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Inside the First TYPO3 North America Summit
Read FULL Article: Inside the First TYPO3 North America SummitOn May 19, the first TYPO3 North America Summit was held at the Georgia Aquarium in Atlanta. The Summit marked a new chapter for enterprise open source in North America, and Crowd Favorite was proud to help bring it here.
Digital Insights from Crowd Favorite
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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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Software design mistakes that just won’t die
(This article is a recap of a lightning talk I recently delivered at the Business of Software conference.) As the Chief Creative Officer here at Crowd Favorite, I spend pretty much all day obsessing about how to improve user experiences. I’ve observed a number of recurring software design problems over the years, and I thought I’d share a…
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Managing times & dates in WordPress
Keeping track of time in any modern computer system is a complex affair. Not only does one have to consider the timezone of the server, but the timezone of the user, the user’s system, the user’s browser, and systems such as PHP and MySQL, each with their own separate time settings. Even though time keeping…
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WordCamp London and WordCamp Belgrade 2015
It is spring time around here in Europe and a lot of WordCamps are happening in many different cities and countries. As part of the Crowd Favorite team, I have visited two WordCamps this year so far – volunteering at WordCamp London and speaking at the first WordCamp Belgrade. WordCamp London 2015 The second WordCamp…
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A modern look for Morehouse MacDonald & Associates
Morehouse Macdonald & Associates is an architecture firm based out of Massachusetts, specializing in detailed, textured, and sophisticated design. Crowd Favorite helped them tell their visual story in the creation of a WordPress website that reflects their high-end style. We are very pleased with the new web site Crowd Favorite has created for us. Our…
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JavaScript feature resolution – A case study with iSigner
Background iSigner is a JavaScript project for a subscription-based service which embeds an American Sign Language interpreter into a page, and allows the creator of that page to direct the plugin to sign page content, including image attributes (alt/title), video, and text. In order to provide the greatest amount of accessibility and flexibility that is…
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More mobile, savvy SEO, and Crowd Favorite Australia
Crowd Favorite currently delivers professional services in design and engineering to Fortune 500 companies, often connecting their existing back office systems with web-facing applications. Today Crowd Favorite is happy to announce several partnerships that will expand our suite of services for Enterprise clients. Mobile development Crowd Favorite is proud to announce a partnership with Zeek…
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WordCamp Orange County
Crowd Favorite was proud to sponsor WordCamp Orange County in 2014. Our team showed up en masse (18 Favoriteers!) to participate and meet others in the WordPress community. Our own Jeff Zinn and Brandon Dove did a lot of heavy lifting for this event so we raise a glass to their efforts. We had a couple of…