Cognition: The blog of web design & development firm Happy Cog

Defining our industry's methodologies, standards, and culture have long been a part of Happy Cog's values.

We started Cognition as a product to offer advice, create a dialogue, and serve our industry and clients to help them with their goals and aspirations.

Learn more about Happy Cog at happycog.com.

Speeding Up During a Slowdown

4/30/20

by Lee Goldberg

It’s no surprise or secret that businesses and people are struggling right now. Thanks to the global pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus, companies are seeing major drops in revenue, site traffic, and of course, overall profitability. While economists debate how long the slowdown will last, now is the time to start planning for a recovery as we begin a return to normalcy over the weeks and months ahead. For businesses that have had budgets cut and initiatives stalled, thinking about a brighter future is welcomed news, but it won’t be easy getting there. So it begs the question: What can businesses be doing now? Moreover, is it possible to take advantage of the current situation to prepare for what’s ahead?
3 Weeks In: What We’re Seeing in Terms of Shifts in Consumer Behavior

4/7/20

by Lee Goldberg

Let’s face it: life has undergone a significant change for virtually everyone around the world, as the novel coronavirus has forced us to morph from a world of togetherness to a world of social distancing. This has led to a shift in consumer behavior and Internet usage. After evaluating data across our portfolio of clients, we’ve noticed a few significant shifts and trends that are worth highlighting:
Lead Generation for Law Firms

12/6/19

by Lee Goldberg

Stereotypes are often associated with law firms – That they can be aggressive, sharp, and cutthroat, amongst other characteristics. The competitive nature of successfully practicing law directly parallels the level of competition found online as law firms attempt to build brand awareness and garner qualified leads that have the potential to develop into actual clients and cases.
5 Things I’ve Learned About Tech Leadership

11/25/19

by Jeremy Gimbel

Tech leadership is a mystery to many. As one racks up years of experience as a developer, there’s often an assumption that one must eventually move into tech leadership to continue to grow. And while this may be true, given the structure and hierarchy of the company you work for, the jump from individual contributor to tech leader isn’t always smooth. The two roles have some crossover in skills, but each also requires its own unique set of skills to get the job done as well.
4 Ways to Make Your Holiday Strategy Even Merrier This Year

11/7/19

by Lee Goldberg

If you’re an online retailer, Q4 ‘tis the season to be jolly. You’ve likely already started to prepare your strategy for making the holiday shopping season as successful as possible, which is great. Based on our experience working with a variety of online retailers over the years, we’re highlighting some best practices and effective optimization tips to make this year be the best one yet.
Going Headless with Craft CMS

10/4/19

by Ben Smith

What is a headless CMS? A headless CMS is a major shift from the traditional model for delivering web content. It is not a single technology, it is an approach for serving web pages and data to your users. Rather than have a single codebase handle both content management and presentation of that content, a headless CMS is only concerned with content management, leaving presentation up to other parts of the tech stack.
A Day in the Life of a Project Manager

10/1/19

by Saima Khan

Happy Cog’s Project Management Team is a well-oiled machine built upon a solid foundation. But with an ever-expanding clientele, growing cross-departmental teams, and external competition always chasing us, we needed to elevate the team that is the heart of the agency to the next level. Starting in Summer 2018, we developed a series of initiatives designed to help strengthen that foundation. We started with the basics – adding structure and levels to the team. We began to define our methodology as Hybrid – think of that as a mixture of waterfall and agile! We tried and tested our tools and found what works for us. We totally re-hauled the project life cycle by introducing phases, which in turn has made the management of our Greenfield and Retainer projects consistent and manageable. Something we are really proud of is our team camaraderie. Through weekly 1:1s, weekly department meetings, and those ever-popular monthly nights out, we are stronger and better than ever!
Enter the Matrix

9/20/19

by Andrew Kaslick

A few years ago, a fellow developer (Santiago Sosa) and I were brainstorming ways to foster our company culture when we came up with the idea to bring our developers together more often for informal discovery sessions. In the company’s early days, we were a fairly small and close-knit development team that usually had a decent idea of what everyone else was working on and what technologies everyone was using. However, as the team began to quickly grow, we realized that developers were working on a wide variety of projects and were bringing with them a diverse set of skills and knowledge that many other developers were unfamiliar with. Often, developers weren’t aware of all the exciting projects that others were involved with. We felt it would be an incredibly valuable opportunity for the team to share what they were working on with each other on a regular basis.
Design Experimentation: Exploring the Evolution of Ideation

8/13/19

by Kate Lechleiter

When I started design school, I was surprised to hear my professors say things like “there is no right answer” or “keep exploring, you’re not there yet.” Coming from the world of high school calculus and definitive, objective answers, it all felt a little too open-ended for me. However, I quickly learned that with this iterative way of thinking and experimenting, there weren’t any wrong answers either. As designers, we need to be willing to share a spectrum of ideas, including ones we might be unsure about, in order to receive the most helpful feedback, collaborate with our teammates, and ultimately produce the best designs.
Humans vs Machines: When to Automate Your Paid Media Campaigns

7/2/19

by Lee Goldberg

Claude Shannon, the late American Mathematician, largely known as the ‘father of information theory,’ once remarked that he can “visualize a time when we will be to robots what dogs are to humans.” Artificial Intelligence (AI) and machine learning are no longer mere buzzwords. They’ve evolved to be an integral part of society, powering everything from self-driving cars to Amazon’s Alexa. Within the MarTech space, it’s now hard to find a software package or technology that doesn’t tout its use of machine learning. Indeed, machine learning and AI have been incredibly powerful in the paid media space, automating tasks that practitioners could do, but would rather not. This is especially true for tasks that take a disproportionate amount of time relative to the benefit earned.