One of the famously ‘hard things’ in programming is naming things – I’ve found following a few conventions in naming help you reason about a program. For example, variables should be named to describe what they are and functions for what they return. Take this function: This function is named for how it being used. […]
I’ve had a gmail account since as long as there have been gmail accounts. I remember waiting eagerly for an invite and asking around on the pre-facebook and pre-reddit internet for a hook up to this crazy new email service. When I finally got my invite I picked the name I always do – muddylemon. […]
When is a visitor to your website “converted?” For most websites and analytics programs, the answer is the confirmation page. You may have also heard this page called the Thank You Page or Receipt Page or something else entirely. The fact that it has so many names makes it clear to me that there hasn’t been […]
“For those who think business exists to make a profit…think again. Business makes a profit to exist.” Ray Anderson, founder of Interface. I ran a small web dev shop that failed because I didn’t understand how much I should have been charging my clients. I started my business with a lot of assumptions that proved […]
Many landing pages, especially those designed to collect leads, will use a form as the primary call to action. In this guide, you will learn how to optimize your form to maximize your conversion rate without sacrificing your lead quality. Forms do a lot of jobs on landing pages. Jobs like: Asking for contact information […]
I had really hoped that things would fall in place and the mild flirtation we shared would eventually allow me to kiss you but instead you went back to your room and i paused, only for a second and saw myself in third person as a movie star in some passionate melodramatic nineteenforties black and white […]
Everyone loves the story about how a scrappy upstart changed the color of a button on its landing page and suddenly increased its conversion rate by 200%. Stories like that make for a great headlines. They also often spawn copycats naïvely trying to replicate that anomaly in completely different contexts. Do you remember when Dustin […]
Everyone – well, everyone in my social circles, has a stash of great domain names that were bought in a moment of inspiration and are renewed annually in a pitiful sacrifice to the God of good intentions. It’s high time to give someone else a crack at it, and what better way than to transfer […]
Imagine you walked into a car dealership to look at a brand new Hyundai. You’ve wondered if they have the leg room you need. You approach a sales rep and ask if the Hyundai Sonatas have adequate leg room for a big galoot like yourself. The salesperson nods and says that they are surprisingly roomy […]
Last night on twitter I started this series based on the hashtag #PHPConfessions I’ve never gotten the order of arguments right for str_replace without checking http://php.net first #PHPConfessions I’m always afraid I’ll be seated with the Perl people at programmer gatherings #PHPConfessions I like PHP because I like always having the option to blame my […]