Five Great Campaign Websites from the 2014 Election Cycle

Having worked in digital politics in a previous life, I observe elections these days with mixed feelings from a safe distance.

Working for political campaigns is hard, stressful and often demoralizing.  The long hours rewarded with below market pay.  But the highs are pretty high.  When you are working on a political campaign it is your whole life for a time. ...

23 Takeaways from Drupalcon Austin

Chris, Mike, Ron, Shane, Teddy and I spent last week at Drupalcon Austin.   We learned a lot, and ate our fair share of Mexican food and BBQ.  Following is a list of our key takeaways from the trip.

(1) Drupal 8 won’t be released until sometime in 2015. ...

10 Best Trade Association Websites

What makes a good website? About a hundred different things. But what’s a good start? Good organization, good design, good content.

Brick Factory is based in D.C., where you can’t go a block without passing half-a-dozen trade associations, so we were curious: which ones have the best websites?...

Five political emails that look nothing like political emails

As someone who works in digital public affairs, I paid close attention to the emails that were sent out by the Obama campaign during the 2008 and 2012 election cycles and am now closely watching what is being sent out by  Organizing for Action.  The reason I’m paying attention is simple: the Obama folks know what works. ...

NBCNEWS.com Succumbs to the Grid

When the Mashable site was redesigned into the now familiar grid layout, I wrote a blog post bellyaching about the infinite scroll, various usability issues and somehow Jakob Nielsen. I’m still not a big fan of the grid approach to website design because it’s not design, it’s the process of dumping content into boxes that descend like fish food over time to the bottom of the page and I find that solution lacking creativity....