Blog | Blou Designs

April 9, 2026

Closing your business? What to do with your website, domain, and email

You need a wind-down plan that includes your website, domain, and email (i.e., parts of your business’ tech stack) so that you don’t remove vital business infrastructure before you’re ready.

Uncategorized

April 1, 2026

Replaced by AI? Workflows, Service Design, and What AI Doesn’t Know

We don’t share everything with AI— and probably never will. In that gap is the boundary you get to set between your service’s value proposition and what folks can reasonably do with AI (instead of you).

Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

July 30, 2025

Change Sucks (Even When It’s for the Better)

The process of change comes with chaos and complexity – sometimes more than what you started with. You get through the process by maintaining vision while tolerating the chaos and complexity. (Even when the end result isn’t perfectly defined.)

Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

May 5, 2024

Organize Your Digital Notes: The PARA Method (plus one thing Forte missed)

Are you a digital note taker? Can you easily find – and use – those notes, or are they a jumbled and ever-growing collection of things you promise you’ll organize some day? If that sounds like you, you might want to try the PARA method. If this ends up working for you, go ahead and start sorting your old notes...

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Maximize the SEO Value of Your Calls-to-Action

If you’ve used a template to design a landing page or other marketing/sales materials, you’re probably familiar with the format that has you list a catchy sentence that perfectly entices your audience, followed by a button that reads something like “Learn More”, “Download Now”, “Enroll”, or “Buy”. That button is called a Call to Action (CTA), and, when it’s generic...

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Asking & Listening: The Problem with Qualitative Data … and what to do about it

When it comes to quantitative data (i.e., number data), we’ve come up with a lot of “scientific” standards for assessing quality of the data and how confident we should feel about the conclusions we draw from that data. At its most basic level, that’s things like having a sufficiently large sample size (i.e., a minimum of 30, but more is...

Data Strategy/Strategic Alignment

June 1, 2023

SOPs Are Like a Dictionary for Your Business

What type of thing is the dictionary? And why does it matter to your SOPs?

Processes & Productivity

January 9, 2023

Client Intake Forms

One of the primary tools of the client intake process is the intake form. In this post, I talk about how to set up tools like your client intake forms to help make your client intake processes as simple and efficient as they need to be. What is a client intake form? Client intake forms go beyond the formality of collecting names...

Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

January 9, 2023

The Client Intake Process

Are you sabotaging your business by making it too easy to work with you? So much of today’s business rhetoric is about “removing barriers.” But you’re introducing barriers if your client intake processes and intake forms are not, at every step of the way, helping you make meaningful progress towards a successful outcome. In practice, these barriers look like In this post,...

Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

April 4, 2022

How to write multi-select checkbox questions and analyze the results

No one is just one thing. And that matters when you’re writing things like those client personas that we’re all supposed to have. But how do you capture that nuance in a survey? One way is to use the multi-select checkbox question, e.g., check all that apply. But how do you write a checkbox question that gives you information instead...

Data Strategy