A little of what we’ve been up to.

In this Q&A, Lee shares analytics best practices and detailed insights into conversion rate optimization, the customer journey, and much more.

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.

I am currently the Author Experience Lead at Happy Cog and I’ve been making websites for the past 12 years, starting in middle school. I’ve been involved with the ExpressionEngine and Craft CMS communities for the bulk of that time.

At Happy Cog, we pride ourselves on the level of attention and detail we put into planning our CMS projects, which extends deeply into thinking about the Author Experience – an area that is typically neglected.

We’ve welcomed new talent to our team, celebrated award wins, and launched some exciting new work!

Let’s face it – SEO and UX design don’t have the greatest history together. In the early, nascent days of the web, designers used to joke that if you talked to an SEO professional, they’d advise that your website should include nothing more than a white background with black text, lots of hyperlinks, and repetitive, monotonous copy, all in the name of “keyword density.” Indeed, in the early days of search (going back to the era of Yahoo!, Excite, Hotbot, and Dogpile – before Google was even a public company), simplicity was key — and search engines could do little beyond scanning text on a page.

Along with cooking up a fresh design and renewed rewards system, we helped &pizza meet their security goals by implementing tools to prevent data hacking and fraudulent purchases.

It’s always exciting to see our work recognized and we’re proud to share that we’ve won two American Web Design Awards and two Muse Creative Awards for 2019!

Cognition launched on October 7th, 2010 with this very interesting inaugural post by Happy Cog Founder Jeffrey Zeldman. It began as a “design blog”, then evolved over many years serving a loyal community seeking interesting content relevant to the ever-growing digital space. We’ve heard testimonials from many past and present Happy Cog team members, as well as external parties, about the contribution Cognition served them as they grew their own abilities and careers.

We’ve unveiled our rebrand, participated in conferences, hosted a Craft Meetup, launched new work, and continued to grow as a team!

On May 9, we hosted Brandon Kelly, CEO of Craft CMS (Pixel & Tonic), for our first Meetup at our new Happy Cog office in New York City.

Today we’re happy to announce a number of updates, including a rebrand. For us, our rebrand didn’t start with a logo or visual identity, but by understanding how we work with clients, partners, and each other — and then amplifying our core values.

We’ve already achieved great things working as one team, but effective today we will now proceed under one name: Happy Cog.