Design, like all aspects of marketing, should serve a business need. Too often, this doesn’t happen, Paul Adams writes:

Too many designers are designing to impress their peers rather than address real business problems. This has long been a problem in creative advertising (where creative work is often more aligned with winning awards than with primary client business objectives) and it’s becoming more prominent in product and interaction design.

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Ana Swanson:

In those early days, engineers were focused solely on efficiency — how to serve as many customers as possible without cutting into a company’s profits. It wasn’t until 50 years later that researchers began to realize that there were subtler factors influencing people’s experience of waiting in line, including ideas of fairness, mismanaged expectations, and the strange and inaccurate way that most people perceive both time and pain.

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Harry Roberts has put together a comprehensive resource to help you organize and maintain your CSS stylesheets:

CSS is not a pretty language. While it is simple to learn and get started with, it soon becomes problematic at any reasonable scale. There isn’t much we can do to change how CSS works, but we can make changes to the way we author and structure it.

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For six years, I used WordPress to maintain this site. I hosted the whole setup with the good folks at Site5. All in all, it was a fairly standard blog setup.

Last week, I switched to a Jekyll-powered site hosted on GitHub Pages. Here’s why:

1. Jekyll is simple. This isn’t a complex web site. It has a few hundred posts, plus a few other ancillary pages. None of the pages require dynamic content, generated on the fly. In short, this is the perfect sort of site for Jekyll, which generates static HTML pages using simple templates.
2. It’s a fun challenge. Learning to use the tools that underpin Jekyll—Markdown, Liquid, and Git—has been an interesting challenge.
3. GitHub is free. Maintaining my web hosting account at Site5 cost me about $70 per year. GitHub is free, and runs Jekyll natively.
4. GitHub is secure. My WordPress site was compromised at least twice, and was subject to regular brute-force password attacks. That led me to install an increasingly complex set of security plugins—all to protect a site I maintain as a hobby. GitHub has a security system far more robust than anything I could hope to maintain on my own.

Smashing Magazine published an article earlier this month explaining static website generation, with a follow-up reviewing four popular ones.

Ed Catmull:

If you aren’t experiencing failure, then you are making a far worse mistake: You are being driven by the desire to avoid it. And, for leaders especially, this strategy—trying to avoid failure by out-thinking it—dooms you to fail.

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