Pattern sight requires you to master the skill of looking for what should and shouldn’t be there. It’s the ability not only to see the rare “odd duck” but to routinely look for that duck and see it…It takes time to learn patterns of information, which is why you need to spend a lot of time “in the field.”
We call that “experience,” and you’ve seen that whenever you’re in a situation with someone who just “knows” what’s coming next without being able to explain it. That person is reading the patterns. This mastery is not about fresh eyes but wise eyes.
Many people use Design Thinking as a methodology for problem solving, innovation, or just figuring out what to do next. The key ingredient to arriving to the best solutions comes from identifying these patterns.
This is also the key reason why you cannot completely learn Design Thinking through, for example, a 3 day program or even one that is a week or more. We know, because we have been teaching it for years.
Most DT training programs will perhaps, at best, give you an introduction to Design Thinking and its value. However getting it done right requires experience, experience that stems from years of deliberate practice in identifying such patterns and applying it positively.
I like to expand this skill to also include the (overlapping) ability to reframe problems and situations. Many people look at reframing as simply turning negative to positive, or going from “left” to “right”. It’s a lot more.
This quote sums it up nicely and also my blog post today. Have a great week ahead!
Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
Pattern sight requires you to master the skill of looking for what should and shouldn’t be there. It’s the ability not only to see the rare “odd duck” but to routinely look for that duck and see it…It takes time to learn patterns of information, which is why you need to spend a lot of time “in the field.”
We call that “experience,” and you’ve seen that whenever you’re in a situation with someone who just “knows” what’s coming next without being able to explain it. That person is reading the patterns. This mastery is not about fresh eyes but wise eyes.
Many people use Design Thinking as a methodology for problem solving, innovation, or just figuring out what to do next. The key ingredient to arriving to the best solutions comes from identifying these patterns.
This is also the key reason why you cannot completely learn Design Thinking through, for example, a 3 day program or even one that is a week or more. We know, because we have been teaching it for years.
Most DT training programs will perhaps, at best, give you an introduction to Design Thinking and its value. However getting it done right requires experience, experience that stems from years of deliberate practice in identifying such patterns and applying it positively.
I like to expand this skill to also include the (overlapping) ability to reframe problems and situations. Many people look at reframing as simply turning negative to positive, or going from “left” to “right”. It’s a lot more.
This quote sums it up nicely and also my blog post today. Have a great week ahead!
Thus the task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everybody sees.
Today we’re happy to release yet another freebie: a set of 60 lovely workspace illustrations of items that many web and graphic designers use every day: tablet and desktop computers, Apple Watches, cameras, Moleskine notebooks, headphones, pens, pencils, pairs of glasses — even coffee cups and cookies!
The set has been designed by Anastasia Kolisnichenko, from Minsk, Belarus, and released for free for Smashing Magazine’s readers. Feel free to use all these elements and others for your projects. Grab what you need for a poster or website. You can customize everything you want: stroke width, size, color, shape — everything.
This typeface family is not only professional and highly legible. During our Deal of the Week it is also extremely price-worthy. Meet the Muller Font Family. Composed of 20 different fonts, Muller sports 10 Uprights and 10 Italics with weights ranging from Hairline to Heavy. Highly versatile, you can count on Muller to handle any project you throw it at! Highlights: Get psyched with 20 professional fonts in one terrific typeface bundle! The crisp, clean Mueller Font Family features 10 different weights: Hairline, Thin, Ultra Light, Light, Regular, Medium, Bold, Extra Bold, Black and Heavy. Each of the 10 different weights comes in both a Regular Uprights and Italics style for a total of 20 unique fonts. Mix and match the various weights to create engaging and seamless results for your latest project. Muller is a great font choice for just about anything and everything including advertising, packaging, editorial and branding for both the Web and printed projects. For some extra fun, dive into the numerous OpenType features available: ligatures, fractions, alternate characters, superscripts and subscripts, proportional and old style figures, case-sensitive forms and more. Previews: Pricing: Normally, the Muller family sells for $279, but for a limited time only, you […]
* You might also be interested in the following articles:
In part 8 of our Online Marketing Series, we will talk about affiliate marketing. This type of marketing can be a powerful tool – especially for sales people. To figure out what it is and how to use it, this post will answer these questions: What exactly is affiliate marketing? Who should use it? How is it deployed? What kind of tricky issues should we pay attention to when doing affiliate marketing? What is Affiliate Marketing? Roughly, „to affiliate“ means to associate or to partner with someone. That’s what it’s all about: You tie your partners (the affiliates) to the advertising of your products or services. As always when doing online marketing, you want to direct attention (and drive traffic) to a certain web presence, like your website. So whatever you want to sell – with affiliate marketing, the partners you take on board are called publishers. These publishers promote your product or services on their websites. The goal is to get visitors clicking on your ad or link, respectively, and direct them to your website. Once there, these visitors hopefully perform the desired action (like buying something). If that’s the case, your partner earns a predetermined commission. For the […]
* You might also be interested in the following articles:
Here is your mission, should you choose to accept it: create a table of items. Each item should span a third of the content area, with the fourth item starting on a new row, much like floats. However, a particular item must always display the price at the end of the first row.
So if there are only two elements, the price element would be second. But if there are more than three items, the price would be the last element in the first row.
You might assume that JavaScript would be the best solution — just loop over the items, and if there are more than three, update the styling. But what if I told you could do it with CSS alone?
Pure CSS Counting
I’ve gone all in on flexbox lately, teaching it right alongside floats as a layout method at our little project called HackerYou, and I have found that students take to it well. The flexbox specification contains properties that enable us to modify markup in new ways. One of these is order, which allows us to modify the presentational order of content without touching the markup or structure.
Used with media queries, order is extremely useful, enabling us to change the content’s order with the viewport size. That got me thinking: Why can’t we change the order of elements according to the amount of content?
What if we combined quantity queries and the order property to change how content is read according to how much of it there is?
Using Flexbox
Flexbox, or the “Flexible Box Layout Module4,” is a CSS specification that allows for content to be laid out in any direction and for children to be sized to their parent easily. Originally introduced in 2009, flexbox has gone through many changes over the years. However, it is supported5 in all current browsers, with the exception of Internet Explorer 9+.
One of the most significant changes within flexbox is the naming syntax of associated properties and values. Because the specification evolved over years, browser vendors would use the syntax that was being developed at the time. So, using vendor prefixes is recommended to ensure support across legacy browsers.
One recommended tool for managing cross-browser support in CSS is Autoprefixer6, which is typically included in preprocessors and Gulp and Grunt files.
Understanding Order
Before we dig into quantity queries and how they work, we should understand how to use the order property. First, we need to wrap the content with a parent element and apply display: flex to it.
By default, elements will appear in their order in the markup. All child elements of a flexbox parent share an order value of 1.
This value is unitless and simply refers to the order of the element relative to the other elements around it. However, we can change the value of an individual element using the order property.
In the example above, we’ve changed the order of p.itemOne to a value of 2, making it fall after p.itemTwo and thereby changing the presentational order for the user. Note that the markup remains the same, however.
Counting With CSS
Media queries, eh? Such an awesome tool for applying CSS when certain conditions are met. Those conditions could be device type, size, color and more — pretty powerful stuff. But the query applies only to the device that the viewer is using; there is no defined CSS method for querying the amount of content in an element.
If we get creative with existing CSS pseudo-selectors, however, we can build tools that count the number of children in an element and then apply styles accordingly. For this example, let’s use a simple ordered list:
Yep, that’s the selector. In English, it could be translated as this: “When there are four or more child elements, get the other list items and the first child.”
Let’s break this down. First, the counting:
ul.ellist li:nth-last-child(n+4) {
// Styles!
}
This translates as, “Go to the last child and count back four children.” Apply the styles to the fourth element and all elements before it.
Go ahead and experiment by editing the Codepen and changing the selector to a different number.
So, there it is, counting. If fewer than four siblings are counted, nothing is selected and no styles are applied. We can now modify this selector to select all li elements using the general sibling combinator19.
ul.ellist li:nth-last-child(n+4) ~ li {
// Styles!
}
The problem is that this doesn’t select the first child element. We can append another selector to do that:
Of course, we can make the selector more agnostic simply by supplying the parent element and letting it choose all of the children. We do this with the * selector.
element > *:nth-last-child(n+4) ~ *,
element *:nth-last-child(n+4):first-child {
// Styles!
}
Ordering Based On Quantity
Now that we have explored how to count with CSS selectors and how to use flexbox to order content, let’s mix them together to build a tool that orders elements based on the number of siblings.
Again, we’re trying to make our last element be the third element (i.e. appear as the last element in the first row) when there are more than three siblings.
Let’s apply some CSS for some presentational styling. We’ll apply display: flex to the parent container, which allows us to apply the order property on the child elements. As well, we’ll apply some default styling to the .target element to differentiate it.
Now that we have a base style to work with, we can create some logic to order our items accordingly. Again, by default, all elements have an order value of 1 and are displayed according to the order in which they appear in the markup.
Using a quantity query, we can count whether there are more than three items.
ul.ellist > *:nth-last-child(n+3) {
// Styles!
}
We can then modify our query to select the .target element only if the number of items is met. For now, we’ll apply an order of -1, so that it appears at the beginning of our list.
Voilà! We’ve just styled an element based on the numbers of siblings it has. Using this code, we can put one element in front of another.
But what if it needs to go between items?
Some Logical Thinking
Here is the problem, in three arguments:
By default, all items have an order set to 1. We need the items at the beginning of the list to keep that order value.
Our target will be presented at the end of the first row. So, we need the target’s order value to be higher than the ones in the beginning — i.e. 2.
We need all items from three onward to have a higher order than our target and lead elements. So, they will have an order value of 3.
How about this?
Because all items have a default value of 1, we don’t need to declare that. Let’s allow our target element to have an order value of 2 via our quantity query, effectively placing it higher than the others.
Then, using another quantity query that utilizes nth-child(), we will count from the beginning of the list, rather than from the end. Because our .target quantity query is more specific, the last element will be ignored, but all others three and higher will have their order changed.
We counted from the end of a parent element if there were a number of child elements. If there were, we applied some styles to an element of our choice. We then counted from the beginning and applied styles to all elements past that point.
The beautiful part is that if we were to remove elements, the target element would still appear in the correct position.
My first thought when given this task was to use a programming language. Because the website was built on WordPress, I could modify “the loop” to count and inject the element where needed.
However, because I’m building the website for a front-end development school, I wanted to do it with pure CSS and explore the possibilities that flexbox’s order allows.
Below is an example of the resulting page, done entirely with CSS.
Quantity queries are a fairly new concept, and writing the selectors can be a bit of a challenge. Nevertheless, the community is embracing the concept and is building tools and writing Sass mixins that can help us write queries effectively. Libraries such as the one by Daniel Guillan23, called a Quantity Queries Mixin24, enable us to write media queries as simple includes.
PostCSS is a new tool that allows CSS to be transformed with JavaScript. The current PostCSS ecosystem includes many community-developed plugins, including a Quantity Query27 plugin.
The plugin allows for custom pseudo-selectors to target values within a certain range, at least, or at most.
p:at-least(4) { … }
p:between(4,6) { … }
Browser Support
Currently, support for both CSS pseudo-selectors and flexbox28 is great in modern browsers. If your project targets users on IE 10 and above, you can use quantity queries and flexbox ordering together.
Where to Use It
When building websites, we often use programming languages that allow us to count and modify our content as needed. However, as CSS has improved, we’ve moved away from programming languages into advanced CSS properties.
One example is CSS animations. What was previously possible only through Flash or JavaScript is now achievable with pure CSS, a language for defining the presentation of our content.
Quantity ordering enables us to remove modified loops that count and insert content accordingly, allowing our content to be read semantically.
A great example of the usefulness of quantity ordering would be a news website with advertising. In the markup, all articles are organized together, and the ads are placed at the end. In terms of accessibility, this allows for an uninterrupted flow of content. The ads can then be placed throughout the content, using quantity ordering only on a presentational layer.
While ordering can be used to change the presentational display of elements, for accessibility, it can damage the experience. Be aware of how content flows and how it will be read on accessibility devices.
Conclusion
Quantity queries and quantity ordering are advanced concepts and might be scary for beginners. However, as we move presentational styling away from programming languages and into CSS, we should use these tools more and more.
Even as many members of our industry explore content queries32, we can now use quantity queries to modify the order of content simply by counting.
We love experiments, and trying things out. So what if we published our lovely Smashing Email Newsletter1, with thoroughly collected, written and edited little articles on useful tips’n’bits for web designers, in the magazine as well? This newsletter issue was sent out to 181,631 newsletter subscribers on Tuesday, July 14th. Perhaps you’ll find something useful in there, too. We’d love to see your feedback in the comments. — Ed.
Editorial
How much data do you actually use per day? What if you go to a remote city, just to discover a few entangled data plans on site — unless you want to stay off the grid? What if you do have to work full day and you can’t rely on a “good enough” Wi-Fi in a coffee house? Also, how do you make sense of the plans if sometimes you are expected to pay a setup price, or pay per 100 Mb, or weekly, or monthly, or perhaps even with a long-lasting contract. Oh nightmare!
As I keep observing my data plan squandering from one month to another, I’ve noticed that even without downloading videos or syncing Dropbox or streaming Spotify (using it in offline mode), I ended up spending around 375 Mb of data per full working day — basically just reading many articles, visiting many websites, and receiving many emails — with an occasional dash of Facebook, Tweetdeck, Instagram and Skype attachments.
Extrapolated for an entire month, it makes up for 8–10 Gb of data per month (if you count weekend for occasional browsing as well). Considering that an average web page is 2.1 MB in size3, it makes sense — with 375 Mb/day, that’s just (well, “just”) 178 web pages a day.
If you still use roaming when travelling, consider purchasing a local SIM-card instead; depending on your work, you might need to sync larger files, so accounting for 375 Mb per working day might make sense — and that without heavy downloads. To save bandwidth, use Opera Turbo4, Opera Mini5 or Tripmode6. In light of this, a 3GB plan doesn’t seem like much any more, yet depending on the country of interest it might be ridiculously expensive — unless you find a savvy café or an open space, that is.
A good interface is all about great copywriting. The tone, the voice, the language all define how messages are perceived, but also how exactly they are communicated, shaping the atmosphere and experience for users. Particularly when we design interfaces for tiny screens18, being precise yet delightful is crucial. No wonder that some designers go as far as starting to design their interfaces in a text editor19, outlining interactions and copy in plain text first. Often, adjusting microcopy is a quick win20.
However, it can be difficult to find a strategic approach for writing and maintaining good copy consistently. Nicole Fenton’s article on interface writing22 looks into the fine detail that make up interface copy, and offers a few guidelines and examples of how to get it right. Not enough tips for you? Jonas Downey from 37signals has an article on writing interfaces well23, too. And just in case your clients send their content in Microsoft Word, consider using Writage24, a Markdown plugin for Microsoft Word that converts Word documents into reasonable Markdown plain text. (vf)
2. Dealing With Multilingual Responsive Design
One codebase of one responsive website, shared across dozens of international versions of the website, supporting dozens of different languages. If it doesn’t sound like a complex undertaking to you, it probably should. Creating a scalable design system across viewports and browsers is one thing, but when it comes to languages, web fonts and layouts can easily become a headache.
Tom Maslen from the BBC team has summed up the lessons they learned when building the multilingual BBC website26. You won’t find any obvious statements, but practical tips, from creating JSON configuration files with language attributes, to translation files for the critical UI components — as well as dealing with web fonts and bidirectional layouts. Certainly an article worth reading.
If you’re looking for more general non-technical issues to keep in mind on multilingual projects, check Jane Robbins’ slide deck27. Now, if a multilingual project comes your way, you’ll be prepared. (vf)
3. Don’t Trust HTTP Cache
When we talk about performance, we tend to talk about the first visit and subsequent visits. The first visit is always expensive because so many assets have to be requested and downloaded; also, the render tree has to be constructed from scratch — not to mention images and web fonts. Subsequent visits shouldn’t be that bad: after all, most of the site’s assets are in HTTP cache at this point. Well, they should be. As it turns out, that’s not really the case most of the time.
Caches don’t stay populated for very long; according to Facebook, on desktop there’s only a 42% chance that any request will have a cache that is, at most, 47 hours old. It’s not surprising when you remember the 2.1 MB weight of an average website31 — keeping caches for a long time just isn’t viable for most devices. If you rely on cache too much, it might be worth reconsidering; in most cases users will have a first-visit experience, so we’d better make it damn fast. (vf)
4. Designing Style Guides And Pattern Libraries
We’re all still trying to figure it out, aren’t we? When crafting responsive websites, how do style guides and pattern libraries fit into the workflow? Are they tools we use when we start off with interface inventories or atomic components? Or are they deliverables, a by-product of what we are building anyway? Well, everybody finds an answer for themselves, but there are a few interesting conversations happening among people like us.
Sönke Rohde and Jina Bolton have recently published33articles34 on their experiences with style guides at SalesForce and beyond. SalesForce applies Theo35, which uses a set of JSON files which contain name/value pairs describing their design properties, and then translates this raw JSON data into a platform-specific format for the style guide.
If you spend a lot of time working remotely, or have to travel to a distant place to work on site for a while, wouldn’t it be useful to know a few general rules of thumb about the remote location so you have the right expectations? Even better if you can actually select the location where you can focus on your work for the next project. Well, NomadList40 has got your back.
Drawing on the expertise of a growing community of creatives travelling and working remotely, the project aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the best cities to live and work remotely. It ranks destinations based on the cost of living, the climate, average connection speed, clean air, safety and friendliness — taking into account whether a destination is female-friendly as well.
Once you select a destination, you can preview the expected costs for a cappuccino or beer, connect with community members staying there, ask questions in a forum or online chat, and check options for working spaces and accommodation. Apparently, if you search for a safe, friendly destination with “super fast” Wi-Fi, warm temperature and clean air, Chattanooga in the US, Timisoara in Romania, and Braga in Portugal are your best options.
Alternatively, be sure to check WorkFrom.co42, an overview of the best coffee shops and co-working spaces to work from while you roam — recommended by people who have actually worked there. Handy? Handy! So, where you are travelling to next now? (vf)
6. Graphics Standards And Instruction Manuals
There is always something alluring about graphics standards manuals — frankly, surprisingly boring documents which describe a design system and provide guidelines on how it should be used in different contexts. Exploring those manuals can be a discovery in itself, especially if you spend a lot of time studying both the design of the manual — the table of contents or the layout — and the building blocks of the system with the connections between these parts.
If you have time over the weekend, why not visit your local library and search for old technical books like these? The experience alone will be worth it. (vf)
7. What’s Around You Now? That’s Your Design!
We all have that one cool friend whose walls are covered with obscure, beautifully designed posters that we wish we had found to hang at home. Yet we tend to see these posters from distance — as something “artsy” that we can’t necessarily apply to our work right away. But perhaps we can. To explore the creative edge, we could think about ways to use pretty much anything around us — a carpet, a bouquet of flowers, an iron shape — to the aesthetic of our next project, to make it really unique and unusual.
We could look into older books or magazines or leaflets or instructions manuals; or we could explore that one artist whose work you really love, and meticulously study the details and ideas of their artworks. Perhaps Birgit Palma’s projects50, such as designing glyphs using stairs as a metaphor of our path in life. Curated collections aren’t particularly loved but they be inspirational, too: Baubauhaus51 or Veerle’s Inspiration Stream52 are a few thoroughly curated streams of illustration, photography, fashion and all else art-related. What’s around you right now? Perhaps that could Look around you, outside or inside the screen. That could be just the inspiration you are seeking, if you think about it creatively. (cc)
8. Keep Calm And Attend A Smashing Workshop!
With so many techniques, tools, libraries, design patterns, strategies, abstractions, frameworks and boilerplates available nowadays, what do you really need to know to keep your workflow fast, smart and efficient? That’s exactly what our front-end and RWD workshops are all about: practical front-end and RWD workshops53 that will help you become better front-end developers and designers, today.
The authors of this newsletter are: Catherine Clark (cc), Iris Lješnjanin (il), Vitaly Friedman (vf), Christiane Rosenberger (research), Owen Gregory (proofreading), Elja Friedman (tools).
About The Newsletter
We love useful stuff, and we love quality writing, that’s why we send out an editorial email newsletter twice a month with useful tips, tricks and resources for designers and developers — thoroughly collected, written and edited by us exclusively for our readers. Once subscribed, you’ll receive a small token of appreciation — a free eBookjust for you. We’d love to hear your feedback in the comments section!
For some time, people have been talking about microservices. I say “some time” for two reasons: 1) It’s a good opening line, and 2) I have no clue how long people have been talking about them. I just heard the term for the first time about four months ago. So if I start talking about them now, while I still know virtually nothing, I can get at least two more future posts on the subject talking about how I was doing it wrong in the beginning.
In the meantime, I have been talking about them quite a bit recently. We’ve been using them on a project at Clear Measure and I’d like to think it’s been successful but it’s too soon to tell. I feel good about what we’ve done which, historically, has always been a good metric for me.
The topic has been covered at a technical and architectural level pretty well by Martin Fowler, so much so that he’s even collected his discussions into a nice little Microservices Resource Guide. In it, he and other ThoughtWorkians define them (to the extent that anything in software containing the word “services” can be defined), point out pros and cons compared to monolithic applications, describe testing strategies, and cover off the major success stories in the space.
That doesn’t leave much ground for me to cover which, from a marketing standpoint, is almost surely the point. But I would like to add my voice if for no other reason than to plug the podcast on the subject.
One of the more interesting links on Fowler’s Resource Guide is tucked away at the bottom. It’s a series of posts on how SoundCloud is migrating from a monolith to microservices. Part 1 discusses how they stopped working on the monolith and performed all new work in new microservices andpart 2 is on how they split the monolith up into microservices. There were challenges in both cases, leading to other architectural decisions like event sourcing.
The arguments for and against are, predictably, passionate and academic. “Overkill!” you say. “Clean boundaries!” sez I. “But…DevOps!” you counter. “Yes…DevOps!” I respond. But SoundCloud’s experience, to me, is the real selling point of microservices. Unlike Netflix and Amazon, it’s a scale that is still relatable to many of us. We can picture ourselves in the offices there making the same decisions they went through and running up against the same problems. These guys have BEEN THERE, man! Not moving to microservices because they have to but because they had a real problem and needed a solution.
Now if you read the posts, there’s a certain finality to them. “We ran into this problem so we solved it by doing X.” What’s missing from the narrative is doubt. When they ran into problems that required access to an internal API, did anyone ask if maybe they defined the boundaries incorrectly? Once event sourcing was introduced, was there a question of whether they were going too far down a rabbit hole?
That’s not really the point of these posts, which is merely to relay the decision factors to see if it’s similar enough to your situation to warrant an investigation into microservices. All the same, I think this aspect is important for something still in its relative infancy, because there are plenty of people waiting to tell you “I told you so” as soon as you hit your first snag. Knowing SoundCloud ran into the same doubt can be reassuring. Maybe I’m just waiting for Microservices: The Documentary.
Regardless, there are already plenty of counter-arguments (or more accurately, counter-assumptions) to anecdotal evidence. Maybe the situation isn’t the same. They have infrastructure. They have money and time to rewrite. They have confident, “talented” developers who always know how to solve architectural problems the right away.
So now I’ve more or less done what I always do when I talk microservices, which is talk myself into a corner. Am I for ‘em or agin ‘em? And more importantly, should you, reader, use them?
The answer is: absolutely, of course, and yes. On your current project? That’s a little murkier. The experience is there and microservices have been done successfully. It’s still a bit of a wild west which can be exciting if you ain’t much for book learnin’. But “exciting” isn’t always the best reason to decide on an architecture if someone else is paying the bills. As with any architectural shift, you have to factor in the human variables in your particular project.
For my limited experience, I like them. They solve one set of problems nicely and introduce a new set of problems that are not only tractable, but fun, in this hillbilly’s opinion.
And why else did you get into the industry if not to have fun?
Podcasting has experienced a renaissance in the last couple of years. According to RawVoice, which tracks 20,000 shows, the number of unique monthly podcast listeners has tripled to 75 million, up from 25 million five years ago.
Suffice it to say, now is a great time to start a podcast. It’s an authentic and intimate way to demonstrate authority in your niche and to grow your client base.
I recently started my first podcast1, Agencies Drinking Beer, with my cofounder, Kevin Springer. When starting out, I was a bit lost with the technical logistics of actually setting up the podcast; figuring out the best approach required a lot of searching and digging.
I want to make all of that easier for you. Here, in one place, is all of the best advice, information and resources I can offer you. This way, you can spend less time on the technical side of setting up your podcast and more time creating killer content.
Ready to start? Let’s go!
Plan Your Podcast
While this article focuses on the technical aspects of getting a podcast online, we should quickly cover the basics of starting a successful podcast.
Pick a Target
As with any content marketing2 endeavor, start with identifying your audience and creating personas3. Your podcast should target one distinct niche and not try to appeal to everyone.
Listen to other podcasts4 in your niche to get an idea of what’s out there and what you can offer that’s different. A ton of web design podcasts are out there; so, if your goal is to talk about web design, think about how you can approach it in a way that no one else is doing.
Form a Structure
Decide on the length of the show, whether you’ll have interviews, how often you’ll publish episodes, what day of the week you’ll release them and so on. In most cases, there is no right or wrong way to do it. I’ve listened to podcasts that are 15 minutes each and some that are two hours long. Just pick what works for you and stick to it as consistently as possible.
Plan Your Content
While heavily scripted podcasts can come across as stiff and robotic, planning your topics is still a good idea, especially if you’ll be interviewing guests. I schedule our episodes using a Google Docs spreadsheet, and I use Evernote5 to store notes, questions and topics for each episode. More recently, I’ve also been sending guests an email outlining the questions I plan to ask, to guide the discussion.
Add the Polish
Create a theme song in Garageband or buy a stock theme from somewhere like AudioJungle6. Music will add a lot of energy to your show and make it feel polished and professional.
What Makes A Good Podcast?
An entire article could be written about this — in fact, many articles out there discuss what makes a good podcast7 — but I will mention some things I’ve learned in the four months I’ve been doing it.
Be Real
You don’t need to have the golden voice of a professional radio announcer, and people won’t care if you stumble or make mistakes — that will just make you sound more authentic and human. Whatever you do, don’t read from a script. Speak from the heart and say what you’re really feeling.
Be Passionate
If your podcast revolves around a subject that you love to talk about, then creating new content each week will not be hard. Your passion will shine through, and people will pick up on that. In my podcast I talk about building great agencies because it’s a topic I enjoy discussing with agency owners. I also like beer.
Be Focused
It’s hard to market an episode where you bounce from topic to topic and go on long, rambling digressions. A few off-topic excursions are fine if they are entertaining, but have a clear direction in mind for each episode. If for nothing else, that will make it easier to package and promote later. Preparing bullet points to have in front of you will help guide the discussion.
Really Listen to the Other Person
This seems obvious, but it’s tricky in practice. If you are thinking about what you’re going to say next while your guest is speaking, later you’ll listen to the recording and kick yourself for missing out on great conversational opportunities because you weren’t really listening to what the other person was saying.
My advice is not to overthink it. Recording something is better than obsessing over getting it perfect and not recording anything. Your first episode isn’t going to be as good as your 10th or 50th, but accept this fact, lay down some tracks and move on.
Ready to record? Let’s make sure you’ve got the right tools in place.
The hardware required to record a podcast is actually pretty simple.
We use a Macbook Pro with an external hard drive (since clips quickly eat up storage space). Mind you, any PC with an audio input can be used.
A proper microphone was the first thing we purchased, and after some research we found a fantastic product at a great price point, Blue Microphones’ Snowball iCE10. It’s a simple plug-and-play USB mic with a sturdy swivel tripod stand. We require two of these because we have two hosts on the show, and we also purchased a USB hub to plug into.
Headphones are a necessity, and they must be ones that do not have a microphone built in, so that they don’t pick up unwanted sounds. We use Rocketfish’s headphones hub for two.
Software
Skype is a good choice if interviews are an important part of your podcast. Skype is free and ubiquitous, and the sound quality is decent. Keep in mind that if your Internet connection is slow, you may find occasional distortion or delays, which can sap the flow of your interview. Plugging your laptop directly into your Internet connection will help, especially if you’re using a public Wi-Fi network.
We found Ecamm‘s Call Recorder11 to be the easiest way to record calls in Skype. The one-time fee of $29.95 is well worth it. It also has video recording capabilities if you need that.
After we’re done an interview, we import the Ecamm file (which is automatically exported as a MOV file) into GarageBand, and from there we record our introduction and conclusion and add our sound effects and music. GarageBand has a podcast setting, which makes editing a breeze.
Note: When recording with a remote guest, if at all possible, ask them to record their own audio separately and send it to you as an MP3. The quality will generally be much higher than if you record through Skype; and this way, if your recording fails, you’ll have a backup.
From there, we mix it down to a M4A file and upload it to our web server via FTP. (Of course, you may choose MP3, which is perfectly all right.)
Configure Your Website
If you’re new to podcasting, you might be surprised to learn that Apple doesn’t directly host podcasts, and it doesn’t offer any tracking data to tell you how many downloads each episodes get. It’s all on you.
Third-party services, such as Libsyn12, will host your podcast for you, generate an RSS feed and give you download metrics. Call me a control freak, but I want total control over my publishing and don’t want to rely on a third-party service for it.
According to the “king of podcasting,” Paul Colligan13, you should:
own the domain name of your podcast,
bankroll the hosting of your podcast,
own the RSS feed of your podcast,
own your podcast copyright.
Set Up a New Blog Channel in Your CMS
For a content management system (CMS), I use Craft14, but you could publish your podcast using WordPress15, ExpressionEngine16, Drupal17 or any other CMS that lets you define your own fields and output them on the page however you want.
Below is what a blog post in Craft looks like for one of my podcast episodes. I’ve set up basic fields for the headline, teaser, main image and content. For the audio file, I simply insert the name of the file and specify in the template the directory in which to look for the M4A file.
You could do this differently and directly upload the file through your CMS. But at 40 to 50 MB per episode, uploading is easier via FTP than in a web browser.
Set Up Fields to Output the RSS Page
Next, you’ll want to set up fields specifically for your RSS feed that iTunes and FeedBurner will display (more on submitting your feed later). Here are the fields you’ll need:
Episode title
Make this separate from the headline used on your blog. Most podcasts contain a short code to go in the title. This looks good on iTunes but may not be what you want on your blog.
Subtitle
This will appear as the description on the iTunes podcast web page.
Summary
This will appear as the description when someone is subscribed to your podcast in iTunes.
Length
Find the length of the episode, and insert the time here (for example, 45:15).
File size
To get the file size accurate, right-click on your audio file and look at the size in bytes. Remove the commas and paste in the size. It should look something like 56288430.
On the front end of the website, I designed a simple blog-style page for each podcast episode that outputs the headline, introductory paragraph and audio player with iTunes and RSS links. Below that is an image for the episode and the written article.
For the audio player, we use audio.js28, a simple JavaScript file that uses HTML5’s audio tag, with a Flash fallback for old browsers. The UI is great, and configuration is simple.
Steps for Installing audio.js
Put audio.js, player-graphics.gif and audiojs.swf in the same folder.
OK, now that your CMS and front end are set up, it’s time to generate the RSS feed.
Generate The RSS Feed
Apple has an extensive article29 showing all of the different nodes to add to your RSS feed. But after digging, I’ve come up with a basic template that should work for most people’s needs:
Note that you won’t be linking directly to the audio file. Rather, you’ll be linking to yoursite.com/download.php?url=path-to-your-file. This is important for tracking downloads. Trust me on this for now — I’ll explain more in a subsequent step.
Below is what the RSS feed template looks like filled out with static and dynamic content within my Craft template:
Finally, once you’ve finished coding your RSS feed, submit it to Feed Validator33 to ensure it has no errors. Do this even if you’re sure it’s valid. At one point, I wondered why my podcast was behaving strangely in iTunes, and it came down to an invalid feed, which Feed Validator helped me fix.
Not everyone will want to subscribe to your podcast through iTunes or email. To let people more easily subscribe to your podcast using their own RSS reader or a third-party podcast subscription app, using FeedBurner36 is best.
First, submit a new feed and check off the “podcaster” option:
Once you do that, it will read your feed and generate a unique URL. This is the URL you should be linking to when advertising your RSS feed on your website. It will look something like what’s below when users click the link, which is a bit more friendly than sending them to a pure XML page.
Of course, you’ll want to submit your podcast to iTunes to reap the benefits of the free exposure that Apple offers. (That being said, don’t ignore other platforms, such as Pocket Casts39 and TuneIn40.)
Before you submit it, design a beautiful cover to stand out in the iTunes store. This cover is comparable to an app’s icon in the App Store, but you have a slightly larger canvas to work with. Design it at 1400×1400px. It will appear smaller than that in most places your listeners will see it, so keep it simple, bold and free of small text.
I remember thinking I could get away with including my logo and some text in the cover, but this is how it appeared in the iTunes store:
I removed the Proposify logo and text because it couldn’t easily be read.
Ready to submit to Apple? Go to your iTunes app, click on “Podcasts,” and to the right you’ll see a link to submit a podcast.
It will return a message if you’ve missed filling in any fields. Once everything is correct, iTunes will notify you within a couple of days that your podcast has been approved and will email you a link to your podcast on the iTunes website. It may take a bit longer to show up in the iTunes app.
Seeing your very own podcast in the iTunes store is a pretty magical experience!
The “New and Noteworthy” section of the iTunes store offers you much needed exposure, especially in those critical six to eight weeks following the launch. iTunes has an algorithm that looks at a number of different factors to determine whether to push you higher up in the “New and Noteworthy” section. One factor you can affect directly is the number of downloads.
What if you haven’t yet built up a huge audience? Simply put, launch with more episodes. The more episodes you launch with, the more likely you’ll get more downloads per subscriber, meaning you’re more likely to get bumped to the top.
Consistently releasing new episodes on schedule is important, so put one or two months’ worth of episodes on reserve in case an interview falls through, you get sick or you can’t release a new episode for some other reason. Of course, this may be impractical if you are newsjacking or discussing some other time-sensitive topic.
Track Downloads With Google Analytics
This is the last piece of the puzzle, and I was shocked at how few resources exist to do something as relatively simple as tracking downloads.
Apple doesn’t offer any tracking whatsoever. There are third-party apps, such as Lisbyn48, Podtrac49 and Blubrry50, but, as mentioned, many require you to host your audio files with them and to use their CMS and RSS feed. Not what us control freaks want!
If you aren’t overly concerned with getting paid sponsorship of your podcast, tracking downloads yourself is actually much easier by combining a bit of PHP with Google Analytics events.
I came across a free script from Chris Van Patten, Downloadalytics51, which allows you to track downloads as an event in Google Analytics.
Update Links to Your Audio Files in Your Templates
Remember earlier when we pointed our RSS feed to download.php?url=, instead of just the basic path to the file? We did that so that Downloadalytics can properly track downloads in Google Analytics.
If you’re using an audio player on your blog, be sure to also point to downloads.php, instead of the basic file path. For example, your blog post should link like this:
Hopefully, you’ve found this to be a useful and comprehensive guide to launching your very own podcast. I’m only 10 episodes in at the time of writing, but so far I’ve found the experience to be a great way to build a closer relationship with my customers and fans. It’s a lot of work, and discipline is required to record week after week, even when you aren’t in the mood, but the reward is more than worth the effort.
So, tell me, when do you plan to launch your podcast?
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