider just slowing your connection down, but in fact, it's likely something on your own browser called the "cache".
The cache stores lots of temporary data on websites such as images, text, and more to make it easier and faster to load next time you visit the site. This is very useful if you only visit a few sites, but it can really bog down your browsing experience if you let all of the data build up over time.
In addition, you might be viewing old images on sites and outdated, cached data if you don't frequently clear it. This built up data can even cause issues in loading pages and logging in.
Clearing your cache is very easy, in most browsers it involves accessing your browser history, selecting "Clear Recent Browsing History" and ensuring that cache is checked before you hit clear. (either uncheck the other items or make sure you really want to delete them, as they can actually be quite useful to your browsing experience.)
Clearing this data every now and again will help your browsing experience to move significantly faster and be more enjoyable!
Monday, January 23rd, 2012
New Google Update: Pages with Too Many Ads Penalized
Google released a new update today (although reportedly only affecting 1% of results) that penalizes sites with ads above the fold. In other, words, the less content you have above the fold, the more you will be penalized.
The point of the release is to make it easier for search users to sort through the muck of advertisements and the hassle of having to push through ads to get to any real content. Since the update took effect today, the penalties also took effect, so theoretically your results should be easier to sort through already.
If your site got hit, you'll need to fix the amount of ads, and then wait for the Google crawlers to come around again for any substantial righting to take effect.
Friday, January 20th, 2012
Great Photos Make Great Sites
We've all seen them - sites with brilliant designs, amazing copy, and a photo taken on a 6-year old digital camera with less resolution than your smartphone. They're everywhere, and they're giving up a powerful opportunity to convert prospects into users/buyers/subscribers.
Today, we have millions and millions of photos at our fingertips in the form of royalty-free paid and free photos, illustrations, and incredibly well-priced photography studios. We are exposed to so much quality photography these days between advertising and our friends with digital cameras that poor photos stick out like poor thumbs.
Photos are often the first thing in your website that many people will be drawn to simply due to the fact that they're larger, and often brighter and sharper than anything else on the site. Our eyes are just drawn to photos.
That means that the first thing they see on your site should be sharper, clearer, and brighter than anything else on your site.
Great photos bring a design and copy all together in a fluid form. To ignore these or not put a decent amount of thought into them is giving up a powerful opportunity to convert a prospect before they even read a word of copy.
If you're stuck looking for good photos or don't have any of your own, we recommend looking on a site such as istockphoto.com or 123rf.com. Either of these sites offer royalty-free (use as many times as you want with no later fees) for very reasonable prices.
If you've been looking around your Google Analytics recently, you'll notice a new option on the right-hand menu called Visitor Flow. Visitor Flow gives us the option to see how visitors are flowing through your website in an easy-to-read visual flow chart.
This new tool is incredibly useful. It allows you to see how and when visitors drop off, how they get to certain pages, and the easiest path for conversion. In addition, you can see how many people drop off, why they drop off, and where they drop off. This should give you a good idea of how and why people are visiting certain pages and streamline your design for maximum effectiveness.
This information as always available before, but never in such a well-designed visual manner. The great thing about the visual displays is that you can extrapolate so much more useful information than tabular data.
Thursday, January 12th, 2012
2 Clicks or Less
There’s a relatively new web design rule – 2 clicks or less. This rule states that if a user has clicked two times or more and has not found what they need, you’ve lost them as a visitor.
The previous rule here related to “above-the-fold”, in other words, everything important needed to be viewable on an average sized screen. If they had to scroll you lost them. If it didn’t fit on one page, make another page.
“Above–the-fold” is already outdated due to two simple facts – users are less patient and more savvy. “Above-the-fold" implied that a user wasn’t savvy or informed enough to know to scroll. As time goes on and Internet adoption goes up, we’re finding this less and less true.
In addition, the Internet is getting faster and faster. Clicking to another page means loading another page. Which means time. Time is more and more valuable, and people are more and more impatient.
When you’re deciding on what content people need to see, and how they’re going to see it, you need to keep in mind that people are incredibly impatient, informed, and intelligent. Forget that, and you’ll watch them drop off like flies.
Wednesday, January 11th, 2012
Why You Need to Respond to Every Social Media Comment
A recent study by Conversocial asked consumers what they would feel about a company who ignored their requests or comments on Facebook or Twitter. As you can see below, a minority didn't care, but almost all consumers would feel put off by being ignored or seeing others' ignored comments.
This makes it crucial to answer any and all comments and ensure that your customers feel connected. After all, one of the top reasons for connecting with a brand is to communicate with it.
Monday, January 9th, 2012
It's Friday, and we have a treat for you.
This morning, we sent out our newsletter. It has a collection of useful resources and interesting articles that will help you prepare for some of the challenges of the coming year. You can find the html version of the newsletter here.
Be sure to read through all of the articles!
Friday, January 6th, 2012
Who's Your Linchpin?
Everyone has one. Every company and every person has one in their life, and everyone needs them. That's why they're the linchpin. Most people are afraid of having a linchpin, of putting control into another individual.
However, without linchpins, your company is nothing more than a factory of disgruntled people spitting out the same product again and again and again. Giving someone control, giving them responsibility allows them to do their best work, to please the client every time, to go above and beyond the requirements every time.
If you don't allow them to do this, then you'll end up with a bunch of "punch-in, punch-out" employees. And those employees will never do more than push buttons all day, because it's all their allowed to do.
If you're curious on the topic, Seth Godin has an amazing book titled Linchpin that makes the best case for this phenomenon we've ever read.
