The top spot goes to: 14 lousy web design trends that are making a comeback

Our Director of Content Chris Lake has repeated his top spot from last year, this time managing to enrage a bunch of design folk with a mention of HTML5. Cue a heated debate…

And the rest, by pageviews…

24 beautifully-designed web dashboards that data geeks will love.

Mr Lake again, repeating his crafty tactic of adding lots of external links so that users come back and forth to clock up more page impressions…  this time managing to enrage a bunch of design folk with a mention of HTML5. Cue a heated debate…

10 useful Google Analytics custom dashboards

This round up of ready to go Google Analytics dashboards has proved to be useful for our readers. 

10 brilliant examples of responsive design in ecommerce

Responsive design has been a very popular topic in 2013. This round up of examples from David Moth provided some useful inspiration. 

17 digital marketing and ecommerce trends for 2013 

Our CEO Ashley Friedlein’s future-gazing from January 2012: did he get it right? 

10 valuable Google Analytics custom reports

The same as number three, only for reports…

16 drop-dead gorgeous examples of mobile design inspiration

Some great examples of beautiful mobile sites and apps from Chris Lake.

10 great examples of responsive design from around the world

We gave our intern David Olshanetsky some blogging practice…

70+ epic social media case studies, stats, blog posts and more

Andrew Warren Payne rounded up lots of our social media resources into one post… 

Introducing the Modern Marketing Manifesto

In April, Ashley Friedlein presented the 12 constituents of modern marketing in this post. You can read the updated Manifesto here. 

Six case studies and infographics on the optimal time to send emails

We like to present useful stats and resources for readers, and this from David Moth has been a popular one. 

10 more valuable Google Analytics custom reports

After publishing the first list of custom reports, I received loads of other great suggestions, so compiled a second post with them. Why ditch a winning formula? 

10 brilliant digital marketing campaigns from McDonald’s

Our ‘most English of analysts’ Andrew Warren-Payne (see here) has been a valuable contributer to the blog over the past year. 

17 delightful micro UX effects and transitions for your website

A round up of some lovely UX effects from Chris Lake. 

10 inspiring digital marketing campaigns from Coca-Cola

I wonder where David Moth got the idea for this? 

12 inspired 404 pages that make falling into a hole fun

From Chris Lake. Does what it says on the tin. 

Five examples of B2B companies achieving success in social marketing

Some useful B2B case studies and stats from David Moth. 

60+ amazing email marketing best practice tips, stats, blog posts and more

Ben Davis gathers the best of our recent email marketing blog posts, reports and other resources. 

10 simple responsive WordPress themes for small businesses and blogs

Need a responsive WordPress theme? Look no further… 

20 noteworthy campaigns guaranteed to inspire your own digital marketing

Ben Davis compiles some great examples of digital campaigns suggest by nominees for our Digitals awards. 

Google’s new ‘Hummingbird’ search algorithm: the experts’ view

Google surprised us with this algorithm update back in September, and this is the reaction to it. 

The top 16 social media fails of 2013

Hard to beat the Nokia cock up… 

How Nike uses Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+

David Moth looks at the sports brands social strategy across the ‘major’ social platforms. 

31 things I need to see on your ecommerce product page

A look at the essential and desirable features for your product pages. 

10 more examples of responsive design in ecommerce

David Moth with another round up of resonsive design inspiration from retailers. 

A note on lists…

The more observant reader will no doubt notice the dominance of list posts within this list of posts. 22 of the 25 in fact. And the Marketing Manifesto is effectively a list, so that’s 23. 

Some people do like to diss the list (or ‘listicles’) but the plain fact is that they work well. 

The reason we use lists is to make this content more appealing to people. It can make it easier to digest, and provide a way to quickly get up to speed on a given subject, and it makes the article that bit more shareable. 

Formatting is very important online and I still believe long form content can work well. However, huge swathes of text with giant paragraphs, little formatting and no images would be enough to make most readers bail.

Not all of our posts are lists, but the fact that the 25 most popular posts are kind of proves the value.