The Sparkline — a blog for independent creatives and entrepreneurs building matterful things.

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Website Design

Website design is more important now than ever before. It can make you stand out amidst the noise and create a powerful first impression. However, most founders don’t know how to do it or where to start. In fact, since “good design” is so hard to define, design can be a huge cause of wasted money, time and energy.

Jason is the founder of a bunch of online businesses. Most of them he’s sold. All of them have been small and fun. His most recent business is Paleo Plan, which we talk a lot about in this interview because it’s such a great example of the small, focused, simple online business.

Chuck is the founder of Digital Telepathy, a user experience web design company. In this interview we talk about what it was like to build the web apps Hello Bar and Slide Deck as well as work on big name book launches like the 4-Hour Body and 4-Hour Chef with Tim Ferriss and The Lean Startup with Eric Ries.

Barron Cuadro is founder of Effortless Gent, a top men's style blog. He's also one half of Fifth&Brannan, a new men's fashion label based in San Francisco. In this interview, Barron shares how he built Effortless Gent into a popular blog and business that attracts over 50k unique visitors per month. We find out how Barron launched his first E-Book through the site, and how he and his partner Katie started Fifth&Brannan with a highly successful Kickstarter campaign.

If you haven't defined your audience you're, at best, leaving money on the table and, at worst, too clueless/blind/self-centered to create and land something valuable to others. In this course Chase shares why it's so important to define and understand your audience as well as how to do the digging, thinking and insighting (sp?) so you're able to create, serve and sell to your audience.

There are lots of ways to accept payments online, and it can be confusing trying to choose the best way for your situation. In this special comparison series, you'll learn about several popular payment processing services and how to choose the best for your business.

Google Analytics is a free and easy to use traffic analyzing tool. In this course you'll learn exactly how to use it, what you should be tracking, and how to automate the whole process.