The NEWY blog.
Practical notes on design, engineering, and delivery — written by the people doing the work.
Posts
The handover test: can your team run it without us?
A project is not finished when it launches. It is finished when the people who own it can change it without calling anyone.
How to brief an agency so you get what you want
The best briefs are specific about problems and outcomes, and deliberately loose about solutions.
Core Web Vitals, plainly
Three measurements, in ordinary language: how fast the main thing appears, how quickly the page responds, and how much it moves about.
Accessibility is a design constraint, not a checklist
Treated as an audit at the end, it produces compliance and little else. Treated as a constraint, it usually produces a better interface.
Writing for machines that quote you
A practical editing pass for copy that will be read by models as often as by people.
SEO after AI answers
Search increasingly returns an answer rather than a list. The work shifts from ranking a page to being the source that gets quoted.
AI features that survive contact with users
The demo is the easy part. What matters is what happens when the model is wrong, and whether the user can tell.
Where automation actually pays
Automate what is repetitive, rule-based and frequent. Everything else usually needs better information, not less human involvement.
What "MVP" should mean, and usually does not
A minimum viable product is the smallest thing that produces evidence. It is not a cheap version of the real thing.
Your first mobile app probably should not be an app
App stores add distribution friction, review cycles and platform work. Validate the idea somewhere cheaper first.
Choosing between a platform and a custom build
The question is not which is better. It is which constraints you are willing to live inside, and for how long.
Checkout: the five places people leave
Abandonment is rarely about price. It is usually about surprise, friction, or a moment of doubt at the wrong time.
What actually makes a site fast
Most performance work goes into the wrong layer. The wins are usually in what you send, not how you send it.
The three questions every homepage must answer
What do you do, who is it for, and what happens next. Everything else on the page is supporting material.
Why your website should be boring
Novelty costs attention. On a business website, the interface should be invisible and the content should do the work.