Shopify Growth Insights

We've learned a lot in the past year on how to build a website that builds a business. For 2014, we've boiled it down to three simple rules that will put you head and shoulders above your competiti...

Infographic by Conversion Voodoo – Performance based landing page optimization.

No idea is stupid if you can monetize it. To explore projects outside of clients demands, we began a Labs initiative in March 2012. Think of it as a palate cleanser between client work. It's resul...

Sometimes usability doesn't have to be complicated. By recognizing convention, we can build consistent and easy to use interfaces. In every state, in every city, at every intersection across Ameri...

In his blog, Eric Davis recently wrote, “Many years back I heard from somewhere that you should learn one layer above and below where you do most of your work. This was specifically for programming...

OS X 10.9 Mavericks' energy-saving feature may be delaying your uploads. After updating to OS X 10.9 Mavericks, we noticed that when saving in TextMate to a remote server with Transmit, the upload...

What if you wanted to have greyscale images on a site that turn to color when the user hovers or taps? Rather than load two separate images, we can apply a grayscale effect to a single color im...

Hosting provider Radware compared the performance of top retail websites. As web pages continue to slow down, user demands increase. 57% of users abandon pages that take longer than 3 seconds to lo...

For RainyCafe, we wanted toggle photo realistic toggle switches as our checkboxes. To achieve the effect we used an image sprite and some CSS trickery. The magic here is that the checkbox is hid...

People don't buy features, they buy benefits. Product pages often highlight just features but that's not what sells products. Benefits appeal more directly a reader's emotions. It's especially tru...

Running AdSense on a responsive site doesn't have to be hard. To promote a clean user experience, Google allows modification of the AdWords code (so long as it doesn't artificially inflate clicks...

Not all browsers are made equal. Chrome, Firefox, and Safari showing differences in font rendering. A website is just a set of instructions describing how a site should look. It's up to the bro...

No one wants to "submit" to you. The default label for a button on a form is, and always has been, "Submit." That's a terrible label. Submit doesn't provide me any context beyond the obvious: my...

You have a great idea for a smartphone app. What is the process of putting it together? How tech savvy do you have to be? And then what is the process to get the app into an app store? Aside from ...

It can be tough, frustrating, and even painful to get approval for a design from a client. Anyone can offer an opinion on design, so they do. Worse yet, these opinions are based on an individual's...

Leanne asks... How do you handle final payment when the site launch is delayed? We require 50% down payment for website design projects and the remaining when the site is launched. But lately, we...

Within 24 hours of Apple announcing iOS7, we downloaded the developer preview to our own phones. It is the biggest refresh of the OS ever. It's a welcome change as iOS was starting to feel stale, ...

Dedicating 20% of our time to personal projects and research is the secret sauce that makes our client work successful. We call it Ethercycle Labs. Its shaped our culture in to one of open explora...

In 2009, I quit my job to launch Ethercycle. Back then being a consultancy hadn't crossed my mind. Quite the opposite, I wanted to build an ecommerce SaaS app for bike shops. A little over a year ...

During the month of March 2013, Calming Manatee received 613,792 total page views. Of them, 26.87% were from mobile devices. Unique Visitors by Mobile Device iPhone - 59.45% iPad - 14.06% iPod...

We curated this checklist to make our own website testing more efficient. We run through it before we launch a client's site. We're sharing it with other designers and developers to make the web...

Businesses fall into a trap where when they have a lot of sales coming in, they don't put as much effort into advertising or marketing. It's a combination of two factors. It's the thought...

The trap that many creatives fall in to when marketing themselves is not differentiating themselves. Saying "Hello, my name is Chris, and I make beautiful websites" doesn't help to sell anything....

Slow is annoying. People like things fast. Fast cars, fast good, and fast downloads. Who wouldn't? There's nothing more annoying than sitting on your phone and waiting for something to load. And ...