Ctrl+click Cast

Landing pages are bound to come up for almost any type of client. How can we designers and developers help clients reach their conversion goals, while making it easy for them to create these landing pages? Special guest Shawn Maida returns to the show to discuss how his company uses landing pages themselves, as well as how they build landing pages for clients. We run the gamut of different types of landing pages, as well as different client goals. We discuss solutions we’ve built in ExpressionEngine, Craft and Statamic, as well as alternative options when a CMS doesn’t make sense. And we talk about the importance of testing and measuring success. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Are Your Landing Page Easy to Change? 5 Landing Page A/B Tests and Their Surprising Results Umbel Dynamic Yield Optimizely Content Elements for ExpressionEngine Statamic Replicator Craft Mat

Tired of websites looking the same? So are we! Hosts Lea and Emily discuss how signature design style benefits designers and their clients. We weigh in on the pros and cons, how to find a signature design style and apply it, as well as how other phases of a project cycle is affected by a design style. Lea also shares some resources to help designers create their own signature design style. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Designers! You Should have a Signature Style! Can You Justify Design? Art of Self-Branding Bauhaus Art Nouveau Helvetica Design is History Art History Basics Gothic Architecture Post modernism Design 101: International Style 7 Steps to Developing Originality in Your Design and Illustration Work 10 Tips on Developing Your Own Style NHS: Developing a Design Style How to Develop Your Style According to DVF, Rachel Zoe, and More The Cajun Crawfish

When we go online, the stresses and triggers of our offline lives go with us. So the apps, sites and technology we use online need to account for those stressors. Special guest Beth Dean returns to the show, this time to talk about emotional intelligence in design. She shares her own lessons learned working at Facebook, trying to anticipate and avoid the friction that can occur when the design process doesn’t consider the human factor. Beth also offers tips for how to be more emotionally intelligent in both design and development, including embracing diversity in the workplace, identifying stress scenarios early in the process, and emphasizing the user throughout. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Lesbians Who Tech Facebook real-name policy controversy Facebook authentic identity Kaiser Permanente’s Innovation on the Front Lines Facebook On This Day Facebook Yea

Websites are no longer silos. There is an increasing need to connect various services together through their APIs. Solspace founder and developer Mitchell Kimbrough returns to the show to explain how he approaches requests for 3rd-party API integration. He shares what a good API looks like, emphasizes a discovery-first approach, goes through technical tips like his “crud” script to help test assumptions and troubleshoot, but most importantly, shares scenarios on how to navigate the human element when juggling management of different APIs through various gatekeepers. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: APIs Solspace API Integrations EE Add-on Development Craft Plugin Development Salesforce APIs HubSpot API Overview NetSuite Developers Overview MemberSuite Developer Resources SDKs (Software development kit) Stripe API Facebook Developers REST API SOAP API cU

SVGs aren’t just another image format. They are code. They are infinitely scalable. And they can be manipulated with CSS and JS to create both subtle and dramatic interface experiences. Designer and front-end dev Brenda Storer joins the show to give us a primer on scalable vector graphics, from how they are different from the familiar PNG, JPG and GIF, to browser support, to the underlying code elements and attributes. Brenda offers recommendations for optimizing SVGs and making them more accessible. She also details real world use cases (an alternative to icon fonts) and shares her favorite resources for learning and inspiration. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Girl Develop It Giant Robots The Bike Shed ShopTalk #151 Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.1 Can I use… A Complete Guide to SVG Fallbacks Emacs Entypo Font Awesome Icon System with

Where does progressive enhancement fit in the web today? Developer Aaron Gustafson, author of Adaptive Web Design, returns to the show to update us on how progressive enhancement fits for today’s mobile web design & development workflow. Not only do we go through the technical specifics of progressive enhancement, we chat about how design and user experience work hand-in-hand alongside the business benefits inherent when building an inclusive site or app. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Adaptive Web Design Aaron Gustafson The Web Isn’t Uniform Designing with Progressive Enhancement 15 Years of Dao Progressive Enhancement: Zed’s Dead, Baby Zed's dead, baby Inside FastBoot: The Road to Server-Side Rendering Isomorphic JavaScript Siri Cortana Alexa The Full StackOverflow Developer by Christian Heilmann Build Conference Pew: Chapter 1: A Portr

An add-on with a single code base that supports five different CMSs? That’s the unicorn of platform-agnostic add-on dev, and it is just as illusive. Special guest Eric Lamb shares how he developed an efficient, smart approach to porting his popular ExpressionEngine add-on, Backup Pro, to four other content management systems (with more planned). The key? Abstraction. He also details the nuances of working with different communities and submitting add-ons to different marketplaces, as well as the challenges of support and how he keeps it manageable. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Backup Pro devot:ee BUILD'ing Backup Pro BUILD'ing Backup Pro for ExpressionEngine 3 ExpressionEngine Craft WordPress concrete5 PrestaShop Unit testingSeleniumMink Fat Fish Cantina Grill Trivium Leave us a review on iTunes Review our show on Stitcher

There are a lot of moving parts to running a business — how do you get through it all in an efficient manner? Emily and Lea go through the tools, resources, and services Bright Umbrella utilizes to run a business more smoothly. We chat about past and current experiences with task management and business development, invoices and time tracking, and everything in between — all to show you how to help you save time (and money!) for your business! < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Basecamp Bullet Journal Dropbox Bidsketch PandaDoc Capsule CRM Google Chat Skype Join.me UberConference FreeConferenceCall.com Inc. Hootsuite Google Calendar Schedule Once Calendly Acuity Scheduling Freshbooks Shoeboxed FreeAgent Google Docs Beanstalk GitHub Browserstack Jennifer James 101 Leave us a review on iTunes Review our show on Stitcher Sponsored By

A good workflow means fewer hiccups in a project build. An automated workflow means fewer hiccups and faster production! Front-end developer Dan Tello joins the show to share how he and his team at Viget use build tools and task runners to automate their front-end (and CMS!) development. Dan details his process learning Grunt, then making the switch to Gulp and why he prefers it. He shares his Gulp Starter repo and details the various tools he uses for the different assets he builds. We also discuss some of the challenges of workflow automation and tips for keeping those challenges manageable. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: LiveReload IcoMoon Rails Sprockets Compass Grunt RequireJS And just like that Grunt and RequireJS are out, it’s all about Gulp and Browserify now Gulp Browserify Node.js NPM Babel webpack Node-sass imagemin gulp-svgstore Browse

Choosing and applying colors on the web can get complicated quickly, especially when considering user experience and accessibility. Don’t rely on assumptions, urges designer and illustrator Geri Coady! She shares tips on how to make informed design choices that improve a site’s interactivity for all users. We talk about color’s impact on a site, compare color applications to other industries, and share tools on how to test color decisions that enhances a web experience. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: A Pocket Guide to Color Accessibility Subtractive color Additive color What is the difference between CMYK and RGB? Color Profiles Pantone Color of the Year What is Wayfinding? Colour Blind Awareness All about Color Blindness On Mystery Meat Navigation Color Contrast for Better Readability Three common accessibility pitfalls for developers: colour contrast Accessib

ExpressionEngine for large-scale sites? Yes, says EE expert Travis Smith, and he’s got the statistics to back it up! Travis returns to the show as we revisit one of our EE Podcast episodes on large EE sites to discuss what has changed and what’s stayed the same. Travis details his updated statistics about the largest EE sites on the web today, and discusses the factors that make a site “large.” He also shares tips for efficient development, good infrastructure and mitigating the challenges large sites introduce. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: The 20 Largest ExpressionEngine Sites ExpressionEngine 3 Is Here Template Layouts in ExpressionEngine 2.8 Wrapping Templates in Layouts Embedding Templates within Other Templates Stash Grid Structure Amazon Web Services (AWS) Nexcess Leave us a review on iTunes Review our show on Stitcher Spon

Curious about flexbox? Web designer, developer and author Zoe Gillenwater says the flexible box model ranks high among what seasoned web developers should learn now. We discuss what the hype is about, how it differs from other layout methods, and where it’s best used. We also talk about the changing landscape of layout methods overall, and Zoe shares simple and complex use cases for flexbox. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: CSS Flexible Box Module CSS Grid Layout Module Modernizr @supports rule flex-wrap Autoprefixer The Guardian's website CodePen Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) flexbugs Flexbox Froggy Sublime Text skyscanner Flexbox Cheat Sheet Flexbox in 5 Flexbox layout isn't slow Don't Use Flexbox for Page Layout CodePen: Pure CSS off-canvas menu with flexox CodePen: Tournament Grid CodePen: Flexbox Video Control Haesje Claes Stone Temp

Are you pricing your services correctly? Do you know what it costs to just maintain your business? Are you making a profit? Do you know how to correctly estimate? How do you talk to clients and prospects about budgets and costs? If you work for yourself and you aren’t asking yourselves these questions, then you may be hurting the future of your business. Special guest Brad Weaver joins the show to offer practical pricing tips and strategies that can help your business today—as in right now! We talk about shop rates vs. billing rates and how to calculate both. Brad shares suggestions for accurate estimating, as well as different pricing options that make sense for different types of project. And we also discuss ways to talk to clients and prospects about money and value. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Creative Truth What to Charge The Designer’s Guide to Marketing

The fast-paced nature of the web industry can cause confusion as to how to prioritize what to learn, especially if a framework or technique is obsolete in a year. Our first guest of 2016, front-end developer Susan Robertson, urges us to take a step back before immediately diving into something new. We discuss why we think there’s such a panic to learn new things, how to avoid this panic, and also share tips on how evaluate what is actually worth investing time to learn. < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Editorially Fictive Kin Ember Angular Ethan Marcotte Sass SMACSS React Jeremy Keith Tim Kadlec Rachel Andrew CSS Grid Spec A Guide to Flexbox How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner CSS Tricks Stephen Hay Building to Learn Cibo restaurant Mark Rothko Miles Davis Donate to CTRL+CLICK Leave us a review on iTunes Review our show on Stitch

For our 2015 season finale, we look back on the past year and share some of our lessons learned with our Bright Umbrella intern Erin! From tech to business to life, we share the important lessons we learned this year, along with our goals for next. We also take a look back at our 2015 guests’ answers to our Rapidfire 10 Questions, and then turn the questions on ourselves! We’re on a hiatus until the new year (tune back in January 14, 2016), and wish you all the happiest of holidays! < Download MP3 >      < Listen on ctrlclickcast.com > Show Notes: Wrapping Templates in Layouts Element (Container) Queries Inc Delicious Create Your Own Starter Files Slack How to Price Your Work WBENC Girl Develop It The Relative Joy of Entrepreneurship Seriously, Don't Use Icon Fonts Leave us a review on iTunes Review our show on Stitcher Sponsored By