CTRL+CLICK CAST

Special guest Shawn Maida returns to the show to discuss landing pages: both how his company Visual Chefs uses landing pages for their marketing and 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 different solutions 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.

There is a crisis of sameness in web design today. Host Lea Alcantara explains the benefits of a signature design style as a way to break through these barriers. We discuss pros and cons, how it affects clients, and how to balance business goals with your own unique way of applying design solutions.

The more we interact with technology, the more we interact with it like it is human. And the more design needs to account for that human factor. Facebook designer Beth Dean returns to the show to talk about emotional intelligence in design. She shares scenarios of real-world apps and sites that create stress for users, along with examples where stress points have been avoided through emotionally intelligent design. Beth also offers suggestions on how to bring more emotional intelligence into projects, including embracing diversity in the workplace, identifying stress scenarios early in the process, and emphasizing the user throughout.

Solspace founder and developer Mitchell Kimbrough returns to the show to discuss 3rd-party API integration. We talk about the importance of a discovery-first approach, test scripts that help you throughout the project, defining what constitutes a good API and the human aspects involved that help you get your job done.

SVGs aren't just another image format. Designer and front-end dev Brenda Storer joins the show to give us a primer on scalable vector graphics, from browser support to the underlying code elements and attributes. She offers recommendations for optimizing SVGs and making them more accessible. She also details real world use cases and shares her favorite resources for learning and inspiration.

Author, developer and web standards evangelist Aaron Gustafson returns to the show to discuss progressive enhancement and how fundamental concepts are still relevant today. We discuss development philosophies as well as dive into development specifics of progressive enhancement, how planning and responsive design fits in, as well as the business and user case for always developing with progressive enhancement in mind.

Platform-agnostic add-on dev. Sounds complicated, and it is. mithra62's Eric Lamb joins the show to explain his process for porting his Backup Pro add-on from one CMS to several others (and more in the future). Eric details the necessary process of abstracting the add-on to its core universal functions, which helps him support five platforms with a single code base. He also shares how he decides which CMS to target, the submission process to different marketplaces and supporting a broader range of customers.

Time is money. Emily and Lea go through the tools and services Bright Umbrella utilizes to free up more time to run a business more easily. From task management to business development, collaboration and scheduling, to bookkeeping and time tracking, get an inside look on what makes Bright Umbrella tick — efficiently!

A better, faster workflow? That reflects how you want to code? Special guest Dan Tello joins the show to share how he uses build tools and task runners to automate his front-end development. Dan details his process learning Grunt and Gulp, and why he decided to invest in Gulp for his starter repo. He also details the various tools he uses for the different assets he builds, and how he ties them all together with Gulp. We also discuss some of the challenges of workflow automation, and tips for keeping those challenges manageable.

Color is deceptively simple, but truly complex to execute on the web! We have designer and illustrator Geri Coady on the show to break down what color is all about. We discuss its definition, its application on the web vs other industries, while focusing on accessibility, testing and user experience concerns. Also, we share tools & resources to make informed choices for color on the web.