Growing Your Blog’s Audience & Increasing Engagement

Whether you blog for fun or to add value to a business, your blog can be one of your greatest assets and one of your most valuable marketing tools. You can use it to build trust with your customers, generate leads, educate, hone your communication skills, and build brand awareness. Once you get into a …

Building relationships can help build page views

In an effort to empathize with our customers, we at Automattic attempt to tackle real world problems that our customers face in their journey toward success. The problem I'm looking at today is how to get more page views on an existing blog post with a budget of $20? It's pretty much a problem that …

“How can I get more views to my blog?”

At work, we were recently asked to examine a common problem among bloggers of all types: how to get more views. As someone who has been blogging since before it was called “blogging”, web traffic is still a bit of a black box to me. Any success I’ve had has been the result of persistence …

What Problem Are We Solving?

There is no such thing as Good Design. Sure, there's design that you personally like, which is nice. And there's good default practices that can help you get started. But over the course of my career, every time I came up with an iron-clad Rule of Good Design, I was generally one project away from …

Themes are Mission Control

When we think of space flight, we often think of the thing that gets us there: the shuttle, module or rockets that take us out of this world. However, in the early days of space flight programs at NASA, one man realized how important control from the ground would be to quickly evolving missions. Christopher …

Keeping product assumptions in check

Assumptions can be difficult to overcome. Many times we don't even realize we're making them. As an experienced product designer, I find it easier to make these assumptions. They more easily creep into my work subconsciously because I have more knowledge and experience of "best practices" and "what worked before". So how can we keep …

Be kind, rewind

We’ve all been there—from time to time a site becomes inaccessible, goes blank, or stops working altogether. This can be caused by many factors: the dreaded hacker, an unreliable host, a less-than-legit plugin, or a simple user error. You might have a full database backup to bail you out, but restoring the database requires some …

From No Code to Pro Code

I'm lucky that Automattic sponsors my time to work on the core WordPress software full-time. This allows me the time and focus to take on more leadership responsibilities in the community, including my current role as Customization Design Lead and the co-lead for the upcoming WordPress 4.9 release. ✌️ One of our major goals during …

Hundreds of Tiny Arrows

I recently hand-drew hundreds of tiny arrows for a Longreads illustration. It took about four hours, with a few breaks to check Slack and refill my chai. I knew I could have drawn a few arrows and duplicated them in Photoshop. I would've added some brush strokes to differentiate them from each other, and it …

The importance of triage practice

At Automattic we have the concept of ‘trash pickup’. The idea being you see something that is an issue, you fix that issue. It’s a powerful idea, one that over time adds up to seeing a better experience for everyone. Living this idea for me also means focusing on every detail, even the smallest of …