6 Awesome Ways to Create Kick-Ass Content Strategy

To get high rankings in SERP, most of website owners publish not only quality content on landing pages, but also add epic posts to their blogs.

Today one of pressing challenges is to search for smart ideas on blogs. It takes much time and efforts to find what you really need to catch readers’ attention.

In the post, I would like to cover top 6 ways on how to create awesome content strategy. So, I have tested 6 great tools that help me get different variants and ideas for my content campaign.

Ready, set, go!

by Guest Author via Digital Information World

4 Myths About A Career In UX Design

UX design has become a hot topic both in and out of the tech scene, but as with many ‘buzzwords’ the legend often belies the reality. You may have noticed that many of your colleagues love to throw in comments about ‘the bad UX’ of a product, or ‘the great UX’ of a website, but there is still a lot of ignorance around what these terms actually mean.

In this post I’m going to bust four myths about a career in UX design so you can sort the fact from the fiction if you’re thinking about launching yourself into this lucrative, creative and varied career.

UX designers and UI designers do the same thing

A commonly held misunderstanding is that UX design and UI design are the same thing. This is far from the truth. Although UX designers and UI designers often work together on a product, they perform very different roles within the team. So, what’s the difference?

UX design is the process of enhancing user satisfaction by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction between the user and the product.

UI design, on the other hand, is focused on the design of the actual interface elements that the user interacts with to accomplish a goal within an application.

During the UX design process the questions a UX designer is concerned with are: Was it easy to navigate? Did you ever feel lost or confused? How did you know where to click to get to where you needed to go?

While the questions a UI designer is concerned with are: How did it make you feel? Was there a logical hierarchy to the interface and typography? Was the color scheme consistent? Were there design patterns that you recognized from other interfaces?

Anyone can become a UX designer

Wrong. Not everyone can work as a UX designer. Why? Because working in UX requires you to not only LOVE people, but to be endlessly curious about why they do the things they do. If you’re not a people-person, and you have no curiosity about human behaviour then this simply isn’t the career choice for you. Sorry!

Here are some essential personal skills and traits of successful UX designers:

Empathy

During user research you will be regularly interacting with individuals and groups as they navigate your product. You need to be able to see that product from their perspective, irrespective of what your own is. Being able to put yourself in the shoes of the user means you are able to understand how to make that user experience even better for them.

Curiosity

Being curious about people is not essential to doing your job right, but it will have a marked effect on how much you enjoy it. Most UX designers are fascinated by the workings of the human mind, and love to study human behaviour. Wanting to find out why people behave the way they do should be what gets you out of bed in the morning.

Communication skills

It’s not just your target users who you’ll be interacting with both online, over the phone and in person; you’ll also be communicating regularly with developers, CEOs, project managers and designers. This means you’ve got to be able to communicate clearly with people of all levels of knowledge and experience. In some cases you will even have to explain what it is you do, as there is still so much ignorance about UX out there.

You need programming skills to become a UX designer

You definitely do not need programming skills to become a UX designer. Being able to communicate with and understand how teams of programmers work (and at what stage in the UX design process you need their involvement) is very important though. Whether at a startup or large corporation, you will be working intimately with developers to reach your end goal for a project. The developers will be working to transform your design ideas into a real, working website, so how you approach this relationship will determine the success or failure of your project.

Here are some tips to working with the development team:

• Honesty – UX designers need to be open with developers about what the end goal of the product is.
• Transparency – Developers need to be transparent about what and how they need to do something to achieve the desired result. They need to explain clearly why something won’t work, not just that it won’t.
• Involvement – UX designers need to communicate with the development team right from the start of the project, not just when they need them. That way, they have a much clearer idea of what might or might not work early on.
• Work on the same team – If possible, make sure that you sit on the same team as the programmers at your company. There is much less chance of miscommunication or disagreement when you are freely communicating all the time.
• Be realistic – When sending over a final design for implementation, talk to the developers about what a realistic timeframe for the project would be. That way, everybody is on the same page with their expectations.

You need graphic design skills to become a UX designer

Graphic design and UX design are dramatically different. Graphic design is concerned with the aesthetics of the product – the decoration, colours and fonts. Essentially it dictates how things should look. UX design is, as we have already discussed, much more about making the user experience as delightful as it can be so that the user can reach their end goal in the quickest and easiest way possible. It focuses on the logic and structure behind the elements that you actually see and interact with, whereas the graphic designer is concerned with how those elements look.

If you’re thinking about moving from graphic design into UX design then keep the following in mind:

• It’s more important to know what questions to ask than to have all the answers.
• Keep your eye on the end goal of both the user and the business.
• Plan roughly, don’t put too much effort in the early designs, and focus on the content and where it is, rather than what it looks like.
• Think about the hierarchy of the content in relation to the user’s goal – what do they need to see first?

Still interested in launching a career in UX Design? Check out the following resources for more information, or head straight to the CareerFoundry UX Design Course to kickstart your new career.

Resources

Get Started in UX
What Is UX Design? 15 User Experience Experts Weigh In
7 Signs This Person Isn’t Actually A UX Designer
The Difference Between UX & UI – A Layman’s Guide
UX – A Process Or A Task

 

The post 4 Myths About A Career In UX Design appeared first on UX Mastery.

by Rosie Allarbarton via UX Mastery

A Closer Look at Angular’s ngMessages Module

This article was peer reviewed by Marc Towler and Stephan Max. Thanks to all of SitePoint’s peer reviewers for making SitePoint content the best it can be! Because of its ability to help developers craft better user experiences when building forms, the ngMessages module became a core directive with the release of Angular 1.3. One […]

Continue reading %A Closer Look at Angular’s ngMessages Module%

by Thomas Greco via SitePoint

Web Design Weekly #221

Headlines

Making A Service Worker

Lyza Gardner explains what service workers are and how to go about creating your own. She has even created a nice example file to help get the ball rolling quicker. (smashingmagazine.com)

HTTP/2 is here, now let’s make it easy (thedotpost.com)

Responsive Email Designer App

Creating responsive emails is a huge plus for individuals and companies today. With more than 50% of emails initially being opened and read on smartphones and tablets, a solid responsive design is pretty much a necessity. Check it out today. (mightydeals.com)

Articles

CSS Variables: Why Should You Care?

As CSS Variables (aka CSS custom properties) are starting to land in a few browsers, Rod Dodson explains why you should be getting excited and how they differ from CSS preprocessor variables like SASS or LESS. (developers.google.com)

Why Mobile First Is Outdated

I feel this article won’t align to everyones views, but Paul Adams does have some interesting points that are worth considering. (medium.com)

Advice and Mistakes about Web Performance

A selection of top web developers share their advice and common mistakes that they see people making when it comes to web performance. (keycdn.com)

How do you learn d3.js?

Ian Johnson questioned a selection of d3 experts to find out the best way to learn the ins and outs of the powerful library. (medium.com)

The Art of the Commit (alistapart.com)

Tools / Resources

Editing Images in CSS

Una Kravets explores three CSS features: filters, blend modes and gradients both individually and in combination to create great image effects. (thedotpost.com)

Differences in Font Rendering Today

Rob Dodson explains the new `font-display` property that lets us decide how web fonts will render (or fallback), depending on how long it is taking them to load. (developers.google.com)

Extending Sass with PostCSS

Ashley Nolan explains why you would use PostCSS with Sass to add additional features that Sass doesn’t provide out of the box. (ashleynolan.co.uk)

TestMyCSS

An interesting tool that analyses CSS selectors by complexity and performance. Once your CSS is parsed it builds a collection of insightful results to help you create better CSS. (testmycss.com)

Craft – Sketch and Photoshop plugin

Craft is a plugin for Sketch and Photoshop that lets you design with real data in mind. (invisionapp.com)

GitHub Pages now faster and simpler with Jekyll 3.0 (github.com)

Things every React.js beginner should know (camjackson.net)

Pure CSS masonry layouts (medium.com)

Inspiration

How we “CSS” at BigCommerce

An insight into how BigCommerce deal with their CSS. If you work on a large team with lots of legacy code I’m sure you will find this post helpful. (bigeng.io)

Why writing should be part of your design portfolio (invisionapp.com)

Design Details – Episode 100 with Daniel Burka (spec.fm)

Jobs

Senior UX Designer at Campaign Monitor

We’re looking for a Product Designer who shares our vision for designing beautiful software that thousands of people people love to use. We’re looking for someone with a strong understanding of interaction design, and knows how to apply that to directly drive product growth. We’re hoping that might be you. (campaignmonitor.com)

Senior Product Designer at Stack Overflow

We’re looking for a talented senior designer to join our tight-knit team of designers, developers and product managers. The work you do here will directly affect millions of users around the world. (stackoverflow.com)

Have a web related job you need to fill?

Last but not least…

Designer Bio Generator (sulko.co)

The post Web Design Weekly #221 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.

by Jake Bresnehan via Web Design Weekly

Create a One Page website with Layers and WordPress

This weeks RSS and website sponsor is the awesome free Layers WordPress theme by theme veterans, Obox.

With WordPress now powering 1/4 of the internet, the CMS vs “blogging software” discussions are officially dust. There is also no denying the increase in One Page WordPress themes.

But still some are quick to shut down the idea on a One Pager using WordPress with the mention of blogging. They forget that WordPress is a solid piece of software with excellent infrastructure to build any website on. One Page websites not only use WordPress for their content management but for the access to a sea of quality free plugins for SEO, security and speed – all elements needed in One Page website design.

Meet Layers

Layers is a free WordPress theme that enables you to create a powerful website all within WordPress’s new theme customizer. This means you don’t have to go back and forward between the dashboard and your website. All the action happens real-time as you edit within the customizer on the left.

How free you ask?

This is not your normal free product. This is a quality, well supported offering by a seasoned group of WordPress lovers – the Obox team have been around since the beginning.

… but sustainable?

So you’re probably wondering how they make money and that’s a good question before you commit your next project to Layers – it needs to be sustainable. They offer premium add-ons to Layers as well as pre-designed premium themes that integrate with Layers. Not to mention Obox have a fleet of WordPress themes they’ve built over the past 10 years. So yeah, they’ve got your backs!
 

Creating a One Pager with Layers

Step One: Go through the 1 minute tutorial

First impressions count and you’ll be so dazzled by how slick their quick setup tutorial is. The layout is clean and the videos are short and on-point.

I can imagine these have been perfected over time, it really is impressive.

 
 
 
 
 

Step Two: Choose the One Pager template

Once you’re briefed, you simply section the One Pager template and click the “Start Building” button:

Step Three: Start Customizing

Their tutorial explains it best but here’s a quick breakdown:

• On the left are your “Widgets” that control the sections of your long scrolling One Page website. You can add, reorder or remove these section (aka Widgets) easily. Examples of Widgets are General Content, Slideshows, Services, Contact Details & Maps
• When you click a Widget it expands the content into a bigger editable area in the middle. This is where you add your text, links, images and videos.
• That thin strip on the right is your “Design Bar” where you get to fine tune your widgets. The overall Layers UI is real clean. Usability wise, I’ll be completely honest, it takes a few minutes to fully understand. But once you’ve done it once, you are styling… excuse the pun;)

Step Four: Hit Save & Publish

Your One Page website is live. Obox really has made the most out of the WordPress Widgets functionality. Kudos to them.

Neato, but how does Layers look in action?

Below is a screenshot of a beautiful app One Pager made with Layers. Here is the live demo.

Useful Layers links

• Download Layers WordPress Theme – 100% free, no signup needed
• One Page Layers Theme Demo
• Browse Premium Layers Themes
• Learn how to create a long Single-Scrolling One Page website with anchor links

by Rob Hope via One Page Love

Empowering Your Api.ai Assistant with Entities

Here at SitePoint, we've looked at the basics of setting up your own personal assistant using Api.ai and delved further into intents and context. In this article, we'll be going one step further in the process, teaching our assistants completely custom concepts using Api.ai entities.

What is an Entity?

An entity is a concept we want our personal assistant to understand when it is mentioned by the user in conversation. Each entity has a range of values and properties that contain the terms the assistant will need to understand to respond to this concept.

There are three types of entities in Api.ai:

• System - entity types defined by Api.ai such as date, color, email, number and so on which Api.ai already understands. You can find a full list of these entities in Api.ai's documentation on System Entities.
• Developer - Entities which we create for our individual needs — these are what we will be focused on in this article.
• User - These are created for individual users while they use the assistant and can be generated by the Api.ai API to be used within a single session. We won't be covering these in this article but if there's enough reader interest, we might explore this in future!

Api.ai's pre-defined domains (see our very first article on this topic) would be examples of a whole range of pre-built entities that also come with pre-built intents for how to access them. When we add in entities into our assistant, we are adding them to expand into areas that domains do not currently cover and to train our assistant to do something unique to our personal needs.

For example, an entity of "superhero" is not something Api.ai knows about. We could train our assistant to understand a range of superheroes and their various names — "Superman", "Batman", "The Flash", "Green Lantern", "Wonder Woman", "Santa" and so on. It could then understand that these are specific concepts which we want to trigger actions with, such as contacting these heroes when villains strike via an API when we say things like "We need The Flash!".

We also teach our assistant synonyms for each of these so that alongside names like "Superman", it would also understand that Superman is also known as "Kal-El", "The Man of Steel", "Supes" and "Smallville". If we say a different name in the spur of the moment (or someone else tries to request help from our assistant and they call them something else), help from our hero will still come!

While I'd have loved to keep that entity example going for the whole article, I thought it might be best to focus on a more realistic example in the demo itself! In our demo, we will teach our assistant to understand one important metric I get from my Jawbone Up — sleep. The end goal is for our assistant to understand statements like "How many hours of sleep did I get last night?" and "How much deep sleep did I get last night?".

In this article, we will look at the first step of this process — setting up the entities required for our assistant to understand these statements. In a follow up article, we will look at connecting up our assistant web app to third party APIs to give it the information it needs to respond.

Creating a New Entity

To create a new entity, we open the Api.ai console and go to the "Entities" page using the menu on the left. We then create an entity by clicking either "Create Entity", the plus symbol on the "Entities" menu item or the "Create the first one" link which appears for those who have yet to create an entity:

In the page which appears, we enter in our entity name. A common convention is to write this in lowercase with words separated by dashes. We call our new entity "sleep". We leave "Define synonyms" checked and enter one term in the section below it — "sleep". We also can add in synonyms, so we cover a few more options by entering in "rest", "doze" and "shut-eye" next to "sleep". You add each synonym by pressing either the Enter key, Tab key or semicolon (;) key. When done, click Save:

If we return to the "Entities" page, our new entity is shown with the name we will use to access it — @sleep.

Using Our Entity in an Intent

We now need to create a new intent that will train our personal assistant to recognize the sentences which trigger our sleep related requests. We start by heading to the "Intents" page and creating a new intent.

On our new intent page, we include our entity within "User Says" statements like so — @entity-name:alias. In the case of our sleep entity, we call it @sleep:sleep (the second parameter is the alias, which can be used later on as $sleep, however that is a bit beyond the scope of this article). When we include our entity within a user statement like "How many hours of @sleep:sleep did I get last night?", it automatically is added into our parameter section below it:

Above those parameters, we have a field for the action name, this is the name which will be passed to our web app to show what Api.ai thinks the user wants to do. We name our action "sleepHours":

We then can add a variety of different ways to say the same sort of statement, just as we did in the previous article on creating intents:

Continue reading %Empowering Your Api.ai Assistant with Entities%

by Patrick Catanzariti via SitePoint

Google Fit for Android: Reading Sensor Data