Latest
Build or buy: internal tools
The spreadsheet is winning for a reason. Understanding that reason decides whether you should buy software or build it.
Insights
Insights
Articles on the decisions we are asked about most often. Written to be useful to someone who is not going to hire us, which is the only standard that makes this kind of writing worth doing.
We publish infrequently and at length rather than frequently and thinly.
All articles
SEO
Information architecture is SEO
The largest SEO decisions on a site are made in a sitemap workshop by people who are not thinking about search at all.
E-commerce
Checkout: what actually loses the sale
Most checkout advice is about reducing steps. The money is usually lost to something that was never on the page at all.
Development
What maintainable means when you pay for it
Maintainability is not a quality of code, it is a rate: what the second year of changes costs compared to the first. Here is what sets it.
Strategy
Writing a brief that gets comparable quotes
Wildly different quotes are rarely a pricing difference. They are a reading difference, and the brief is what caused it.
Working on one of these problems?
These articles describe how we approach the work. If you would rather have the conversation than the reading, that is usually faster.
Or email hello@applystudio.com – we reply within one business day.