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Deleting 3 million spam comments from your WordPress database
Recently, I was working on a project that required me to copy a database with 3 million spam comments. The database export was 12GB and just about everything I tried failed because of the sheer size of this file. I eventually did get it to work. Here’s how: First, I tried doing things server-side using…
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Is WordPress a viable CMS for the enterprise?
For a long time, WordPress advocates working at large enterprise organizations and institutions have been fighting an uphill battle to bring their beloved WordPress CMS into the fold of their companies. This battle has been fought in the face of stiff competition (like SharePoint and Luminis), misconceptions (WordPress is just a blog), and some real…
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Apps we’re thankful for
Working as a remote team has its challenges. Fortunately, there’s an app for just about everything. This November, we’re sharing the apps we’re most thankful for. Some help us to communicate, others to do our jobs faster, and some are just for fun. For work The essentials Slack – It’s how we communicate. All day,…
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The sweet layers of UX design
The UX process can be thought of like a multi-layer cake. Done well, the steps build on top of one another, ultimately providing a satisfying user experience. Determine Foundation Define goals, business objectives, and user needs This is the base layer of any project. Supporting all subsequent layers, the strategy sets the stage for…
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Amusement park websites: best practices for digital engagement
With nearly half of Americans planning to visit an amusement park within the next year, parks have a big opportunity to bring in business through website traffic.
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Takeaways from the 2016 Phoenix Method + Madness Conference
Our design team recently attended Phoenix’s main design conference, Method & Madness. It was an enlightening weekend hosted by the ever-amazing group of AIGA volunteers who brought in speakers from all over the states. To see a community come together to support design and to support one another is so special. We at Crowd Favorite…
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Considering customer touch points: The many expressions of a brand identity
I recently had to choose a daycare for my daughter, and I was overwhelmed by the many options. Some were clearly not for me, while others were certainly viable options. From this experience I learned that, in a world of many choices, it’s important to pay attention to how customer touchpoints, and brand identity, can…
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Our top four favorite tools for user research
At Crowd Favorite, we love to dig in and learn all about the experiences users have, both good and bad. We get to know our clients and their audiences. We listen, we learn, and evaluate. To get to the root of the problems our clients are experiencing, we use a variety of tools. Here are…
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WordCamp Europe 2016
In the WordPress world, last weekend was dedicated to the biggest WordCamp ever: WordCamp Europe 2016, which took place in Vienna, Austria. With over 2,000 people registered, more than 1,000 people watching a live stream of the event, and countless volunteers and world-class speakers, it was incredible experience for everyone – three days of learning,…
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A new chapter for Chris Lema
Nineteen months ago, we proudly brought aboard Chris Lema as our CTO. Chris’s counsel as a member of our board had been invaluable leading up to his hire and since then we’ve benefited from what many of you know about Chris already: his expertise, his evangelism, his intellect, his innovation, and yes, his amazing storytelling.…
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Avoid SSL Mixed Content Errors in WordPress
Recently, an interesting bug popped up, post launch, during a WordPress project. This bug caused certain styles and images (assets from here on out) to not load in Chrome and Firefox, because these browsers do not allow “mixed content” (different content coming from both secure and non-secure sources). Problems like this occur when your URL…
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Building beautiful APIs with Foodgawker
Crowd Favorite has been working with the Gawkerverse on their Foodgawker site for several years. Along with its sibling sites (Craftgawker, Stylegawker, Dwellinggawker, and Weddinggawker), Foodgawker tremendous collections of curated content and highly-technical features to improve performance and ability to navigate content. As a part of this, the site features a fully-responsive design, and provides an API with…
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First Click Free: What you need to know
Improving traffic to any website is a constantly evolving process. Among the best, and most obvious ways to increase traffic is to make the website more prominent on search engines, like Google and Bing. Each engine has its own method of ranking results for any given search, but both search-engines agree that a better user experience…
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How to evaluate an API: Starz
What is an API? An Application Programming Interface, or API, is a set of commands, utilities, functions, or uniform data access points that allows for programmatic access to a system. A website-based API is built primarily using a Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) or Representational State Transfer (REST) interface. While SOAP is common in older…
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Consuming APIs with LivePhish
One of my first projects utilizing the AngularJS framework came to Crowd Favorite through the folks over at nugs.net, who desired a subscription-based music streaming service that would provide wide access to single bands. It would be similar to Spotify, but with a focus on specific artists and a broader selection, rather than a wide…
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Thinking beyond the blog
Companies should stop thinking about having a “blog” and instead think more specifically about their audience and trying to communicate with potential users and clients. Consider how blog information might reflect the design approach. Could the information be communicated outside of the traditional blog to better appeal to the audience? By thinking, “beyond the blog”…
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How cognitive bias skews design reviews
Being human means we’re not always logical. Our brains have developed certain ways of thinking that help us understand and simplify the complex world around us in simple ways, but unfortunately, those mental shortcuts can often cause problems for us as well. Psychologists refers to these mental patterns as “cognitive biases”: individual beliefs and tendencies…
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Designing better login forms
We’ve all been there, an empty login form sneering at us from the screen, that pit in our stomach when we become acutely aware that we’ve forgotten our password. Or our username. Or the ultimate horror: both. It seems everything online requires a username and password. The number of credentials we’re required to remember pile…
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