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gregularfox
The Most Important Five Minutes
As someone who spent several years squarely in the Engaged DIY-er camp working hard on my side hustle, I should know them. But I’m starting to realize something that never really fully clicked for me then. I’ll try my best to articulate. A Tricky Name. A Misleading Image. The name “Engaged DIY” conjures up an…
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Sylvester Wilmott
“Am I Doing This Right?”
As a former freelancer I would have been considered a small business owner at one point. I was managing all aspects of the business which operated under my name. There were definitely some areas that I neglected early on and the main one was marketing or “getting myself out there”. Producing the work itself was…
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marinawoo
The Best eCommerce Software is Invisible
I’ve worked in the WooCommerce marketing team for four years. In the past six months I finally got around to building a store for a social enterprise I’m involved in. Sure, I’d tinkered in test sites, but launching a store that really takes people’s money teaches you something different. Over in the world of WordPress.com, some…
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Allan Cole
Challenging our Empathetic Assumptions
Earlier this summer, the Dotcom Design team performed a quantitative segmentation study on a collection of small business to gain a better understanding of their needs and expectations as it relates to having a web presence. Before joining a8c, I ran a small business offering contract web design and development services. The majority of my…
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Megs Fulton
Of Failure, Learning, and Relationships
This past May, the WordPress.com design team set out to undertake the largest research study that the company had ever done. We spoke to 34 small business owners across the United States over the course of two weeks. Now that a few months have passed, the one thing that has stuck with me is the…
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Thomas Bishop
Finding a Product’s Place
Some of my colleagues recently embarked on a journey to better understand our customers’ perspectives and what is most important to them and their businesses. While reading about their learnings, I wrote down some things that stood out to me. When we are tasked with working on digital products, we often get stuck in the…
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erikokawakami
Against the tide
I once worked on a project for rebranding a small Japanese baby stroller brand. Considering how difficult and cumbersome it still is to travel with a stroller in Japanese cities, this said stroller brand’s designs were unusually large, and equipped with heavy wheels. There are still many train stations in Japan without elevators and the…
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ashleyvonclausburg
Our users don’t care about websites. And that’s ok.
Automattic recently conducted extensive research on small business owners (SBOs), looking into their behaviors, preferences, and motivations around both building websites and business in general. The design team was tasked with reading through this research to find something that challenged our previous notions about SBOs. My initial read proved fairly uncontroversial as most of my…
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Shaun Andrews
From Blogging to Business
For so long, WordPress.com (and, in some ways, WordPress itself) has been very focused on blogging. But we’ve known for a while (perhaps since the introduction of Pages all those years back) that WordPress can do more than blogs. WordPress is being used by businesses all over the world to help them sell their products…
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Andrei Slobtsov
In Praise Of Jargon
Alright, yes, as a general rule, you should avoid using jargon as much as possible. However, there are some situations when speaking the jargon can be very helpful.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
A fully distributed team making the web a better place.
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