Design is one of those tricky areas of business which some people seem innately good at and others are terrible.

But effective design is crucial to business success.

Here are two key statistics from Adobe which demonstrate how vital design is for your business:

• Design-driven companies have outperformed the S&P Index by 219% over 10 years
• Companies that foster creativity enjoy 1.5x greater market share

In the modern digital arena, customers and users expect excellent design and usability more than ever. Poorly designed websites will put customers off or fail to convert those customers who see past the poor layout. Design thinking is business thinking.

For instance, think of any marketing campaign you’ve run. The choice of the images, the font, the location of your call to action are all defined by thinking in terms of design.

For this reason, in this Process Street article, we give you free access to our top 11 design processes and checklists. Simply click on the links below and be directed to your template of choice.

• Web Design Process
• UX Design Process
• Brand Identity Design
• Header Design
• Engineering Design Process
• Graphic Design Process
• Logo Design Process
• Animation Design Process
• Blog Image Design Process
• Graphic Design Approval Checklist
• Social Media Image Design

Even websites which appear on the surface to be poorly designed, like Craigslist or Reddit, work because the user experience they provide is one that resonates with the user. A solid design creates more than just conversions, it can create brand loyalty too – keeping your customers coming back for more.

Click on the subheader below to navigate to the relevant section in this article. Alternatively, scroll down for a thorough overview of our top 11 design checklists.

• Our top 11 design checklists covering design’s vital areas
• How to create your design processes and checklists using Process Street

Let’s jump to it!

Hacking is constantly misunderstood in pop culture.

From an 11-year-old crashing Wall Street and flying through 3D landscapes in Hackers to “hacking” an entire city in Watch Dogs, it’s easy to see why it’s seen as an extreme and dangerous hobby to have.

In reality, there are plenty of “white-hat” (well-intentioned) hackers who help companies to identify security weaknesses in their programs through bug bounties.

So, to de-mystify the air around bug bounty programs and white-hat hacking, this post will show you:

• What bug bounties are
• How you can start earning money through them
• What to consider when setting up your own bug bounty program
• 20 examples of top bug bounty programs you can take inspiration from or take part in yourself

Let’s get started.

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Written by Andy Barnes, MotoCMS marketing manager. He is a professional content creator and an enthusiastic marketer reporting on tech news and all aspects of the web design industry. Anyone looking for more inspirational posts, tips, and advice or simply the latest industry news, email him at [email protected].

Are you dreaming of creating a powerful website by yourself? The right choice of DIY website builder can make your dream come true without much effort.

No one will deny that online presence is vital for any business nowadays. Whether you produce goods or provide services, it’s almost impossible to be on top without a highly-functional website.

However, is it possible to create one if you are not a pro in web design? Can you succeed without knowing a line of code?

Don’t worry.

It’s not a problem anymore with modern website builders. Zero need to code required.

In this Process Street article, we’ll focus on the DIY website builders you can use to create a competitive website in 2019.

We’ll look at:

• What a DIY website builder is
• What your options are
• How to know whether you need one
• What key features you’ll need to make sure your DIY website is done well.

Go from website templates to website revenue!

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In 2015, The Fader reported huge news for Spotify. Out of its 75 million monthly users, 20 million are paying customers.

A 26.6% conversion rate is staggering on freemium products. As Jason Cohen says:

“A really good conversion rate for free-to-paid is 4%, like Dropbox. Awesome for them, but normal rates are more like 1%, and that’s if users are reasonably active.”

If 1% is average, and Dropbox‘s “really good conversion rate” is 4%, then 26.6% is absolutely bloody ridiculous.

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On August 25th, we launched a library of 1000+ real sales and emails from the top 280 SaaS companies.

The library was hosted on a microsite, Inside SaaS Sales, which allows users to browse the full sales cadences, organized in the order the message or voicemail was sent.

The launch landed us almost 800 votes on Product Hunt, 10,000+ site visits, a mention in Hiten Shah‘s SaaS Weekly, and publicity from the SaaS and VC community.

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Launching a website can be a huge undertaking. A successful launch requires managing many moving parts including content, design, marketing and the technical side. That’s why we have created this handy checklist for you to use on your next website launch or redesign.

And don’t forget, you can get this as an interactive checklist that you and your team can collaborate around. Just create a free account with Process Street and grab it from the examples section.

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Websites are delicate, messy, and hard to manage effectively. Setup might be easy, but a beginner learning to maintain a website will hit a damaging snag sooner or later.

The main problem is that the tech behind any website is complex for beginners. The files that run your site are written in multiple different languages, depend on each other’s fixed locations, and are controlled by config files. In short, there’s a lot to grasp when you’re starting up a website.

To avoid making mistakes you need a basic knowledge of SQL, cPanel, and phpmyadmin, as well as a general idea of why and how websites work. Like I learned the hard way, tiny tweaks or careless uploads can take the entire site offline for days at a time, which is especially damaging when you have a recurring audience of any kind.

In this post, I’m going to go through the methods you’ll need when maintaining a website, and give you processes you can follow for each task.

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Home pages are typically the most viewed location on a website and your main opportunity to connect with the audience as a brand. Get it wrong, and all of those views will go from potential customers to part of your bounce rate.

“Your homepage is probably the most visited page on your website — in fact, for the majority of websites, it typically receives more than 50% of all visitor traffic. In light of that… you may want to start thinking of your homepage more like a landing page” – John Paul Mains, Your Homepage Is THE Landing Page

Knowing this, I decided to do something similar to our SaaS pricing pages study by analyzing 100 leading startup home pages to see what they have in common, and how you can apply these lessons to your own website.

In this post I’ll go through 11 core data-backed takeaways to give a better outline of how to make your home page, and highlight the differences you’ll need to know if you’re targeting a niche audience.

From word count and jargon usage to social proof and CTAs, keep reading to see how the top 100 startups use their home page.

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Thinking of starting a side project?

A month back, I realized I was getting to the point where I wasn’t bothering to take lunch breaks. I read as a big part of my job, and I didn’t want to get involved in anything heavier than reading articles. Frankly, I was bored during my lunch breaks and I got annoyed I wasn’t doing anything productive.

The solution?

After brainstorming several side project ideas, I started making a personal website.

This was the perfect amount of work because I had (very) basic HTML skills and needed to learn only CSS and how to deploy the code.

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The copy on your SaaS startup’s landing page is one of the major factors that determines whether your product lives, or dies a horrible death.

Unbounce cites headlines as the single most important element of a landing page, and that’s for good reason.

Several decades back, advertising legend David Ogilvy said:

“When you have written your headline, you have already spent 80 cents of your dollar”

That means that for every 1,000 people who land on your page, 800 leave after reading only the headline. But that’s just an average. It’s possible to boost those numbers with great copy, and a small tweak at the top of the funnel, as we know, can really move the needle at the bottom of the funnel.

For this article, I analyzed 87 SaaS startup landing pages. This was taken from the top 100 in AngelList’s Trending section at the time, disregarding companies that had shut down.

I found hidden trends and best practices in two supposedly simple elements of the pages: the headline and the subheadline.

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