Robynne Lofton’s Transition From Higher Ed to Digital Agency

It has been a beautiful period of transitions. My time in admissions was driven by the deep desire to open wide the doors to spaces that so few had access to. Over 26 years that passion grew into leadership, serving students, managing teams, offices, and divisions. A passion to serve became grounded in purpose as […]
Why and How to Add Heat Mapping to Your Analytics Toolkit

Summarizing and reporting data about your website can be difficult to do in an engaging way. Data tables and complex visualizations from Google Analytics show larger trends, but don’t always communicate what users are doing on the page-level: Heatmaps can help you answer these questions. Many tools are low cost and easy to use, and […]
10 Automated Tests to Keep Your Website Healthy — and Help Your Devs Sleep at Night

At NewCity, we apply a number of different automated tests to our client sites. Below are ten of the most useful ones we’ve found.
Is your hypertext too hyper?

If your page is full of links that people find confusing or distracting, and if the only design solution is to make those links harder to see, what you have is a content problem.
What International Students Can Teach Us About the Virtual Campus Visit

It’s decision season for students starting college this year. Normally, campuses would be teeming with flocks of high school seniors and parents following peppy student tour guides. I was one of those guides, a sophomore learning to walk backwards without tripping and swapping my left for my right, as I pointed out interesting features of […]
What Self-Driving Cars Teach Us About Content Management

Though technology is reshaping our world every day, complex situations often require the human ability to strategize, connect, and communicate. Someone who can take the wheel, make decisions, and steer the site towards success. A great example? A complex website needs a managing editor.
The Complexity of Flexibility

When designing the functionality of a website’s content management system, people often want a highly flexible system filled with options and variations. Or, at least, they think they do. The challenge is that the more flexibility you add, the more complicated everything becomes.
Herding Cats (and Building Consensus) with Workshops

Building consensus can be hard. Really hard. Especially when you bring together a group of smart, opinionated people to develop a new approach or solve a problem. That’s why we use workshops.
What Studying the Humanities Taught Me About Software Development

Back in my computer science days, I took a programming class where the professor decided to assign us a project to show us how real-world programming gets done (or ought to get done). We discussed the problem we were trying to solve in extreme detail The professor dictated the precise toolset we were supposed to […]
Get More from Your Analytics: Applying an Ecommerce Model to Higher Ed, Part IV

This is it, the final installment of our series on ecommerce. Get ready, we’re about to take a final dive into using Google’s Enhanced Ecommerce for higher education.