https://demos.subrion.org/_core/bloghttps://demos.subrion.org/_core/blog/7-Christmas-discounts-2015.htmlWed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 ESTGet any of Subrion premium products 25% cheaper.   The development team behind Subrion CMS – Intelliants, have recently announced a major update for their flagship content management system, calling it Subrion CMS 4. Subrion is an open-source PHP content management system which has always aimed to be as comprehensive as possible in terms of functionality, whilst holding true to it's user-friendly ethos.  Key features such as full source editing, per-page permissions and extensive plugin options have always been part of the platform, but now with a host of improvements recently launched along with Subrion CMS 3, users are in for a far more powerful Subrion experience. Let's explore how. https://demos.subrion.org/_core/blog/6-Black-Friday-Discounts-2014.htmlWed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 ESTThe deals you've been waiting for all year! Save up to 35% on your purchase from Intelliants team. We have a lot of news to share with you. You will be surprised how many new stuff we have here at Intelliants, including new Subrion CMS 3.2, new subrion.com and subrion.org websites, new plugins & templates. So take your seats and get ready for a long story. Winter has arrived, and that means holiday shopping. Why not give yourself a gift this year? In keeping with Intelliants holiday tradition, we're offering our best prices of the year during the Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend. Have a look at what's available: BLK2014 Please note that you can apply these coupon codes to upgrade your license to a multiple domains license. If you are a happy owner of our software and wish to build more and more successful websites using our software, please contact us to get the personal discount. Please note the discounts can only be applied to the products. You cannot use them for the services, as we already offer the lowest possible prices. https://demos.subrion.org/_core/blog/5-Now-More-Powerful-and-Flexible-Than-Ever-Before.htmlWed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 ESTThe development team behind Subrion CMS – Intelliants, have recently announced a major update for their flagship content management system, calling it Subrion CMS 3. Subrion is an open-source PHP content management system which has always aimed to be as comprehensive as possible in terms of functionality, whilst holding true to it's user-friendly ethos. Key features such as full source editing, per-page permissions and extensive plugin options have always been part of the platform, but now with a host of improvements recently launched along with Subrion CMS 3, users are in for a far more powerful Subrion experience. https://demos.subrion.org/_core/blog/3-Data-Driven-Design-In-The-Real-World.htmlWed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 ESTAs more designers and writers look to analytics to inform their decisions, many still struggle to implement their findings in a sustainable, ongoing way. Too often, testing and analysis are one-off activities, providing plenty of important-looking numbers but not lot of context or specific direction. After more than five years helping content and design teams capture, measure and understand website performance data (client-side at Bazaarvoice and now at Volusion), I’ve learned a lot about connecting the dots between data and design improvements. Today, I want to share some of those lessons with you. In this article, we’ll: see what a good data-driven model looks like on paper, look at a real-life example of the model, share some resources to help you get started with testing. Defining “Data-Driven” Design Before we can talk about using data to improve design, we have to define what we mean by “data.” This will help with a very common challenge: no shared language between designers and writers and their analytics team and tools. QUALITATIVE VS. QUANTITATIVE DATA In most Web-based projects, there are two general types of data, and you’ll often see these discussed in articles about website optimization: Quantitative data Numerical data that shows the who, what, when and where. Qualitative data Non-numerical data that demonstrates the why or how. Most analytics tools, such as Google Analytics, provide a lot of quantitative data, such as who has come to your website, how they got there and what actions they took. What these tools don’t tell you is why. Why does a certain group of visitors take one action, while a different group of visitors choose another? Why does one piece of content keep visitors on your website longer than another? That’s when we turn to qualitative data. Whereas quantitative data shows scale, qualitative data gives perspective. It helps us understand not just what happened, but why and how it happened. “The qualitative/quantitative issue is really a misunderstood area in research, especially to people who haven’t been exposed to broad-based training,” says Dave Yeats, senior UX researcher at Bazaarvoice. In his over 10 years of conducting user research, Yeats has developed a greater appreciation for the qualitative side of things: “I’ve come across too many instances of people dismissing qualitative research as ‘anecdotal’ because they don’t understand how non-numerical data is still data.” A good data-driven model must include both. And a good working understanding of how the two relate to each other will not only provide better insights, but also improve communication between team members. The Key To Success: Be Empirical, Be Specific The very best data, be it qualitative (i.e. non-numerical) or quantitative (i.e. numerical), is always empirical. Empirical data is any type of information gathered through observation or experimentation. The best empirical data answers specific questions — because when data is specific, taking action on it becomes easier. When looking for general empirical data, such as “metrics for the website” or “how the website is performing,” you can end up with data that, while interesting, doesn’t lead directly to specific actions. Or, as Google Analytics evangelist Avinash Kaushik colorfully puts it: “All data in aggregate is crap.” You can’t isolate variables when looking across big aggregated metrics (such as overall page views or downloads.) This makes it difficult to hypothesize about why you’re seeing what you’re seeing. There are just too many moving parts to know. Plus, different portions of a website — indeed, even different pages within subdirectories — have different, smaller goals. Sure, they all feed into large site-wide goals, such as sales or downloads or content consumption, but optimization must happen within smaller visitor groups, traffic segments or groups of pages. Let’s look at an example. A Textbook Example Of Good Data-Driven Design To better understand how to focus on empirical data, both qualitative and quantitative, let’s look at a hypothetical problem for a content-oriented website. Let’s suppose you run an online periodical or research website. Keeping visitors engaged is a big goal! You’ve been asked to make design and content changes that will help retain visitors. Where do you start? You could log into your analytics account and check exit and bounce rates. For our purposes, we can define these as follows: Exit rate The number of times a visitor leaves your domain from a page, divided by that page’s total views. Generally expressed as a percentage. Bounce rate The number of times a visitor enters a domain on a page but leaves before viewing any other page in the domain, divided by the total number of views of that page. Also generally expressed as a percentage. Upon sorting all of your pages by exit rate and then bounce rate, you find that two pages have much higher rates than the website’s averages. Based on this quantitative data, you look up the pages. One page contains a prominent link to a sister website — this means you’re intentionally sending people someplace else. You’re not as concerned, then, by the high exit and bounce rates on that page, because that page is designed to be an exit point. But the other page contains a long, important article and no direct, intentional reason to leave. Why are visitors bouncing and exiting so often, then? Time to turn to qualitative data! “My favorite thing to do is combine observational research (watching somebody use a site) with in-context, self-reported data asking people about their presence,” says Yeats: “‘What are you thinking about right now?’ ‘What is your response to that?’ This combination of observation, stimulus and probing for data paints the full picture.” Yeats is right! This is a great opportunity for user testing. And because you’ve narrowed down your efforts to a single page (maybe a couple for additional context), testing becomes more practical. You’ll also be able to determine whether any design changes you make are working, because you’ve identified specific, empirical metrics that quantify success: exit and bounce rates. Setting Your Data Up For Success As you look to improve your use of data in making decisions about design and content, do the following: Develop a common language with your analytics team or, if you’re also pulling the data, then with your analytics tool. Educate your team on specifically what you mean so that they understand the importance of the metrics you’re providing. Use quantitative and qualitative data together — even if people are skeptical at first of the qualitative points. Always use specific, empirical data — don’t offer “high-level” metrics. Find data points that answer specific design questions and, thus, illustrate whether design or content changes “worked.” (In our example, we used bounce and exit rates.) Remember that success does not mean the same thing for all pages or types of visitors. Consider how returning visitors might have different needs from new visitors, or how visitors from an email might have different needs from visitors from organic search. Think about the goals of individual pages and subdirectories and how they might differ. So far, we’ve talked about the best-case scenario for data-driven design: using quantitative data to identify issues and to benchmark current performance, and then using real-time qualitative user testing to understand why you’re seeing those numbers and how to improve them. Continue reading on SmashingMag https://demos.subrion.org/_core/blog/2-BlendMe-in-Accessing-Vector-Icons-Without-Leaving-Photoshop.htmlWed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 ESTThere is no doubt that the Web is full of websites that are packed with free icon packs, and that doesn’t necessarily make it easier for designers to find their way around when they’re looking for a particular icon for a particular project. When you’re in your creative zone and have an idea about something that would perfectly fit in your design, you don’t have time to waste and struggle with finding the right asset. BlendMe.in is a Photoshop extension that allows you to quickly find a high-quality icon that you can simply drag and drop and then easily continue your ideation. All of the icons are vectorial and have been inserted as smart Photoshop objects, meaning that you get all the icon components as layers (vector objects, adjustment layers, etc.) so that you can easily tweak them to match your creation. Download BlendMe.in For Free! BlendMe.in is freely available for private and commercial projects. All the assets are provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Preview of the BlendMe.in Photoshop extension Download the free extension (ZIP, 1.80 MB) INSTRUCTIONS: Close Photoshop before installing the extension. If you don’t have it, download and install Adobe Extension Manager. Unpack the ZIP file, and double click one of the .zxp files. This will launch Adobe Extension Manager. Please make sure the Extension Manager version matches your Photoshop version. Go through the installation steps. Open Photoshop and choose Window → Extensions → Blendmein. Browse or search icons, then drag and drop into your PSD. https://demos.subrion.org/_core/blog/4-Good-Content-Is-Too-Valuable-To-Die.htmlWed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 ESTWhen I started developing websites back in the day, I was lucky to have hundreds of valuable, practical articles that would help me become better at what I did. I could learn day and night, and whenever I discovered a new tool or technique, I would bookmark it on Delicious for future reference. I knew the value of each article and of each bookmark, and I kept revisiting and carefully tagging them for months and months — almost every day. Years have passed. The landscape has changed. Blogs have emerged and new publications have appeared. Some magazines were discontinued yet remained fully available online (Pingmag and good ol’ Digital-Web, for example). At that point, maintaining a backup of online articles obviously didn’t even cross my mind. For a year or so, I even stopped bookmarking articles since I could always find them via Google, of course. I was naive and stupid. As the time was progressing, every now and again I kept revisiting my bookmarks just to realize that all this fantastic, valuable content was slowly fading away from me, leaving nothing but a breath of disappointment and sadness every time I wanted to quickly look something up and had to consult the fantastic Web.archive.org first to drag the living parts of the article from the incomplete cached version. Good Content Is Too Valuable To Die Yesterday over 9,500 articles published throughout the years on .net magazinedisappeared over night. Sadly, only the top 500 articles were moved to a new home while others just vanished from the Web within a couple of seconds. And so, another portion of my bookmarks died silently and abruptly. Over 9,500 .net mag articles disappeared over night; users are redirected to the “Welcome”-post on Creative Bloq. I loved how detailed and practical articles published on .net magazine used to be. I loved Dan Oliver’s and Oliver Lindberg’s fantastic editorial work on hundreds of articles I’ve bookmarked over the years — many of them now gone due to the simple fact that they didn’t get enough attention over the years. Those articles were good, very good in fact; valuable, helpful, worth reading and rereading, worth tweeting and sharing, worth keeping as PDFs in a special local folder. The remainders of those articles still exist out there, in Google Cache or Web Archive cache. They are accessible and can be found if you know what you are looking for and know where to look for them. But what if you don’t? A couple of months from now, they will disappear from the Google index for good. The content that was thoroughly edited and skillfully prepared over years will not be there anymore. If I started developing websites today, I wouldn’t be able to find them anymore. That’s bad — very, very bad. We know it because we’ve been there: Good content is time-consuming. It’s expensive, requires patience and damn hard work. Good content is very difficult to produce and hard to maintain, and it’s way too valuable to die like this. One thought keeps crossing my mind and that is: “This should not be happening.” Continue reading on SmashingMag