Nothing is more frustrating than spending upwards of $50 on a theme for your WordPress site for it to not […]

The post 5 Easy Tips for Finding the Perfect WordPress Theme appeared first on WPHacks.

Customer service as we know it has changed. Today’s customers won’t necessarily call a contact center when they need help. […]

The post Best WordPress Live Chat Plugins for Better Customer Support appeared first on WPHacks.

Creating a new website can be overwhelming for some people. This is especially true when creating a website as a beginner. […]

The post How to Set Up an Email Address for Your Website Domain Name appeared first on WPHacks.

Deciding between Stripe vs PayPal for your WordPress site can be a daunting task. They both bring many features to […]

The post Stripe vs Paypal: Which Is Best for WordPress? appeared first on WPHacks.

We're back and this week, we're talking to Avatar's colorful frontman Johannes Eckerström. If you've ever seen the band live,...

The post Squared Circle Pit #54 - AVATAR Frontman Johannes Eckerström Talks Wrestling Unlocking His Love of Metal Frontmen appeared first on Metal Injection.

Comic artist Box Brown is the guest on the show this week. We kick things off talking about his comic...

The post Squared Circle Pit #55 - Comic Artist Box Brown Talks AEW vs. NXT appeared first on Metal Injection.

We kick things off talking about the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. We then discuss David D Rainman's recent request...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #536 - Sinema with Chase from GATECREEPER appeared first on Metal Injection.

We're back and super excited to welcome the Hot Topic senior buyer Joe Enriquez to the show. Joe tells the...

The post Squared Circle Pit #56 - Hot Topic's Joe Enriquez talks AEW, ECW and Thrash Metal appeared first on Metal Injection.

MetalSucks' Axl Rosenberg was back to sit in on the show. We kick things off talking about Chanukah and our...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #545 - Pre-Snatch with Axl Rosenberg appeared first on Metal Injection.

It's the first show of the new year and the new decade. We kick things off with a little math...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #548 - A Different Kind of Steamie appeared first on Metal Injection.

We're so excited to have a huge guest on the show – big time comedian and noted metalhead, Brian Posehn,...

The post METAL INJECTION LIVECAST #551 - Where Nickelback Shines with special guest Comedian Brian Posehn appeared first on Metal Injection.

We're so excited to finally have British death match legend Jimmy Havoc on the show. We talked about how he...

The post Squared Circle Pit #57 - Jimmy Havoc Talks Death Match Wrestling appeared first on Metal Injection.

I was asked to close out WordCamp Vancouver with a short 20 minute keynote on something interesting. After some thought, I put together a list of 10 trends I see in the web community and where we are headed in the immediate future. 0. The Future Keeps Arriving In my +15 years working on and with the […]

The post Where We Go From Here: 10 Thoughts on the Immediate Future of the Web appeared first on MOR10.

Sometimes interesting things happen on Twitter. Last week Scott Jehl proposed ASPIRE as an acronym for the practices we should follow as web designers and developers. From the resulting blog post: Great websites should aspire to be: Accessible to folks with varying cognitive and physical abilities and disabilities Secure and reliable for storing, manipulating, and transferring information Performant on average devices […]

The post ASPIRE: An Acronym for Better Web Practice appeared first on MOR10.

As the decade comes to a close, I thought it would be interesting to look back on the past 10 years. So, rather than posting my regular year in review, here’s an abbreviated trip through the past 10 years of my life, both personal and professional. 2010 The decade started for me in an almost […]

The post 2010 – 2019: Decade in Review appeared first on MOR10.

If you’re a remote worker, you may have plenty of experience with video conferencing as a way to communicate with clients, team members, or other colleagues. But with millions of additional...

Click through to read the rest of the story on the Vandelay Design Blog.

Web designers have skills and expertise that open up a whole world of possibilities. Many designers and developers choose to pursue personal projects in their own time, which can be a nice change of...

Click through to read the rest of the story on the Vandelay Design Blog.

There are a number of different ways to make money as a web designer aside from simply creating websites for clients. Many freelancers choose to supplement their income from client work by doing some...

Click through to read the rest of the story on the Vandelay Design Blog.

The team at StarTrek.com has released an official infographic video A Timeline Through the Star Trek Universe, Part 1 that includes all of the various TV and Movie series in their inter-connected places on the timeline.

WATCH: A Timeline Through the Star Trek Universe, Part I

The Star Trek saga has boldly traveled through space and time throughout its over fifty year history. Starfleet has visited the distant past, the far future, and even some alternate timelines. Need some context before you dive deep into Star Trek: Discovery and prepare for Star Trek: Picard? We've got you covered in Part One of our video timeline.

Here’s a snapshot of the complete timeline:

Interesting that they call this “Part 1”… Implying that there is much more to come.

From a DataViz design perspective, I’m not a fan of timelines that don’t keep a consistent scale. There’s a huge jump from the Big Bang 13.8 Billion years ago to the year 1900, then the scale is pretty even with 50-year jumps until the year 2150, and then the scale changes again, making the 50-year jumps are much farther apart.

It appears that this is an evolution of an original design project collaboration between Rachel Ivanoff and Jordan Twaddle that was on exhibit at the The Museum of Pop-Culture (MoPOP) in Seattle, Washington in 2016. The new video adds Star Trek: Discovery to the timeline, and video snippets from each of the shows.

Back in 2016, they shared this great animated GIF of the design evolution from the original timeline design process:

I hope they were involved in the development of the new timeline video as well.

How Much Does It Really Cost To Produce Your Favorite TV Show? infographic compares the cost to make the show to their ratings on IMDb. Cashnetusa.com comes to the conclusion that, while Game of Thrones paid out the big bucks and received the huge ratings, it isn’t always necessary. Peaky blinders received great reviews and spent 10 million less per episode!

Our new guide to the cost of producing the best and worst rated shows on TV in 2019 reiterates this sense that it’s not always the size of your production budget that counts, but what you do with it. The costly robots of Westworld are rivalled in ratings by the non-union zombies of The Walking Dead for a third of the price; Lost In Space was just as mediocre as the decidedly more earthbound NCIS: New Orleans.

And in the short-term, with the complete series rating hovering around 9.5 on IMDb, Game of Thrones still manages to top our new table as both the highest rated and highest costing show. But when you consider the bitter taste on the tongues of millions of disappointed HBO subscribers, would a more thought-through finale have been a better investment than all that extra cash? Or are GoT fans just sour because (as experts suggest) they’re going through an end-of-show ‘break-up’?

This infographic design does a lot of things right:

• Good scatterplot data visualization to illustrate their data

• Data points are clearly identified with data titles using proximity, not connecting lines necessary. This can often be a design challenge!

• Sources clearly identified with links so anyone can look into the data

• Use of Creative Commons to protect the infographic and encourage sharing

• The text on the infographic landing page includes the clickable data source links and a methodology description.

Found on Geekologie.com

Social media is predicted to continue to be a big tool for businesses in 2020. Big surprise. The Social Media Content Trends for 2020 and Beyond infographic from MicroCreatives lays out their predictions for upcoming trends.

Before the inception of social media marketing, brands used traditional marketing channels to reach out to and engage with consumers. Online social networks have made communicating with consumers a breeze and marketing easier and highly targeted for brands.

By 2020, more than 5 billion people will use social media platforms—that’s roughly two-thirds of the world’s population. Now is the perfect time to get started with social media marketing if you haven’t been doing so already. If you’re already doing it, how is it going for you so far? Perhaps it’s time to evaluate and update your social media content strategy to stay relevant and get ahead of the competition.

Here are some content trends we anticipate to be popular across social media in 2020 and the coming years. See what could work for your brand and start planning ahead.

Sometimes an infographic is a great way to summarize a larger, in-depth article. This is a good example that keeps the text in the infographic short & sweet because the article contains the longer descriptions.

They definitely missed out on using data visualization for the statistics though! Big mistake! They are completely lost in the text, and have no visual impact on the audience.

Found on prdaily.com

Not an infographic today.

Free online classes, discounts on software, extended trial periods, free online data sources, etc. as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the Organizer for the DFW Data Visualization Meetup Group, I've started this publicly viewable Google Sheet for the local DataViz community listing various resources that companies are making available during the pandemic. Turns out, these are valuable to DataViz designers everywhere, not just DFW, so I'm sharing the link with all of you.

I’ll continue to update this list as I learn about new resources during the pandemic. Please use the submission link in the spreadsheet if you know of any DataViz-related offers or deals I should add!

-Randy

We’re all working from home, and that include job interviews, news interviews, class lectures, webinars, presentations to customers and even just business meetings. The 10 Things to Do Before Any Video Interview infographic from Kickresume is a great last-minute checklist before you turn on your webcam!

In the end, you can take this infographic as a checklist. You can use it to prepare for your job interview or any other video conference call.

And, oh boy, are we going to make many more of those. Sure, it took a global pandemic for companies to recognize the value of working from home but now there’s no going back. Video conference calls are here to stay. (I personally hate it but even I should probably get used to it. Damn.)

Anyway, good luck at your job interview!

I would have preferred more visual elements, but I like that this is a tightly focused infographic with a clear, useful message to a broad audience. This is one of the best uses for an infographic: an informative topic, related to the industry of the publishing company, with a popular, trending topic. This design checks all the boxes.

Designers have to remember that the infographic image file will often be shared by itself, so it always helps to include a few more thins in the footer:

• The Infographic Landing Page URL (not just the company home page). This will help readers find the full infographic and the article that went along with it. Don’t make people search for it on your website.

• A copyright or Creative Commons statement is always a good idea when you publishing an infographic

WildEarth Guardians Press Release Federal Court Overturns Leasing of Lands to Oil and Gas Industry SANTA FE, NM — In a victory for New Mexico’s air, climate, and water, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Mexico today … Continue reading →

From the National Science Foundation Birds — the only surviving descendants of dinosaurs — are used to study a large range of fundamental topics in biology, from understanding the evolution of mating systems to learning about the genetic and environmental … Continue reading →

By Julia  Conley Common Dreams “Our message as scientists is simple: Our planet’s future climate is inextricably tied to the future of its forest.” With a new statement rejecting the notion that drastically curbing emissions alone is enough to curb … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “This is a wake-up call,” says one Australian marine biologist. “Given sea temperatures usually increase as we get towards March, this is probably conservative.” Delivering yet another “wake-up call” after recent studies have shown that … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams Far-reaching global assessment details how humanity is undermining the very foundations of the natural world     On the heels of an Earth Day that featured calls for radical action to address the current “age … Continue reading →

By Jake Johnson Common Dreams Rapidly falling insect populations, said Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, “will make it even more difficult than today to get enough food for the human population of the planet, to get good health and freshwater for everybody.” A … Continue reading →

Andrew Rickmann posted a photo:

Iron Tree is a sculpture by Ai Wei Wei, currently being exhibited at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.

See rest of photos from Daugavpils (Dinaburg) fortress.

By David Suzuki David Suzuki Foundation In July, Solar Impulse 2 became the first airplane to fly around the world without using fuel. At the same time, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration has been working on electric planes. … Continue reading →

By The EPA The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) today launched a new online portal that will provide local leaders in the nation’s 40,000 communities with information and tools to increase resilience to climate change. Using a self-guided format, the … Continue reading →

Environmental activist and Academy Award®-winning actor Leonardo DiCaprio and Academy Award®-winning filmmaker Fisher Stevens premier their documentary film, Before the Flood, a compelling account of the powerful changes occurring on our planet due to climate change. Before the Flood will … Continue reading →

By Kristie Auman-Bauer Penn State News Climate change is causing glaciers to shrink, temperatures to rise, and shifts in human migration in parts of the world, according to a Penn State researcher. Brian Thiede, assistant professor of rural sociology, along … Continue reading →

By David Suzuki The David Suzuki Foundation Seeing terms like “post-truth” and “alternative facts” gain traction in the news convinces me that politicians, media workers and readers could benefit from a refresher course in how science helps us understand the … Continue reading →

By The Conversation While it’s true that Earth’s temperatures and carbon dioxide levels have always fluctuated, the reality is that humans’ greenhouse emissions since the industrial revolution have put us in uncharted territory. Written by Dr Benjamin Henley and Assoc … Continue reading →

American Geophysical Union (AGU) Press Release A new study finds human-caused global warming is significantly increasing the rate at which hot temperature records are being broken around the world. Global annual temperature records show there were 17 record hot years … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams “This is a wake-up call,” says one Australian marine biologist. “Given sea temperatures usually increase as we get towards March, this is probably conservative.” Delivering yet another “wake-up call” after recent studies have shown that … Continue reading →

By Jake Johnson Common Dreams And colleague says “global warming” no longer strong enough term. “Global heating is technically more correct because we are talking about changes in the energy balance of the planet.” Declaring that after three decades of … Continue reading →

By Jessica Corbett Common Dreams Far-reaching global assessment details how humanity is undermining the very foundations of the natural world     On the heels of an Earth Day that featured calls for radical action to address the current “age … Continue reading →

By Jill Richardson Other Words If environmental solutions aren’t systemic, living green will always mean going against the grain — and usually failing. Every year around Earth Day, I’m reminded of papers I graded in an environmental sociology class. The … Continue reading →

By Jake Johnson Common Dreams Rapidly falling insect populations, said Anne Sverdrup-Thygeson, “will make it even more difficult than today to get enough food for the human population of the planet, to get good health and freshwater for everybody.” A … Continue reading →

By Harriet Gross Courtesy of Aeon What’s not to like about gardening? It’s a great way to get outdoors, away from everyday routines, and to exercise your creativity. It’s good for your health, whatever your age, and gardeners tend to be … Continue reading →

Some of the problems we work on as UX researchers are simple and are easily solved by getting users in front of our product. But other problems can be complex and it's hard to know how to start solving them. In situations like that, a simple 2x2 diagram can cut through the 'what ifs', the 'how abouts' and the edge cases and provide a simple way of looking at the problem. Here are 10 examples of 2x2 diagrams to simplify UX research discussions.

Researchers sometimes ask participants which of two alternative designs they prefer. The data from these studies comprise opinions that have little predictive value. In contrast, multivariate A/B testing involves target users doing real tasks. The data from these studies comprise behavioural observations that predict real-world behaviour.

Although the performance of today's speech recognition systems is impressive, the experience for many is still one of errors, corrections, frustration and abandoning speech in favour of alternative interaction methods. We take a closer look at speech and find out why speech recognition is so difficult.

I take a closer look at some unavoidable challenges to effective speech recognition, and I discuss why you may want to think twice before designing dialogue that is 'conversational' and 'natural'. I also offer five important questions that I think should form the basis of any VUI design kick-off meeting.