Sailing With Sails.js: An MVC-style Framework For Node.js


  

I had been doing server-side programming with Symfony 2 and PHP for at least three years before I started to see some productivity problems with it. Don’t get me wrong, I like Symfony quite a lot: It’s a mature, elegant and professional framework. But I’ve realized that too much of my precious time is spent not on the business logic of the application itself, but on supporting the architecture of the framework.

Sailing With Sails.js

I don’t think I’ll surprise anyone by saying that we live in a fast-paced world. The whole startup movement is a constant reminder to us that, in order to achieve success, we need to be able to test our ideas as quickly as possible. The faster we can iterate on our ideas, the faster we can reach customers with our solutions, and the better our chances of getting a product-market fit before our competitors do or before we exceed our limited budget. And in order to do so, we need instruments suitable to this type of work.

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Create an Opt-In Incentive to Increase Your Email Subscriber Numbers

How to Create an Opt-In Incentive to Increase your Email Subscriber Numbers // on ProBlogger.net

If you were listening to the previous ProBlogger podcast episode about my top tips for building your email subscriber list, you would have heard me talking about creating an opt-in as an incentive for people to sign up.

In this next instalment of the #TodayNotSomeday podcast, I’m going to talk you through exactly how to do that!

Creating an opt-in has the potential to significantly increase your subscriber numbers by offering something truly valuable in exchange for the reader’s email address. They are sometimes called lead magnets, and you’ll have seen them on plenty of other blogs and sites you visit.

Even though creating an opt-in and working on building your email list is one of the most important things you can do as a blogger, I know there are plenty of you who put it off to worry about another time. I know this, because I’ve done it myself! We’ve only recently started offering something similar on Digital Photography School despite being aware it is something I should have done much sooner.

You’ll also notice I don’t have a lead magnet or opt-in here on the ProBlogger blog, but you’ll hopefully see us get this task off our “someday” list in the new year.

Today’s challenge isn’t just for those of you without a lead magnet – if you’ve already got one on offer, you might want to consider upgrading or determining if it’s time to create another? Something more up-to-date, something that will appeal to a different audience, something specific to one of your site categories, or something that could boost your current list?

In today’s episode I also discuss why you should create an opt-in, and the potential it has to grow your blog. We go over how to deliver your opt-in, what format it could take, and how you can figure out something that incentivises your readers to sign up to your list and stay engaged. There is also the option of considering a longer-term strategy or offering as opposed to a one-off incentive, and I give a few ideas here. I also go through the purpose it needs to serve, how you can create your offering, tools and services I’ve used, and that all-important aspect: getting the signup!

So good luck with today’s challenge of creating an opt-in for your email list. What opt-in will you be creating? What will it be about, and how will you deliver it? Be sure to use the hashtag #TodayNotSomeday when you share your efforts to social media so we can see how you’re all doing.

Further Reading:

 

The post Create an Opt-In Incentive to Increase Your Email Subscriber Numbers appeared first on @ProBlogger.

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Optimizing Your Design For Rapid Prototype Testing


  

Product teams in startups and mid-sized and large companies are all implementing usability testing and prototyping as a way to de-risk product development. As the focus shifts from engineering to prototyping, it is becoming increasingly important for anyone who creates prototypes to understand the differences between a prototype and a product build.

Optimizing Your Design For Rapid Prototype Testing

By optimizing the prototyping process, you can produce mockups that deliver the most actionable user insights, while being as efficient as possible with design time. Regardless of which prototype tools you use or whether you test wireframes, clickable mockups or coded prototypes, what’s most important to focus on is what you want to test and what you want to learn from it.

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Creating Content Wireframes For Responsive Design


  

As I was leading my course in responsive web design between 2011 and 2012, I kept stumbling over the process of wireframing. My students tended to focus on the wireframe as being the end game in the planning process. They didn’t understand that responsive design focuses on how users will access the content.

How To Create Content Wireframes For Responsive Design

You can only imagine my relief when I happened to come across a video by Stephen Hay speaking at the Beyond the Desktop conference in 2012. There, in his talk on responsive design, he presented the concept of the content wireframe. This was a huge relief to me. I just knew there was a step before the process got real, but I couldn’t articulate it. In this post, I’ll describe the methods I use to get from content to responsive wireframe — and how you can, too.

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Hey Designers: Stop Being An Afterthought


  

There are reasons you’re still saying the same thing after all these years — still talking about how it always seems like design gets tacked on to the end of the process. You should be at the concept meeting, you say, where you can make a real difference.

Hey Designers: Stop Being An Afterthought

I’ve been hearing it for 15 years. I once had a job where I got to say it myself a few times. I got tired of that pretty quickly. I don’t say it anymore. You shouldn’t either. Primarily because it’s not true.

The post Hey Designers: Stop Being An Afterthought appeared first on Smashing Magazine.

Hey Designers: Stop Being An Afterthought
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Web Development Reading List #105


  

What’s happening in the industry? What important techniques have emerged recently? What about new case studies, insights, techniques and tools? Our dear friend Anselm Hannemann is keeping track of everything in the web development reading list so you don’t have to. The result is a carefully collected list of articles that popped up over the last week and which might interest you. — Ed.

Firefox 41 is released.

Hey, fog and rain take over, temperatures are falling and the leaves of the trees are changing their colors. Sitting in front of a computer all day, reflecting how fast things change in nature, I can often see a similarity between our world of front-end development and things going on in the world.

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Web Development Reading List #105
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