How to Create a Website for Your Small Business, Part 2: Website Structure and Content

Now that we’ve set up our website, it’s time to decide what content to put on it—this is Part 2 of our three-part tutorial series on creating a website for your small business. In this post, we'll be addressing our site's structure and content. If you haven’t read Part 1, click on the following link and …

Can you succeed in blogging without really trying?

As it is probably apparent by glancing through this blog, the designers at Automattic were given a user empathy challenge. Our task was to pick one of our fellow designers’ blog posts and come up with a plan to get it over 1,000 views on a financial budget of $20 and a time budget of …

How to achieve overnight success

The designers at Automattic were given a challenge: to pick a colleague’s post and outline a plan for it to get 1,000+ page views with only a $20 budget. Several years ago, I blogged a lot. I mostly wrote tutorials and gave away free design resources. My first ever design tutorial fortunately got picked up …

Promoting is not short for “professional moting” AKA how to get more eyeballs to your blog post

As you may have read in some of my colleagues' posts on this blog already, there has been a slight shift in the way we do things here. Instead of monthly posts, we're moving to a quarterly schedule instead. For this quarter, I'm going to chat about how to you can get more traffic to …

How to blog it and make them come…lessons from a friend

It’s a new year, and designers at Automattic have been pondering a common question that all bloggers face: how can I get more views? I decided to take a look at this question by examining one of my best friend’s blogs, Southern Ohana, hosted right here on WordPress.com. We’ve been friends since middle school, and …

Finding your target audience. A simple guide to driving more traffic to your blog.

Originally written for DesignTactician.blog First, define your purpose It may seem like a silly question to ask oneself—but its often a question that’s overlooked when folks get a website or blog online (or before). But the answer to “why” can often shift the tactics in which to have a successful website or blog. What’s the …

I’m just starting! What’s the first step to more page views?

It's an exciting journey to have a project going. Maybe it's a side passion, maybe it's a desire to do something for others, maybe it's a business blossoming... when it gets online it always reaches a point where one has to face the question "how do I get more people interested in what I do?" …

Paying my way to success

Some changes are coming to the Automatic design blogs. Previously, we were tasked with writing an article each month on a topic of our choice. However, we're now moving to quarterly posts. For our next article, we were given a specific prompt to follow: The topic for your January 15, 2018 post is to first …

Learnings from designing WooConf 2017

I joined Woo in July 2014 just a few month before we hosted the very first WooConf in San Francisco. Since then we have hosted two more -- in Austin last April and most recently in Seattle. Here are a couple of things I learnt designing WooConf 2017 which might be helpful for folks planning …

A Designer’s (mini) Guide to Basic Developing

When I first started out designing for the web, all that a plucky pixel wrangler needed was Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and an FTP client to get the job done. I'm oversimplifying a little, but it wasn't far off - if you had those programs to call on, you were sorted. I know a few folks who, …