Learn how to better communicate and design so that developers will love you. It will speed up projects and make work life easier. And it’s not a matter of bringing candy to meetings either. You can make developers love you by making slight changes to the way you work.The biggest problem between designers and developers is that they often work in bubbles. The individuals or teams don’t start talking about a project until the first draft of the design is finished. Then there’s a handoff from the designer to the developer. That’s just not the way to work. Designers and developers should be involved together from the beginning to talk about how a project will come together. While the designer might focus on color and typefaces and imagery, the developer can provide insight into usability, function and performance. Designers and developers should have a good idea of what the other side looks like. Designers should understand enough code and usability to speak with developers and understand challenges; developers should have a little knowledge of design theory so they can make suggestions when design ideas aren’t right for the web.

Everyone involved in building a website wants it to stand out from other websites. Clients want to stand out from the competition and leave a favorable impression on potential customers; designers strive for originality and to compete with other designers; back-end developers want a success story in their portfolios and an original or different-looking site can help with that. And we want it bad. There’s a cottage industry of people writing articles designed to help us design more original-feeling sites. I’ve even seen articles about “Trends to Make Your Site Stand Out”, and it feels like at least one of those words is sorely misused. Goodness knows I’ve obsessed over it in the past. I know the feeling that your work just isn’t good enough because man, the last couple of sites you made really felt the same. Where’s the inspiration? Where’s the creativity? Well, originality isn’t the be-all and end-all. If a site that feels the same as many others gets the results you want, that’s not a bad thing. But you can create sites that stand out. Consistently producing original—or at least original-feeling—work doesn’t happen by inspiration or by luck. It happens with planning, and a lot of effort. Here are five approaches you can use to make your work stand out, with their pros and cons. I’m not going to include a ton of examples, because the idea is to not copy other sites.

Information density is the amount of information in the form of content that a site visitor is greeted with as soon as he lands on a website or webpage. The greater the information density, the greater the amount of content a visitor will see on the site or page. Because of this tie-in to content, information density has an immediate impact on a user’s cognitive load, which in turn, has a huge impact on the site’s navigability, usability and user experience. When designing, it’s helpful to think of how much content your user can reasonably handle without being bogged down by it. The more content they encounter, the longer it will take them to complete certain tasks and page goals…since the amount of mental processing power for them to complete tasks and goals drastically rises. While it’s always tempting to load up a site with a lot of content to attract visitors, moderation and minimalism are the key to ensuring perfect user-friendliness.

Building a product from scratch isn’t easy, but it can be a very rewarding process. When I had the idea for Revue, I decided to act on it immediately. Two years later, and with 20,000 users and 2 million emails per month, I can safely say that building on impulse was one of the best choices I’ve ever made. I started quickly and made a lot of stuff up along the way, but I learned many lessons which I will reflect on in this article. In fact, I was inspired to share my lessons after appearing on The App Guy Podcast; a show hosted by my good friend Paul Kemp, a tech entrepreneur himself. We spoke about my journey with Revue and both agreed to co-author this article to unravel the design secrets I learned on my journey with Revue. So, here we go…

OK, so you’ve got an idea of how many different kinds of CMS there are out there. Now you want to pick one. Or perhaps you’re building a client-facing site, and a internal wiki, so you want two. Larger organizations tend to need multiple systems after all. Don’t compare them with each other so much as compare them with your needs. For the sake of simplicity in this article however, let’s just assume you only need one. Let us also assume that you know exactly what kind of site you want to build, and what you want it to do for you. Those are some pretty big assumptions to start with, but working out those particular issues could star in their own ultimate guide. So you’ve got all of that worked out. Now, you need to narrow down your choices. Where do you start?

User interface design is a hot topic these days and for good reason. In a world where digital experiences are such a large part of our lives, the value of a quality user experience is higher than ever. Not only is it important now, but the quality of user interfaces is bound to be even more important in the future given the tremendous growth of mobile, digital, and the Internet of Things. From web sites, to displays in our cars, to thermostat controls in our homes, user interfaces of all types make up much of our daily experience. Taking into account that users are becoming more experienced with digital displays and are expecting better experiences than they were willing to put up with just a few short years ago, it is imperative that businesses carefully consider the quality of the experience they create for their customers. But what makes a quality user interface?

Now think about a website. Any website. What’s on it? Stuff like words, pictures, videos, maps, contact forms, quizzes, polls, and more. All of that stuff (which we call “content”) needs to be organized. It needs to be made available, and easy-to-find for the people who actually run the website, and for the users who browse it. It also needs to be easy to add more content, delete the stuff you don’t want anymore, move it around, or rename it. Yes, you could do all of this manually. For many smaller websites, this is exactly what people do: they mess about with files and folders, and edit their pages in a plain text editor (like Notepad, but they usually use something more complex). If you only have, say, five pages, and you know what you’re doing—or can pay someone who does—then you’re set. You probably don’t need a CMS. But if you can’t afford to hire a professional, don’t have the time to do it yourself, and/or need a site that is larger and more complex, a CMS is worth it. It simply isn’t practical to build a website that big without something to automate at least a part of the process. If you need to have more than one person contributing to a website, you absolutely need a CMS. Giving people access to the raw files would be a recipe for catastrophic user errors. Better to give them a system that allows them to add content without accidentally destroying anything important.