Shopify Growth Insights

Autumn is an exciting time to be outdoors. The summer heat has passed, but the bitter cold of winter has yet to come. This is especially true for us in the midwest where we really only have two mon...

Always looking for insight to the active lifestyle consumer, the EtherCycle team attended Interbike International Bicycle Expo in Las Vegas. There we had the opportunity to meet with over 1,100 bra...

Feature creep is the result of good but misguided intentions. It is perpetuated by the false belief that "the more features it has, the more people will use it!" This line of thinking results in we...

The default view of most analytics packages is overall traffic. This is misleading. The effectiveness of a website can not be measured purely by traffic volume since all traffic is not good traffic...

While there are endless ways to build links and tweak on-page code in an attempt to game Google, the best way to bring visitors to your site is to give them new and valuable content. Content is the...

Quality Assurance is a critical step in the web design process. Before launching a website, we run through the following checklist.Do all links work?Do analytics packages (Google, Clickheat) report...

We recently helped a client improve their conversion rate 36% by adding a guest checkout as the first step in their checkout process. Just as in a grocery store, customers want the fastest checkout...

Nearly every Sunday, I grab a good book and hit our local cafe. It can be intimidating to choose a marketing book when there are so many, and most of them are rehashings of better books. Which are...

Debossed text, commonly called the letterpress effect, has become a lovely trend in web design. The effect can be achieved in Photoshop entirely using layer styles. Try it yourself using these sett...

Photo for a client depicting their pipe tobacco. Shot in our studio with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and Canon EF 50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro lens.Setup:Lighting diagram generated by Online Lighting Diagra...

All QR codes used in public places are vulnerable to a hijack attack by stickers.By generating QR code stickers that are of roughly the same dimension as the targeted advertisements QR code, and la...

Analytics data is great for seeing where your traffic comes from, and where it goes, but it has a blindspot in determining what a user specifically does on page. Click heat mapping logs the coordin...

Speculative work (or spec work) is work done at no charge in the hope that it will result in paying work. We will never design on spec, and are confident that our peers won't either. Professional a...

We recently wrestled with our own official social media policy. What we realized was that it benefits us when our employees and contractors develop their own personal brands in association with our...

Based on three years of research including over 4,500 people, Stanford has produced a list of ten guidelines to improve the credibility of any website. We've distilled that list down to seven aphor...

Free high-resolution textures sampled from some of our office furniture. Taken with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II and EF50mm f/2.5 Compact Macro lens. Available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Li...

The importance of password security cannot be overstated. Password lists are stolen and sold every day. Right now, there are dozens of phishing emails sitting in my spam mail hoping to steal my pas...

As businesses realize the importance of SEO marketing, it's become increasingly difficult to rank a small business for their relevant niche keywords. Local SEO is a much less competitive (and there...

When selling a product online, an e-commerce website's primary aesthetic purpose should be to depict that product in a compelling way. There is no better way to do this than with beautiful photogra...

Top: FireFox for Mac, Bottom: IE8 on Windows7 A client sent me a screenshot of a web page using @font-face. As Apple fanboys typography-enthusiasts, we reacted with the kind of revulsion that i...

Follow these ten tips, and in one day you will improve your customers' satisfaction with your brand, ultimately increasing your conversions. Links should have meaningful anchor text. "Click here" ...

Download the Twenty-Eleven wallpaper. It is one of our New Year's Resolutions to spread the proper pronunciation of the new year. Please perform your civic duty and print the informational flye...

The unfortunate truth about SEO as a marketing niche is that it has become the domain of snake oil salesman. SEO, unlike graphic design or programming, requires no special skills and therefore has...

From our collection of texture scans, we're giving away this lovely cream french speckle-tone paper background for all iOS devices. The available resolutions are: iPad (768x1024) iPhone (320x...