Happy Cog: News

Visitphilly.com wins tons of awards and captures eyeballs galore

happycog — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 20:54:52 +0000

According to the Greater Philadelphia Tourism Marketing Corporation (GPTMC), the visitphilly.com website, which was designed and developed by Happy Cog and the GPTMC, was the recipient of numerous honors in 2011, including:

Two gold Davey Awards, for outstanding tourism website and for its homepage
Four Communicator Awards, including three “Awards of Excellence” in the “Home Page,” “Structure and Navigation,” and “Visual Appeal” categories, as well as one “Award of Distinction” in the “Travel/Tourism” category
Two W3 awards – a gold award for achievement in the “General Website – Tourism” category and a Silver award for for “Web Marketing – Tourism”
Travel Weekly’s Magellan Awards presented visitphilly.com with a Gold Magellan Award for the “Destination Marketing – Website” category
A “Non-Profit Standard of Excellence” award from the Web Marketing Association in the “Travel” category.

Additionally, visitphilly.com’s traffic continues to increase, growing from 2.7 million annual visits in 2007 to 4.9 million annual visits in 2011 (Happy Cog’s redesign launched in January of 2010). The GPTMC’s award-winning With Love, Philadelphia XOXO® campaign has helped to position visitphilly.com as the place to start for Philadelphia tourism information.

To learn more about our work on visitphilly.com, check out our case study.

Hiring a Sr. UX Designer

happycog — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 16:32:34 +0000

Happy Cog is seeking to hire a Sr. UX Designer to work with our team in Austin, Texas. We’re looking for someone who has the experience and passion to lead the UX effort across multiple projects, work with all manner of clients, and look for ways to tailor our service from project to project. You have to be quick on your feet while you work with our highly integrated and motivated team. You need to be an excellent writer and verbal communicator with plenty of experience socializing online.

See our job listing at Authentic Jobs for more details.

Zeldman will be first SXSW Hall of Fame inductee

happycog — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 14:36:19 +0000

South by Southwest Interactive has announced that Happy Cog founder and executive creative director Jeffrey Zeldman will be the first inductee in the powerhouse interactive conference’s Hall of Fame. Active since 1995 and attended by thousands annually, South by Southwest Interactive is an incubator of cutting-edge technologies featuring five days of compelling presentations from the brightest minds in emerging technology. In addition to founding Happy Cog, Jeffrey Zeldman is the author of the foundational web standards text, Designing With Web Standards, the publisher and founder of A List Apart Magazine, and publisher and co-founder of A Book Apart. Congratulations, sir!

Perfect score: Interactive Media Awards honors Happy Cog and Harvard University with Best-In-Class award

happycog — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 16:46:07 +0000

Happy Cog, along with Harvard University, has won a “Best In Class” Interactive Media Award for the recent redesign of harvard.edu in the “university” category.

The honor recognizes that the project met and surpassed the standards of excellence that comprise the web’s most professional work. The judging consisted of various criteria, including design, usability, innovation in technical features, standards compliance and content. In order to win this award level, the site had to meet strict guidelines in each area – an achievement only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each year.

Harvard.edu scored a perfect 500 out of 500. The site was only the third to achieve a perfect score in 2011 from over 3,000 entries. It is also only the eighth to achieve a perfect score since IMA’s inception in 2005, from nearly 16,500 entries submitted.

The site was scored using five specific criteria, with a score from 0-100 awarded for each criterion. The total of these five scores established the overall score, up to a maximum of 500. Websites receiving an overall score between 480 and 500 receive the Best in Class award.

Happy Cog was fortunate to have an extraordinary partner in Harvard University. The forward-thinking communications approach, led by Harvard’s Chief Digital Officer Perry Hewitt, centered around a content aggregation strategy that smartly surfaces the breadth and depth of all that goes on at a world class university such as Harvard.

Happy Cog is thrilled to have had the opportunity to help elevate this legendary institution’s crucial digital communication vehicle through intuitive architecture, beautiful brand-appropriate design, and pristine front-end code. Philadelphia’s SEER Interactive also assisted with search engine optimization strategy work.

About the Interactive Media Awards

The Interactive Media Awards recognize the highest standards of excellence in website design and development and honor individuals and organizations for their outstanding achievement. Sponsored by the Interactive Media Council, Inc., a nonprofit organization of leading web designers, developers, programmers, advertisers and other web-related professionals, the competition seeks to elevate the standards of excellence on the Internet.

Happy Cog wins Interactive Media Award for “Cognition”

happycog — Fri, 21 Oct 2011 18:45:16 +0000

Happy Cog has won a ‘Best In Class’ Interactive Media Award for our company blog, Cognition in both the “community” and “blog” categories. According to the IMA:

The Best in Class award is the highest honor bestowed by the Interactive Media Awards. It represents the very best in planning, execution and overall professionalism. In order to win this award level, [the] site had to successfully pass through our comprehensive judging process, achieving very high marks in each of our judging criteria – an achievement only a fraction of sites in the IMA competition earn each year.

Cognition was scored using five specific criteria, with a score from 0-100 awarded for each criterion. The total of these five scores established the overall score, up to a maximum of 500. Websites receiving an overall score between 460 and 479 receive the IMA’s “Outstanding Achievement” award. Websites receiving an overall score between 480 and 500 receive the “Best in Class” award.

The scores for Cognition totaled 484 and broke down like this:

Design: 98
Content: 94
Feature Functionality: 100
Usability: 95
Standards Compliance & Cross-Browser Compatibility: 97

Happy Cog beat out a combined 134 other category entries for the honor.

Fiery Double Issue

happycog — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:10:33 +0000

In Issue No. 336 of A List Apart for people who make websites, Denise Jacobs tells how to get your design mojo back when clients and deadlines get you down: Reigniting Your Creative Spark. And Mandy Brown of Typekit and A Book Apart explains what to do when your site or service fails in Fire Drills: Communications Strategy in a Crisis.

Zeldman keynote on video

happycog — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 15:49:13 +0000

Happy Cog founder and executive creative director Jeffrey Zeldman explains why now is the best time to be a web designer in The Medium Comes of Age, a 50+ minute video of the keynote address he delivered to the DIBI web design conference held in Newcastle, UK, in 2011.

10K Apart: The Responsive Edition

happycog — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:40:32 +0000

Last year, in partnership with An Event Apart, Mix Online debuted the 10K Apart contest. The challenge was simple: build the best application you can with no more than 10K of code. The 10K was a smash hit. The contest reaped 367 entries in less than a month. And in less than a year, the 10K domain has been tweeted over 11K times. With that kind of encouragement, what could we do but up the ante? So without further ado, say hello to 10K Apart: The Responsive Edition.

A Primer on A/B Testing

happycog — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:36:43 +0000

Data is an invaluable tool for web designers making decisions about the user experience. A/B tests, or split tests, are one of the easiest ways to measure the effect of different design, content, or functionality, helping you create high-performing user experience elements to implement across your site. Lara Swanson shows how to make sure you avoid red herrings and reach statistically significant results in Issue No. 333 of A List Apart for people who make websites.

Making up Stories: Perception, Language, and the Web

happycog — Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:18:55 +0000

We learn and retain information through stories because they turn information into more than the sum of its parts. But what makes a story a story, and what does it mean for the digital world we’ve built? Elizabeth McGuane and Randall Snare weave an enchanting tale of attention, comprehension, inference, coherence, and shopping in A List Apart Issue No. 333: Making up Stories: Perception, Language, and the Web.