Archive for category: Random Stories

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/VFTP0QiC5es/designers-guide-staying-healthy-81516248

Step away from the stylus and get back from that Mac: even if you have all the tools for graphic designers, being a designer can be hazardous to your health. The job you love could be doing serious damage to your body and to your brain.

Some of you already know this. We used social media to find out how readers felt their jobs had affected their health. Here's what we found…

Health issues for designers

The results showed that 15 per cent reported back problems, 15 per cent headaches and migraines, 13 per cent eye problems and 11 per cent repetitive strain injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome; six per cent reported obesity and five per cent circulation problems.

There were other serious issues too, with 17 per cent of you reporting psychosocial issues such as stress and depression, 12 per cent sleep problems and seven per cent relationship problems.

So what's going on – and more importantly, what can we do about it? 

A passion problem

Dr Gail Kinman is professor of occupational health psychology and director of the Research Centre for Applied Psychology at the University of Bedfordshire; she's studied the effect work has on our physical and mental health. As she explains, creative people are at risk of certain conditions because we like what we do. "It's all about job involvement," she says. "People who do this type of work breathe it."

As Dr Kinman points out, the flow that creatives experience – "when you are completely and utterly absorbed in what you're doing, when the demands of what you're doing are slightly beyond your capabilities" – is good for your wellbeing, but it can be bad for your health.

"You're not aware of time passing, you're not aware you're hungry, you're not aware that you're sitting awkwardly." If you're sitting with poor posture and poor ergonomics for long periods of time, back pain and repetitive strain injuries are likely to say hello sooner rather than later.

The good news is that you can change this. Here's how…

01. Pay attention

You can ward off many injuries with a bit of attention – a good, supportive chair and an ergonomically arranged desk, good lighting, a comfortable mouse and a posture that keeps you upright with your arms and legs at right angles. But one of the major threats to designers is lack of exercise.

If you're solo or part of a relatively small team, then the combination of tight deadlines and long hours can make it difficult to find the time or the motivation to eat well and exercise regularly – and that can be fatal, especially if when you go home you relax in front of another screen instead of doing something for your fitness.

The long-term consequences of poor diet and lack of exercise include obesity, type II diabetes, circulation problems, back and neck problems, heart disease, and increased risk of some cancers.

02. Exercise while your work

Illustration: Becca Allen for Computer Arts magazine

Some creatives have decided that the best way to address that is to exercise while they work, or at least to abandon the chair and work standing up.

Proponents of standing desks and treadmill desks – which are exactly what they sound like; desks attached to the kind of treadmill you'd find in a gym – say they help burn calories and help you live longer. But critics point out that standing all day can cause arterial disease and varicose veins, and if your posture isn't perfect, they can contribute to back problems and repetitive strain injuries. 

03. Take a walk

You're better off taking regular walks – especially if they involve meeting up with people. "I'd say do something physically different from being at work, especially if your place of work is also your place of leisure," recommends Dr Kinman.

While the 'genius is close to madness' cliché has now been comprehensively debunked, the nature of creative work isn't always good for your mental health. Tight deadlines, tough requirements, job insecurity and the stress and strains of getting paid can make life miserable. It's particularly pronounced if you work from home or remotely, where you don't have the interactions you'd have with colleagues in the office.

"There is a very prominent model of job stress that is based on high demand, low control and social isolation," Dr Kinman says. Together, those factors have been linked with serious illnesses including coronary heart disease and depression, but you don't need to change all three to make your work less stressful.

It's the combination of all three that hurts, so for example you might be juggling major deadlines, working all the hours God sends, and missing your friends or loved ones.

04. Social support is vital

Illustration: Becca Allen for Computer Arts magazine

"Social support is one of the most important factors," Dr Kinman says. "What we need to do is to replenish ourselves, and social support is a very important part of that." The support might be listening to you vent, or taking your mind off things, or practical support. All of it helps.

Can you get the same support from social media? Dr Kinman isn't convinced. "Social support for creative people can be strange," she laughs.

"You want people when you need them, but you want them back in their box when they start interfering with your work. Social media is very good for that, because you can do that management. But of course that means you won't have the deep social interaction that you need."

05. Know yourself

As Kinman points out, there's a difference between serious stress and depression and having a few bad days or feeling overwhelmed by a client from hell. "It's about knowing your body and your mind, and listening to the signals," she says. "Depression and pre-depression can have a kind of flattening effect. There are feelings of low self-esteem, a lack of enjoyment of everyday activity, a lack of concentration. It's like a narrowing of your field of vision. Sometimes the people closest to you are better than spotting it than you are yourself."

06. Listen to Ice Cube

Being a designer is hardly one of the world's most dangerous jobs, but it's a good idea to look at what you do, when you do it and how long you do it for to make sure that your working life isn't going to hurt your heart or your head.

In the words of renowned workplace health and safety expert Ice Cube, you'd better check yourself before you wreck yourself.

This article originally appeared in Computer Arts. Subscribe here.

Read more:

Amazing art with Mental Health Awareness WeekHow to balance life and work12 of the best places to live as a designer

Original Source: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/08/efficient-distributed-product-teams/

Making Distributed Product Teams Work More Efficiently With monday.com

Making Distributed Product Teams Work More Efficiently With monday.com

Nick Babich

2018-08-23T14:00:26+02:00
2018-08-23T12:23:54+00:00

(This is a sponsored article.) The way that product teams work is changing: The software industry is quickly moving to remote work. In the US alone, 43% of employed Americans have spent at least some time working remotely, and that number has steadily increased in recent years. Many successful digital products on the market today were designed and developed by a distributed team. Such teams don’t have an office in the traditional sense. Everyone chooses to work from where they like, both geographically and functionally (in a coworking space, coffee shop, home office, etc.).

While a distributed product team might sound tempting to you, creating an effective design process on such a team requires a lot of effort. Collaboration and communication are two of the most significant challenges distributed teams face. Managing a distributed team requires an understanding of how the individuals on your team operate, as well as requires a digital toolset that makes the team’s operations as efficient as possible. That’s why investing in the right remote tools and technology is so critical for product managers.

If you’re a team manager who is looking to establish a robust design process for a distributed team, then this article for you. You’ll find seven of the most common challenges distributed product teams should overcome and learn how a team-management tool called monday.com (formerly dapulse) can help them with that.

1. Build A Shared Understanding Of A Project’s Goals

When it comes to organizing a work process on a remote team, one of the key goals is to keep the whole team on the same page. Management needs to set goals and make sure everyone on the team understands and accepts them. Building understanding is especially important on remote teams because interaction tend to be more sporadic. Ensure that everyone on the team knows the following:

What are the project’s overall goals? When a team clearly understand’s the product strategy (what they want to build and why), that understanding motivates engagement.

What is expected of them, and how do they fit in the bigger picture? People want to know their role in the process. Even though every team member will be deep in the details when working on a project, understanding the big picture will help them to focus on what’s really important.

What are other people involved in the project doing? Each team member should have visibility on what the other team members are working on.

The more everyone knows, the better they can work as a team.

Visualize The Product Development Process

Helping everyone on the team know what is expected of them and when is possible using monday.com’s feature named the “timeline.” The timeline makes tasks more visual — team members will be able to see when each task is scheduled for, how long it will take and how it fits in the entire project. The tool enables you to see not only what tasks your team members are working on, but also how those tasks are distributed over time. It is great for when some activities depend on others (for example, developers are waiting on mockups from designers).

The timeline enables team members to see a high-level roadmap. (Large preview)

2. Manage The Team’s Workload

As anyone who has ever worked on a remote team will tell you, remote working is quite different from working face to face. Many project managers find it hard to manage the team’s workload.

Most product teams use project-tracking software to plan and estimate their work. Usually, a team will prepare all of the work in a task list, in which each task has a text description and a time estimate. The biggest downside of this approach is that it’s not very representative. For example, Kanban boards, used by many product teams today, are not very representative — it’s almost impossible from a glance at the board to understand the order in which tasks should be completed, especially when they have dependencies.

Using a Kanban board might make it hard to see how tasks should be distributed in time. (Image source) (Large preview)

Track Everything Your Team Is Working On

Interaction cost (i.e. the cognitive or physical effort required to complete an action) plays a vital role in the user experience of a product. The more effort required to complete an operation, the less usable the interface becomes for the end user. If the project manager has to switch to different products to see the team’s progress, that will create unnecessary friction and hinder the team from working efficiently.

monday.com assembles and displays progress data in a logical and understandable way. The tool has a feature called a board. The board is where all team members can track everything the team is working on. The main advantage of the board is that it enables product managers to monitor the team’s progress in real time and instantly see who is working on what and see where things stand.

monday.com gives you a clear sense of what needs to get done and who is responsible for what. The board provides in-depth insight into a project and its tasks. (Large preview)

Communicate Current Status

Each team needs a mechanism that makes it easy to understand what’s going on at a glance.

One way to solve this problem is to use color coding for different elements. Color coding speeds up visual search because it allows users to quickly filter a particular object (or objects) by knowing the color associated with it. monday.com uses color coding to indicate the current status of a task. For example, it’s easy to see where things have gotten stuck just by looking at the board and finding all tasks colored in red.

Status updates can be color coded. (Large preview)

Create, Modify And Assign Tasks In A Few Clicks

Adding tasks in a project-management tool doesn’t sound very exciting. Generally, the more time it takes, the less happy the product manager will be.

monday.com simplifies the process of data input. Managers can quickly add rows to the board — monday.com calls them pulses. Pulses can be tasks, projects, missions, to-do items, etc. Creating a pulse requires just a few clicks.

(Large preview)

After you create a pulse, simply assign it to a team member.

Assign teammates to particular tasks or projects. (Large preview)

Tailor The Platform To Your Needs

There’s no such thing as a universal design process. Every project is different and requires its own design process. A product-management tool should be very adaptive to change; the product team should be able to customize the process according to their needs, without having to put much effort into customization.

monday.com is extremely customizable and lets the user configure almost any option. You can customize monday.com to manage any workflow or process, to address any challenge and to manage basically anything.

When it comes to creating a board, you don’t need to start from scratch. A multitude of templates allow you to start quickly. For example, the “Team Tasks” template would be very useful for product teams.

Finding the right template for your activity is really simple because all templates are visualized. (Large preview)

After selecting a template for your needs, you can customize it by manipulating different sections. Product teams often need to combine task into groups, whereby each group represents a milestone (for example, “Release 1”, “Release 2”, etc.). Doing this in monday.com is relatively simple. As a board owner, you can have as many groups as you want.

Easy to organize tasks. You can have as many groups as you want. (Large preview)

But it doesn’t stop there. You can use the checklist feature to break down tasks even further. For example, each task can be broken down into smaller to-do steps. This feature is handy when a few activities need to get done before the task can be completed — for example, if a product specification needs to be approved by a few designers before it can be handed over to the development team. The checklist sits within a pulse, in the “Updates” section, and can help create a structure for each pulse.

The checklist sits within a pulse, in the “Updates” section. This feature can help create a structure for each pulse. (Large preview)

Plan The Team’s Workload Visually

Designers, developers and managers often work with compressed timeframes and simultaneous projects. A team must be able to respond quickly to feedback on their product from stakeholders and users. Following the build-measure-learn cycle, a product team should be really flexible; it should be ready to implement feedback from testing sessions and adjust the design process according to the new information. The same level of flexibility should be in all products the team uses.

Using monday.com’s timeline, it’s possible to make corrections and improve the team’s efficiency. The visual editor makes the process of managing tasks easy. The product manager can see where each project is at each point, and can see and focus on areas of struggle, quickly and effectively.

The timeline makes it possible to see each team member’s capacity over a set period of time (say, the next few weeks), seeing where they have room to take on more work and where they need to delegate tasks to others.

Change the time range in the timeline. The time range is updated in real time. (Large preview)

3. Create Effective Internal Communications

Communication plays a critical role in the design process. When it comes to product design, it’s essential for all team members to be on the same page. Unlike colocated teams, a distributed team won’t have an opportunity to arrange regular face-to-face meetings. When you take out face-to-face interaction, you can’t expect things to just work the same way. Poorly established communication patterns can lead to some team members feeling like they’re working in a vacuum.

Tools matter more in remote work because they are the foundation for communication. The goal is to make sure everyone on the team feels connected.

Centralize All Communication

In today’s world, we communicate with a variety of tools: from traditional email to online messengers such as Skype, WhatsApp, Slack and Facebook Messenger. Having to switch from a task-management tool to another tool for communication can be stressful. Worse, some information can get lost during the transition (for example, an email inbox can fill up to the point that a team member can overlook a critical email).

Product teams can use monday.com as a single communication platform for their workplace. And it would be a much better solution because it allows for communication in the context of each task. With monday.com, you no longer need to use email for internal communication. When a team member clicks on a pulse on any board, a box opens to the right of the screen, showing the “updates”. Simply mention a person’s username (“@johndoe”), and send your message. The great thing is that the chat thread stays with that task, so finding a conversation after a while is relatively easy.

Cut Down On Meetings And Optimize Required Meetings

Meetings are an essential part of the communication process. When it comes to reviewing plans and brainstorming on design decisions, there’s no substitute for a meeting. But for a distributed team, the number of potential hours available for real-time meetings can be limited, so it’s essential to make the best use of that time. A distributed team should continually try to reduce their number of meetings and maximize the effectiveness of the time that team members have together.

Take a weekly kickoff meeting as an example. This meeting happens on a Monday, and team members come together to discuss plans for the week. For many teams, such meetings are rarely productive. Quite often, the information shared in a weekly kickoff meeting becomes outdated shortly after the meeting, and team members need to reprioritize tasks.

monday.com saves the team vast amounts of time in meetings. Instead of discussing the plan for the week, the product manager can break down complex tasks into weekly achievable goals. This will help team members plan the week based on what they need to get done.

Create a weekly task board. (Large preview)

Share Valuable Resources With The Entire Team, Not Individual Members

Imagine you’ve found a really valuable resource and want to share it with your peers. You tweet about it and send a link to a group chat. You get feedback like, “Awesome resource! Thanks!” from some people in the chat. Shortly after, most of your peers forget about the resource, especially if they can’t use it in the work they’re doing right now. Sad, right? We can do better.

Instead of sending a link to a group chat, share all resources you find on a separate board. monday.com has a template named “Design Inspiration & Resources”. The great thing about this approach is that it’ll be much easier for team members to find a particular resource when they actually need it.

(Large preview)

Organize Better Planning And Brainstorming Sessions

Task prioritization is a typical activity in agile project management. Team members get together, discuss tasks and vote on what to implement in the next sprint.

monday.com incorporates voting. Team members can use the voting column when they want to decide on something together as a team. Simply add a voting column to a board, and team members will be able to cast their vote in one click.

Vote for ideas during brainstorming and planning sessions. (Large preview)

Notify Team Members In Real Time

Fear of missing out (FOMO) is a common problem on distributed teams. When working remotely, team members might be afraid to miss an important piece of information. As a result, they spend a lot of time in communication tools, checking mail and messengers. This can get really distracting. Team members should spend less time in communication tools and more time in tools they use to design (tools for prototyping and development). It’s all too easy to waste the day reading messages and replying.

A communication tool should serve vital information just when team members need it; it should have an effective mechanism of notification. monday.com notifies users via desktop and mobile in real time. The platform has an app for iOS and Android. The app allows team members to stay connected on their phone or tablet and to respond quickly from anywhere. It’s also possible to customize notification rules. For example, you can manage which activity triggers an email.

(Large preview)

Create A Work Schedule For Your Team

If your team is distributed across the globe and you need to arrange a meeting, you have to be sure that it won’t happen at awkward hours (such as in the middle of the night). It would be great to see the team members’ working hours.

The work schedule board is a cornerstone of your business operations. Team members in each time zone can commit to the times that work for them. This helps product managers schedule meetings at times that work for everybody.

The work schedule board shows when team members will be online and available for chat. (Large preview)

4. Involve Users In The Design Process

Most commercially successful products were created with a strong focus on the target audience. Designers know that if they want to release a successful product, they need to introduce real users to the design process. User involvement is most efficient and influential in the early stages of product development, because the cost of making changes increases as the system develops. Generally, the earlier you create a strong feedback loop, the better the final product will be.

Share Designs With Users And Gather A Valuable Feedback

The feedback that a product team gets from users is extremely valuable. It can validate that the design team is moving in the right direction.

On monday.com, users can create a board and choose whom to share it with. For example, if you are working with a client, you can set up a board for their project and invite them to work as a guest. The board could include key features you want to work on. As soon as you share the board, the client will get a notification and then can open the board, review the plan and request modifications.

5. Find All Required Information Easily

Documentation is another challenge. Distributed teams don’t have a physically shared space where they can share product documentation. Information might be stored in many different places: email, cloud drives, local computers, etc. It could lead to team members missing an important piece of information and being unaware of it. This leads to fragmented knowledge.

Centralize All Documents

Having all documents in one place is critical to success. monday.com syncs all information in a single accessible hub. All team members can store all relevant discussions in a searchable database. The platform provides an option to upload different types of files simply by dragging and dropping. The next time a designer needs to share a product’s specifications, all they need to do is upload a file to the platform.

Upload all assets by dragging and dropping. (Large preview)

Search Anything And Everything

Anyone who has ever worked with a knowledge base will tell you how critical search functionality is. Without proper search, your chance of finding information decreases significantly.

monday.com allows you to quickly find anything your team has ever worked on, including images, updates, projects and assignments. Your work becomes a rich knowledge base.

(Large preview)

For example, when you need to find the latest version of a product’s specification, all you need to do is click the search box, select the “Files” tab and enter the project’s name as a search query.

(Large preview)

6. Make The Collaboration Tool A Natural Part Of The Team

The platform you choose for team management should feel like second nature. Technology should work for you and your team, not the other way around.

Minimize The Time Required To Learn A Tool

When you introduce a new tool in the design process, one goal should be to have total agreement to work using this tool. This agreement is not always easy to come by because team members are usually skeptical about the next “magical tool that will solve all of their problems”. What’s worse is that they have to spend extra time learning how to use it. Nobody wants to learn new software.

One of the most significant advantages of monday.com is its intuitiveness. Regardless of whether you’ve used a similar app before, monday.com can be picked up with no training. Team members will be able to understand how to use the tool without preparation.

monday.com provides basic onboarding to help users get started. (Large preview)

Scalable

When companies select a collaboration tool, they often think of it as an investment. They want a tool that will scale with the business.

monday.com is suitable for any sized team, from two freelancers working together to thousands collaborating across the globe. The tool scales with you, from simplicity to complexity, with total ease. Also, as your business expands, monday.com makes it painless to shift to a premium version (Standard, Pro or Enterprise) and get more of the platform’s premium features.

Integrate The Platform With Existing Tools

A task-management tool is essential for any team hoping for good results. But the team’s toolbox also needs to support the design process (for prototyping and development) and the collection of design artifacts (for example, on Google Drive or Dropbox). It’s essential that the team-management tool integrates seamlessly with other tools the team uses.

When it comes to integration, monday.com does a lot to be part of the established software ecosystem. It can connect to Dropbox, Zapier, Google Drive and other sharing tools. As a team member, you can attach a mockup file to your updates, sharing it in the context of the tasks it relates to.

monday.com also comes with an open API architecture, which lets developers build their own integrations.

(Large preview)

7. Keep The Team Motivated

Having the right atmosphere is extremely important. Team leaders should not only be in tune with each person on the team, but should continually look for ways to increase engagement.

Celebrate Successes With Team Members

It’s natural for people to seek acknowledgment. The need for social approval drives us to look for confirmation from people we know (parents, friends, colleagues). When someone recognizes our results by saying something as simple as “Great job!”, we feel motivated to work towards our goals. It’s essential for team players to get acknowledged, especially when working remotely.

monday.com has a few features that help create a sense of acknowledgment. The first one is the thumb-up feature, which is basically a positive reaction to an activity. Most people are familiar with this from social networks. People are used to measuring the effect of a post by the number of likes they get. monday.com allows you to give a thumb up to your teammates’ work.

(Large preview)

Another nice feature are the animated GIFs. You can liven up comments with GIFs. monday.com lets you pick from thousands of GIFs when responding to teammates, which will add a bit of personality to your comments.

(Large preview)

Last but not least, monday.com has a confetti feature. As soon as a designer completes their last “in progress” task on a board, they will see an animated confetti effect. This subtle detail adds a bit of delight and motivates team members to have an all-green board.

(Large preview)

Conclusion

Establishing an effective process on a distributed team is hard. What works for a colocated team won’t necessarily work for a distributed team, and what works for one distributed team won’t necessarily work for another.

Build a remote-friendly work culture by focusing on following priorities:

Prioritize transparency.
Keep important information accessible to everyone.

Stay on top of the team’s activity.
Understand what every member of your team is doing and where the team is in the process at a glance.

Build an effective communication system.
The foundation of distributed teams is communication. Create a healthy system of meetings and habits to keep people communicating.

Lower the barrier to entry.
Choose a team-collaboration tool that will be the least painful for everyone to get on board with. It should be a reference point that brings everything together.

(ms, ra, il, al)

Original Source: https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/aurora-borealis-colour-spectrum-wallpapers/

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Original Source: https://inspiredm.com/semrush-review/

This SEMrush review discusses everything you need to know about the solution- it’s primary features and functionalities, plus pricing and overall usability. And to help you further, I’ll also throw in SEMrush’s weak points.

Search engine optimization is not the easiest thing right now. Getting noticed by Google takes a considerable amount of resources, time and persistent efforts

That’s why a good rank is always refreshingly satisfying. Breaking through to the first page of the search results alone places you in the category of sites attracting 75% of the organic clicks. And if you’re good enough for the first spot, the result is essentially 33% of the clicks.

It almost feels like winning the lottery, right?

But, let’s be honest here. Deep down you know that making it to that position is not the end game.

Maintaining it is even harder since competition at the highest levels is usually extremely fierce. You might go to bed as the leader, then rise up in the morning to find your site a couple of spots behind.

To make matters worse, Google is not dependable when it comes to conserving the status quo. Just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, a simple algorithm update might be enough to kick your site into oblivion. And probably even blacklist it.

We’ve all been there. And many actually recognize the possibility of backsliding. That’s why, as a matter of fact, 72% of business leaders believe that their enterprises will be vulnerable to threats emanating from digital market disruptions in the next three years.

Think that fear is a bit too familiar? In other words, do you think you have what it takes to effectively wage war against your competitors?

I tell you what. I know the feeling. So, I’ll cut to the chase here and walk you through a tool that’s predominantly leveraged for SEO and competitor intelligence.

But first, what is it all about?

SEMrush Review: Overview

Ask me about keyword research, and I’ll give you a list of tools optimized for it.

Switch to SEO site audit, and I’ll still mention multiple solutions off the top of my head.

Curious about playing dirty too? Well, I can also introduce you to a couple of web-based competitor intelligence services that give relatively accurate insights.

And so forth.

Now, we’ve barely scratched the surface here. By the time we’re halfway done, you’ll have integrated several third-party tools into your site. And there’s no problem with that. Apart from the obvious fact that it’ll be pretty cumbersome switching between them to coordinate your entire digital marketing strategy.

So, guess what? How about combining all these channels into one comprehensive suite?

Well, that’s how they came up with SEMrush in 2008.  With the concept of placing everything under one roof.

 

Quite simply, SEMrush is a powerful digital marketing suite that merges social media marketing, SERP, keyword research and implementation, backlinking, content marketing, paid ad campaigns, PPC, and SEO- to support streamlined marketing through one central dashboard.

All things considered, SEMrush is particularly known for helping its users go beyond their standard jurisdictions, into their competitors’ territories.

And what’s the point?

Well, get this. By granting insight into your competitors’ digital marketing strategies, SEMrush essentially facilitates counter-strategies from a vantage point.

Such provisions have seen this toolkit grow exponentially over the years, to host more than a million regular users.

By the end of 2016, in fact, SEMrush had expanded its reach to more than 160 million keyword databases in the US alone, 70 million in Canada, 95 million in Australia, 80 million in the UK, 45 million more in India, just to mention but a few.

Now that, admittedly, sounds impressive, to say the least. But, does SEMrush live up to user expectations? How much can it support your digital marketing efforts?

Well, let’s find out.

This SEMrush review discusses everything you need to know about the solution- it’s primary features and functionalities, plus pricing and overall usability. And to help you further, I’ll also throw in SEMrush’s weak points.

SEMrush Review: Features
Dynamic SEO

Confused about the best keywords to optimize for Google?

Well, it turns out that SEMrush provides organic research to help site owners establish the golden keywords that will get you that highest possible ranking.

For the best possible results, keyword assessment is based on several critical parameters. Some of the primary ones include competitive density, CPC, search volume, traffic, and overall trends.

Fair enough, but keyword optimization is only a small part of the whole SEO framework. The rest involves technical elements like page loading speeds and link-building.

That’s why, thankfully, SEMrush extends its features to offer a complete site audit on all SEO technicalities.

How, you ask?

Basically, its engine crawls through your site to analyze things like page loading speeds, hreflang attributes, AMP issues, images, HTTPS implementation, content, etc. Any errors that would affect your ranking are then identified for prompt resolution.

Consider duplicate content or broken images, for instance. Normally, it would be difficult to notice such discrepancies. But, SEMrush is capable of detecting even some of the smallest issues that might be hurting your overall ranking.

And speaking of ranking, SEMrush also comes provides a handy position tracking function. It closely monitors your site’s position across all search engine platforms, including Google’s local search versions. Consequently, even the slightest shifts in SERPs are identified quickly, to help you implement a counter strategy in good time.

Now hang on a minute. What counter strategies are we talking about here?

Well, all these insights are extremely valuable. But there’s one problem. They are as good as dead if you can’t figure out the most effectual response strategies. And that always boils down to your SEO expertise.

But, guess what? Instead of leaving it at the error-detection stage, SEMrush also proceeds to handle the heavy lifting for you. It provides helpful suggestions to improve your site’s SERP according to Google’s current algorithm set up.

Paid Ads Insight

By now, we pretty much acknowledge that organic search drives Google SERP.

But, make no mistake. That shouldn’t be the basis for dismissing paid ads. In fact, here’s the deal- PPC leads have 50% higher chances of buying something compared to organic visitors. That’s why businesses are now generating an average of $2 ROI for every $1 spent on Adwords.

Quite promising, but that’s just the average. So, of course, it’s possible to achieve even better returns. But you’ll need to eliminate all the possible errors in your ad framework.

It’s common, for instance, to see inappropriately placed PPC keywords competing against each other. To resolve such a problem, SEMrush provides a PPC keyword tool to identify and remove negative keywords, in addition to refining the entire keyword list.

When it comes to drafting the precise paid ads, SEMrush also comes in handy with its Ad Builder.  It makes the whole process much easier by not only capitalizing on your rivals’ ad templates, but also supporting dynamic keyword insertion for optimal ad relevancy.

Content Optimization

Have you ever invested heavily in content, hoping for the best, and then managed to acquire only a handful of leads? Have you ever been so discouraged by the results that you started believing that content marketing is a bit overhyped?

Well, the fact is content is still king. It’s three times as effective as paid search, and generates 200% more leads than outbound marketing. Most importantly, it forms the foundation for search engine ranking.

So, it makes sense that SEMrush attempts to go beyond keyword research here. To further sharpen your content marketing, the service helps you identify exactly what your target audience is interested in through its topic research function.

To top it off, SEMrush additionally comes with brand monitoring to inform the subsequent content distribution strategy.

Social Media Tracking

In essence, we can’t discuss digital marketing without mentioning social media.

Now, it turns out SEMrush has also engineered tools that delve into the deep stuff. Using just likes and comments to judge results is so last year. So, its tracker scans extensively for profound critical analysis.

You can track the relevant hashtags across Google+, Twitter, and Facebook, discover the principal content types preferred by your target audiences, follow up on all the social media data through PDF reports, plus keep an eye on third-party social media marketers handling your enterprise’s channels.

Come to think of it, however, you might not even need a third-party marketer. SEMrush’s social media poster might be an adequate alternative for a standard small business. It basically automates the posting process, allowing you to queue and schedule posts, curate content, and post to multiple platforms simultaneously.

And to establish the best practices, SEMrush acts as a window to your rivals’ social media methodologies. You get to learn about their posting patterns, top-performing posts, and their corresponding successes across the chief platforms.

Competitive Intelligence

Ok, we’ve mentioned a couple of helpful features for tracking competitors on different channels. But, they only add up to a fraction of SEMrush’s overall competitive intelligence capability.

To get collect comprehensive information about your enemies, you have to be equipped for the Bond-level of spying. That’s how the bulk of the leading brands have been able to remain dominant in the first place. As a matter of fact, 90% of the Fortune 500 companies actively engage extensive competitive intelligence.

That said, SEMrush provides data on your rivals’ SERP, organic keywords, SEO progress, social media marketing strategies, and content efficacy. Through traffic analytics, you can further establish your competitors’ traffic sources, compare traffic response patterns to the corresponding marketing tactics, plus weigh your site against its primary opponents, as you review the respective key metrics.

 

And you know what? You can also track your paid search competition through SEMrush’s advertising research. I was able to follow my rivals’ ad trends, establish mobile and desktop keywords they’ve been leveraging, plus monitor their top results, overall expenditure, and individual PPC tactics.

SEMrush Review: Pricing

The type and level of functions you’re able to adopt, overall, depends on your specific subscription package. And to cater to different types of users, SEMrush has structured its packages and their corresponding prices in line with the expected usage scales- from freelancers to enterprises.

For starters, you can take advantage of the free-trial offer. Unfortunately, it’s only applicable for 14 days, you’re essentially limited to SEMrush Pro.

Then comes the four fundamental packages:

Pro- For startups and freelancers with a limited budget. Costs $99.95 per month, or $999.40 per year for annual prepay subscribers.

5 scheduled PDF reports
Standard features
Crawls through 100,000 web pages
Tracks up to 500 keywords
5 projects
3,000 daily reports
10,000 results per report

Guru- For developing marketing firms plus small and medium enterprises. Costs $199.95 per month, or $1999.40 per year for annual prepay subscribers.

Branded PDF reports
All Pro features
Standard features
Historical data
20 scheduled PDF reports
Crawls through 300,000 web pages
Tracks up to 1500 keywords
50 projects
5,000 daily reports
30,000 results per report

Business- For enterprises with a large web presence, e-commerce projects, and large agencies. Costs $399.95 per month, or $3999.40 per year for annual prepay subscribers.

Product listing ads
All Guru features
Standard features
Historical data
Branded PDF reports
50 scheduled PDF reports
Crawls through 1,000,000 web pages
Tracks up to 5,000 keywords
200 projects
10,000 daily reports
50,000 results per report

Enterprise offers flexible features to large organizations with extensive needs. Its price is negotiable.

Unlimited site crawling
Standard features
On-site training
Custom keyword databases
Custom limits

Who Should Consider Using SEMrush?

Before we settle this, let’s look at what you might not like about SEMrush.

As you’ve probably noticed from the pricing strategy, cheap is not a word you’d use to describe SEMrush. $100 per month, for instance, is considerably costly for startups and freelancers.

But, I guess you could also argue that it’s reasonably priced if we compared it with the alternative option of adopting numerous tools from different providers.

Now, while combining all these functionalities streamlines your overall marketing strategy, here’s the kicker. Learning the ropes as a beginner is not as simple as it sounds. Only experienced marketers are able to leverage the tools effortlessly right off the bat.

And then, here’s an issue I didn’t quite pick up, but many experienced users have raised it on multiple platforms. That SEMrush’s data might have some discrepancies here and there. But that’s a rare occurrence it seems.

That said, SEMrush is best suited for digital marketers. But don’t let that stop you from giving it a try. You can still leverage it as a freelancer or business owner.

The post SEMrush Review: Complete Digital Marketing Toolkit? appeared first on Inspired Magazine.

Original Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/CreativeBloq/~3/eaA-Eh-mgkQ/create-a-leather-material-in-substance-designer

Although there are plenty of pre-made free textures around, if you want a specific material to use in your 3D art, it isn't that difficult to make your own. In this article, I'll show you how to create a simple leather material (shown above) using Substance Designer. You can watch a time-lapse of my process below, or read on for a step-by-step guide. 

When you have to create materials using nodes, like you can do in Substance Designer, Blender and other software, my pro tip is to keep a clean work environment in order to have control over all the elements of the material. So try to avoid overlapping elements and so on.

01. Add nodes

For this type of material, select the Physically Based (Metallic/Roughness) Graph Template and delete the Metallic output, since it isn’t necessary here. 

Now add these nodes from the Substance Designer library: the Cells 3 and BnW Spots 1 noises (these two are the main elements of the material), the Height to Normal World Units filter, four Levels filters, a Blend filter and, last but not least, the Gradient Map filter.

02. Link the elements

Now we can start to link these elements. Start by placing the Cells 3 at the beginning of the graph with the BnW Spots 1. These two generators will be linked to the first two Levels filters, and linked together with the Blend filter. 

Link the Levels filter of the Cells 3 generator to the Height to Normal World Units filter, the third Levels filter and the fourth Levels filter. The Height to Normal World Units filter will be linked to the Normal output, the third Levels to the Roughness output and the fourth to the Height output. Finally, connect the Blend filter with the Gradient Map, and this one directly to the Base Color output. 

03. Adjust parameters

Once you've finished linking every element of the scene, it's time to fix some of the parameters. In particular we need to fix the first two Levels filters of the substance: the first is linked to the Cells 3 generator and must be adjusted in order to increase the brightness of the texture, and the second generator (linked to the BnW Spots 1 noises) must be adjusted in order to decrease the contrast of the texture. 

For the other parameters of the Levels filters choose arbitrarily – but as always I suggest you don’t exaggerate. 

The latest element to fix is the Gradient Map. This filter is probably one of the most important; in fact it can help to give colour to the material. For this project I created a shade of red, but this element, like the others, can be changed as you prefer.

This article was originally published in 3D World, the world's best-selling magazine for CG artists. Buy issue 236 or subscribe.

Read more:

Create a tiles material in Substance DesignerSubstance Designer 5.5 reviewCreating convincing 3D materials