So who is actually going to do the work?

Posted in Site content on October 26, 2010 by Paul Boag

When faced by a problem with their site most website owners turn to a web designer for the solution. However, in many cases they should be looking closer to home.

After 16 years in web design you would think I have the solutions to most website problems. However, I cannot solve the biggest reason most websites fail.

Sure I can make a website more usable, accessible or visually appealing. With the help of Relly I can also establish a good policy for the production of content. By working with Dave, Craig and their team I can ensure the site can be easily updated and integrates tightly with other business processes.

However, the one thing I cannot do is ensure the website is adequately resourced and updated regularly. That falls to you the website owner.

Cartoon showing a web designer frustrated by lack of content

Next time you redesign your website don’t think it is enough just to employ a web design agency. You also need to consider your own responsibilities.

A relaunch requires new content

Ask any web designer and they will tell you that the single biggest point of weakness in any redesign project is late delivery of content. As a website owner it is easy to forget that although your web designer can create you a new website they cannot populate it with content.

Rewriting all of the content on your existing site is a major undertaking and without adequate resources it will simply not happen. What happens instead is that content is copied and pasted from your website, printed material or any other ad hoc source that can be found. This not only leads to a horrible Frankenstein mix of content, it also makes relaunching the website pointless.

Frankenstein monster website

Without new content essentially all you are doing is re-skinning the old site. This does nothing to reposition your organisation or provide any kind of tangible return on investment. Design in isolation is worthless. It needs to be accompanied by a review of the sites content.

Ask yourself who is going to be involved in writing the new content for your website? It is a big job and you’re going to probably need several people. Who are those people going to be and do they have time to do the job? Questions like this need answering before you undertake any significant rebuild of your website.

But these questions do not end once you have relaunched website. You also need to consider your ongoing content production requirements.

Ongoing editorial resource

Unless you are happy for your website to stagnate it is going to need somebody constantly updating the content. Do you have a clear idea of who is going to do this job?

Many organisations think that a content management system is the answer. However that is not the case. A content management system is not going to write the content for you! Although it does allow for the work load of ongoing content production to be spread across the organisation that does not mean people will embrace that additional work.

I think it is also important to be realistic about just how much people can take on. I often hear website owners say “so and so can be responsible for that section of the site” without considering whether they really have the time or the inclination to do the job. Do not take people’s participation for granted but instead ensure you have their buy in before listing them as a content provider.

Employee being overwhelmed by the boss

Unfortunately in many situations all a content management system will do is ensure that nobody feels fully responsible for the content production. Instead content production is tagged on to existing roles and responsibilities. This means it is often the bottom of people’s priority list, well below their “proper job”.

If you want people to take content updating seriously you need to ensure that it is written into their job description and expectations are set about their responsibility. It needs to be seen as just as important as other aspects of their role.

Editorial oversight

Another solution to this problem of who is responsible for the site’s content, is to appoint a website editor. Because this individual would be ultimately responsible for the content on the website they will take responsibility for chasing content providers and ensuring that they regularly update the site.

Another benefit of a website editor is that they can bring a single voice to the website. One of the problems of having multiple content providers is that it can lead to contradictory information and radically different writing styles. This can give any website a slightly schizophrenic feel. However having an editor who can issue style guidelines and check peoples work will help prevent this from happening.

The web team worries about the different writing styles of contributors

Of course the question is: “who is going to do this job?” This is a significant role and not something that can be easily tagged onto somebody’s job. It either needs to be a full-time position or taken on by a passionate individual who is given adequate time to work on the site. What is more this time should be ring fenced to ensure the website does not stagnate.

Can you honestly say you know who this person should be? If you do not then I would warn against biting off more than you can chew with a website that requires constant updating. Instead you are better creating a small, self-contained website that does the minimum required rather than having something larger than is obviously neglected.

What does your site say about your organisation's personality?

Posted in Marketing on October 11, 2010 by Paul Boag

Are users seeing you in the right light? Are they seeing the real you or a phoney persona? In this post I show you how to let your users look behind the corporate facade.

For many users your website is the only glimpse they get of who exactly you are. Most do not meet you face-to-face or even chat with you over the phone. Your website is all they will ever see. If you find that prospect scary then you are not alone. Many organisations not only view their website as unrepresentative of their services but also their personality.

In this post I endeavour to provide some practical advice on how to honestly project your personality online. However to do that you need to have a clear perception of who you are.

Understanding your organisations personality

It’s amazing how few employees have a clear grasp of what their company does, let alone the personality that best represents them. One of the first questions we ask our clients is to summarise what their organisation does in one or two sentences. Many people simply cannot do that.

The second question we ask is “if your company was a person, who would that person be?” Think about it for a minute. Which famous person best represents your company? It’s a hard question to answer. Yet I believe that if your website is to accurately reflect who you are then you need to be able to answer it.

Don’t pretend to be somebody you are not

However the problem does not end with simply identifying who you are. It is also a matter of being confident enough to honestly project that personality. I often encounter organisations who dislike their corporate culture and would prefer to be somebody else. There is nothing wrong with being aspirational in the way you wish to project yourself. However it is important to recognise that if you intend to be aspirational online this also needs to be represented off-line as well. This requires nothing short of a cultural shift.

Overcoming your corporate inferiority complex

In most cases it is better to just “be yourself”. Many organisations suffer from a collective inferiority complex. Instead they need to embrace who they are and be willing to project that online with confidence. I think this lack of confidence is borne from a fear of alienating users. They believe that some of their corporate characteristics may be unpalatable to certain audiences. They might actually be right.

An employee ashamed to work at Microsoft

dragon_fang, Shutterstock

However in my opinion it is better to accept who you are than be something you’re not. You may alienate some users, but your honesty and openness will attract many others. The web is a big place and there are plenty of people out there who see the world in the same way as your organisation and will be drawn to you if only you stand up for what you believe.

That brings me nicely on to the need for transparency and openess.

Be transparent and open

As well is not hiding who your organisation really is, it is important to be open and transparent in the way you communicate with your customers both online and off. Too many organisations harbour the belief that they cannot or should not admit to their mistakes. There also appears to be a culture of secrecy that surrounds many organisations. Although this may work for companies such as Apple the majority of us do not work for Apple and so need to consider a more open attitude.

Stop worrying about the competition

I think much of this closed off mentality comes from a fear of the competition. Organisations believe that to admit their mistakes shows weakness. Although there is an element of truth in this, the benefits outweigh the weaknesses.

Take for example Flickr.com. In their early days they suffered from serious performance problems that angered many of their paying customers. They might have concluded that to admit the problem would have been a sign of weakness. However instead they chose to publicly acknowledge the problem and apologise for their failings. This turned a potential PR nightmare to their advantage and they won a lot of fans because of their honesty.

flickr blog post entitled: Sometimes we suck

Many organisation also worry that making their company too transparent will allow the competition to copy them. Although true, I would argue that it is better to give away some of your intellectual property than it is to work in obscurity. Take for example my own situation. I know for a fact that a large number of my competitors read this blog. No doubt they learn a lot about the way that I work and win business. However I also know that the Boagworld community wins approximately 90% of Headscape’s new business. At the end of the day it is perfectly possible that my competitors will copy some of my ideas. However ultimately they are just going to be playing catch up and I will always remain one step ahead of them.

Another important part of being open and transparent is to recognise your organisation is more than a corporate facade. Instead it is made up of many individuals who all have an influence over the corporate culture.

Recognise that your organisation is made up of people

Why is it that the marketing department within so many organisations actively discourage their employees from talking about their work online? In my opinion employees are one of the best assets a company has in projecting its personality online.

Take for example Microsoft. Among certain segments of the developer community Microsoft is perceived as evil personified. In particular many web developers despise Internet Explorer with a passion. For the longest time the team at Microsoft who worked on Internet Explorer were forced to remain silent and this just added to people’s dislike of the company. However eventually Microsoft began to open up and allow its employees to talk about their jobs and the decisions they made in the development of Microsoft products.

For those of us who have read these first-hand accounts by Microsoft employees on blogs like Channel 9, it has transformed our attitude towards the company. We may still dislike Internet Explorer but although it is easy to despise a corporate body like Microsoft, it is much harder to dislike the men and women who work on the products.

Channel 09 blog

Not only is it much harder to dislike people than corporations, we also feel more drawn to individuals rather than faceless companies. This relationship with people (rather than companies) is particularly important if you are a service based business. At Headscape we actively encourage our employees to blog, tweet and generally participate in the web design community. This is because we know that our clients hire us based on the skills and likeability of our staff. Most people are not impressed by corporate brands, but they are impressed by likeable, highly skilled individuals.

Of course I’m not suggesting that there is no place for corporate branding. After all I fully recognise that first impressions count.

First impressions count

When we meet a person for the first time we make certain judgements about their character and personality based on the way they look, what they wear and their body language. With little else to make judgements on, users take a similar approach online. They make judgements based on the visual appearance of your website and come to conclusions within a matter of seconds. It is therefore important that the design of your site reflects the personality of your organisation.

Because users make judgements about your character based on the way your site looks it is important that the designer has a good handle on your organisation’s personality. That is the reason we ask “if your organisation was a person who would it be?” This allows the designer to picture a particular person when designing the site.

However it is important to stress that it is not enough for just the design to reflect your personality. Your copy needs to reflect it to.

Don’t allow your copy to make you schizophrenic

Content management systems have solved many problems. However the way they have solved some problems has created other more subtle challenges. For example, the introduction of content management systems has meant that a website will probably have multiple content providers. This overcomes the problem of content bottlenecks. However each content provider has his or her own writing styles and this can make your organisation’s character seem schizophrenic.

Image of serious business man holding an image of himself in casual wear looking happy

Worldpics, Shutterstock

As with design it is important that your copy reflects your organisation’s personality. This means that your copy needs a single tone of voice. In an ideal world this would mean that your website had a single web editor ensuring that everything published have that consistent tone. However this is not always possible due to budgetary constraints.

If you do not have a web editor then your organisations website should at the very least have a content style guide. This document should not only ensure consistency in the use of grammar, product names and sector specific terminology. It should also provide guidance for writing with the correct tone of voice.

This kind of editorial control has existed in the print world for years. For example if you compare different newspapers you will find each has its own unique personality that differentiates itself from the competition. This personality is maintained across the publication despite the fact that each issue is written by a variety of different journalists.

The Sun website

The Guardian website

You might think this contradicts my comments earlier about giving different employees within the organisation a voice. I have no problem with employees writing in their own style for content that is specifically associated with them as an individual (e.g. a corporate blog where the author’s name is highlighted). However on more generic pages I believe that the personal style of the writer needs to be secondary to the personality of the organisation.

Conclusions

I find it concerning that so few websites seem to have a consistent tone of voice that extends through both design and copy. Without a strong personality and will within the organisation to express that personality online, websites end up looking bland and generic. This explains the prevalence of ‘corporate blue’ and unintelligible marketing copy across the web. Designers and writers who fall back on these cliches do so because they have no clear image of their organisation’s personality.

Could you easily explain to a third party what the personality of your organisation is? If not then maybe it is time to ask which celebrity best represents your organisation. Why not post your ideas in the comments below letting us know why you selected the person you did.

5 'New' Skills that Every Web Designer Needs to Know

Posted in Talks on May 18, 2010 by Paul Boag

What does it mean to be a web designer? The chances are its a lot more than you think. As the web becomes increasingly complex so do our clients demands.

The world of web design is changing at a scary rate. Where once all we needed was Photoshop and Frontpage [joke], now we have to endure list posts like this one telling us to learn more than ever. It is kind of depressing really.

Of course one option is to specialise. You can intentionally limit your expertise to one area and turn down work outside of that specialism. Although there are a lot of advantages to this approach it is not an option for most web designers.

Many of us are not able to turn away work even if we wanted. What is more our clients tend to presume we know ‘everything about the web’.

For the majority of us we have to continue being generalists. This involves expanding our knowledge into ever more diverse areas.

From my perspective there are 5 skills you would not traditionally associated with the role of web design that are becoming increasingly important. These are…

Marketing
Copywriting
Contextual awareness
Strategy
Psychology

Let us look at each in turn.

1. Marketing

Increasingly website owners are grasping that their online marketing strategy has to be about more than their website. The ‘build it and they will come’ mentality has gone and they realise that their website is the hub for a broader strategy.

businessman drawing a website schema in a whiteboard

Helder Almeida, Shutterstock

Understanding SEO

At the most basic level clients expect us to have an understanding of SEO. Unfortunately their expectations in this area are often unrealistic (“I need to be number one on the term ‘Internet’”). It is our job to educate them about the reality of SEO.

Of course to do that we need to understand the area ourselves. What is best practice within SEO? What impacts does SEO have on usability, accessibility and copy?

However, SEO is not the only consideration. Increasingly clients are recognising the power of social media.

Advising on Social Media

An increasing number of website owners are looking to engage their target audience through the use of social media. They see their target audience gravitating towards services like Youtube, Facebook and Twitter so wish to reach them there.

However as with SEO their knowledge is limited. Often when they try they make horrendous mistakes. Even big brands have suffered from this problem as is apparent from the recent Skittles and Nestle incidents.

Once again they need help and so turn to us. We need to have a clear understanding of community engagement. We need an understanding of how to deal with conflict, encourage participation and spur users into action.

2. Copywriting

Probably the most important new skill we need to learn as designers is copywriting. Let’s face it, most websites have crappy copy.

The majority of that copy is down to the client and so we tend to wash our hands of it. However, not all of it is the client’s responsibility.

Who writes those little pieces of microcopy that appear across the websites we design? You know, the error messages, section headings, instructional text and button labels. Normally it is the web designer.

The problem is that the words we use can have a massive impact on usability, comprehension and conversion. Take for example 404 pages. Other than web designers who the hell knows what a 404 page is?

404 error page from Wufoo.com

It is not just us that needs to learn to write better copy. The client does as well. The question is who will teach them? Once again the burden falls to us.

Setting aside the issue of whether a designer is the best person to teach copywriting (an issue I address later), often there is nobody else. We therefore need to understand the principles of writing for the web and indeed more general copywriting techniques. In particular I think we need to help the client establish consistency and tone in their copy. After all we have worked hard to project the right tone in our design.

3. Contextual awareness

There was a time when you could make certain assumptions about how somebody was accessing a website. The chances were they used a desktop computer and sat at a desk.

However, things have changed. Now they could be using a netbook on the sofa or a mobile phone at the bus stop. This has a profound effect on how we design websites. We need to be contextually aware. We need to understand how both environment and device alters the way people interact with a website.

Child using her phone to access the web on a train

JJ pixs, Shutterstock

The impact of environment

Do you take time to consider the environment in which users are likely to be encountering your website? Do you understand how these environmental differences could impact behaviour?

For example a mother with a new born baby may be accessing the web from a home computer. However, her environment could well be far from perfect. Her child could be crying. She may be sleep deprived. These things impact how easily she can use your website.

The impact of the device

With a growing number of devices accessing the web we need to consider a greater number of factors that influence the users interaction. Screen size, functionality and input devices are just three examples.

When a user could be using a touch screen, a keyboard or a mouse to interact with your website, it makes designing the user interface much harder.

If we are to survive in this multi-device, multi-environment age we need to better understand how these contexts alter the user’s interaction. For example, when was the last time you did user testing that happened in the users normal environment or navigate a website with just a keyboard.

Of course your clients may not want to invest in supporting multiple devices or users who access the web ‘on the road’. They maybe right when they say that it doesn’t justify the investment. On the other hand they might be missing the bigger picture. In which case it is down to you to help.

4. Strategy

So many clients do not really know why they have a website or how to measure its success. They hire you without understanding that the website should be apart of a broader strategy. Often it falls to us to guide them through the process.

Vision Success From Goal and Idea in 3d kentoh, Shutterstock

This means we need to brush up on our business strategy skills. We need to be able to help our clients:

set business objectives,
identify target audiences,
establish success criteria,
decide on calls to action

It strikes me as insane that many organisations do not already have these things defined. However, they do not.

The question is do you feel prepared to guide users through the process? Are you confident in talking about market segmentation or business analysis? If not then it is time to broaden your horizons.

5. Psychology

My final skills may well be the most important of all (yes I know I said that about copywriting). It is certainly the skill you will use more than any of the others.

In order to be effective web designers these days, we need a good understanding of psychology.

For a long time psychology has been a part of our job. Designing usable websites requires an understanding of how users think and complete tasks. However, it is no loner enough to create websites that are merely usable. Increasingly we are looking to create sites that make users passionate and engaged. That takes a deeper understanding of what makes people tick.

Selective focus on the word psychology. Mark Poprocki, Shutterstock

A good grasp of human psychology goes further than just design and usability. If you understand how people think it can also help with building and engaging communities. It allows you to write better copy, promote your services and win more pitches.

Our role almost exclusively involves understand and engaging with people. Whether users, clients or colleagues, if we understand how they think we can motivate them into taking action. We can convince and persuade, nudging them in the direction we wish to go.

To survive in the modern world of web design we need to really understand the human condition so we can use it to our advantage.

How do I learn all this stuff?

By this point you are probably feeling somewhat overwhelmed. How the hell do you get your head around all of this new stuff on top of everything else.

It’s a fair question and I have no easy answer. However, I would suggest one thing: Do you really need to read yet another CSS article or watch another Photoshop tutorial? Do you need to attend a conference about the latest jQuery techniques or would your time be better spent broadening your horizons.

I rarely read anything about HTML, CSS or Javascript anymore. I do enough to keep up-to-date but other than that my reading is not normally web design related.

I read books on business theory, follow blogs on customer service and listen to audiobooks about marketing.

The problem is that the web design community (like any community) can become very isolated by all talking to one another and regurgitating the same old stuff. If we want to meet the needs of our clients, we must start looking further afield for our education.

Is this unreasonable?

You may suggest it is unreasonable to expect one individual to learn all of this. The answer is yes it is. However, that does not change the reality that this is what our clients want and expect.

Clients are looking for a one-stop-shop. They are not looking to deal with multiple suppliers and the associated work of managing different companies. Obviously this is a generalisation and I am not arguing against specialising.

I am however saying that we all need a broad knowledge in todays marketplace.

Does that mean we need a deep knowledge of marketing or copywriting? No it does not. However, it does mean we need to know enough to point our clients in the right direction. Sometimes that might be us suggesting solutions, sometimes it might be us recommending an expert. However, without some knowledge on our part we cannot make those judgements.

So if you want to delight your clients and deliver above and beyond what they get from the competition, it is time to broaden your knowledge.

Content Clinic Giveaway

Posted in Site content on April 19, 2010 by Relly Annett-Baker

Quick! Mr. Boag has left his desk so I’ve got just enough time to do something a bit naughty.

This competition is now closed: However, you can still book a content clinic

I’ve got a 30 minute content clinic session left in my diary and I’m going to give it away for free before he gets back.

Cat hiding in grass with caption - Shhh don't tell Paul

Image Source

If you fancy 30 minutes of first aid for your site content, then send me a tweet to @RellyAB telling me what content on your site needs emergency surgery, why I should take a scalpel to it and the tag #hcc1904 for a chance to get a complimentary content health check.

I’ll pick a winner at random just before 5pm BST.

And, as always, I’m available to discuss massaging the kinks out of your about page, pummeling your content descriptions into shape or any aspect of your content’s health.
Book into the outpatient department at our content clinic page.

Relly

Why you need a content strategist

Posted in Site content on April 14, 2010 by Relly Annett-Baker

Are you investing in your content? Do you have a strategy? If not then help is at hand. You need a content strategist, but who are they and what do they do?

I have a confession to make. Sometimes people ask me, casually, what it is that I do. And up until now I have always shuffled my feet, crinkled my brow for a second and settled for

‘I’m a writer. For websites, mostly.’

‘Oh, like blogs and things?’

‘Yeah. Mostly. Yeah.’

This is a 24 carat lie. And I need to stop it.

Relly

Image Source

So, humour me. Let’s pretend we are stood having a quick coffee in the break at a conference. I’ve asked you what you do and you say that you run a business, selling through different channels but recently you’ve noticed a pick up in interest in your website. I nod and say

‘Yeah, I work on the web too.’

‘Oh really? What is it that you do?’

‘I’m a content strategist.’

‘Oh. Er, is that like a consultant?’

‘No. Well, sort of. Anyway, sit down. I’ve prepared a lecture with slides.’

(You can see why this might not work out so well in reality)

I am the ambassador for your poor, maligned content. Content has for too long been the ragged step-sister in the web fairytale. I am her fairy godmother and I’m here to ensure we all live happily ever after.

A content strategist looks after everything on your website that communicates with your audience. When we first meet, I ask a lot of questions about how your business works, what messages you want to get across and what your business’/ products’ best features are. I look at (and sometimes create) the wireframes and the proposed information architecture of your website, consider interaction instructions, and whether a message is best explained with a screencast or a series of step-by-step by pictures. It all starts with a spreadsheet and a four point plan:

Audit

I look at all your existing content across all channels, brand guidelines and any styleguides you might have.

I gather all that information into a couple of documents to guide our next steps. This means I put my eye over as much as your content as I possibly can, noting aspects of it in a spreadsheet for later reference, looking for good examples, articles that might need revision, items that are outdated, trivial or redundant, how searchable it is, what metadata there is and lots more besides.

Multiple browser windows

Shutterstock

After this I write editorial and authorship guidelines to guide the creation of future content. This means you have a singular place to refer to writing style, references to trademarked products, product description guidelines, tone of voice for articles and brand guidelines for online use.

This bit is vitally important as the outcome is an in-depth knowledge of what is on your current site, what should be on your new site and how it should sound to your readers, which every single person writing for your site can benefit from. The result will be disciplined content, that sounds consistent, on message and smart.

Plan

Now I have these documents that help me work out what the content should sound like, I can commission new articles, revise product descriptions, rewrite that redundant ‘about us’ page, remove the company mission statement that no-one reads. But to do it right, and in the right order, I work with an information architect to find what really needs to be on the site.

We start out by considering everything we could do – a company blog, a youtube video diary, a screencast for product use, regular articles addressing customer concerns, a weekly email out – and then focus on what will help with the goals of the company and of the users of the site. An important consideration is ‘What is possible?’. Is there someone responsible for this content and keeping it fresh and accurate? Are there resources for creating a video diary? Is there a budget for content (and if not, why not?!!)

Website mindmap

Shutterstock

I create a workflow to ensure there is a regular flow of new content and that it meets the standards we have set – either from within the company or commissioned from content creators, who can be briefed with the styleguide we created.

Creation

Let’s do this thing! We set in action the plan we have created. Sometimes I am responsible for creating this content, or seeking out people that can, and other times there is a dedicated content creator (or team) in the business, or someone from each product team.

That said, writing for your website shouldn’t be an extracurricular activity appended to anyone’s work description. Your content deserves better as it is the hardest working part of your website.

Let me say that again:

Your content is the hardest working part of your website.

Books and a macbook

Shutterstock

Your content sells your services, captures the interest of potential customers, guides users through your site to achieve the goal they set out to do, instructs them on how to purchase from you, collects their information, lets people know the terms and conditions for a transaction with you, describes the unique collection you have for sale, rewards them for their brand loyalty, introduces customers to the positive experience they get shopping with you.

(At this point, I hope your coffee has been left to go cold and you are nodding, agog at the revelation of what a content strategist does, and taking notes to take home from this imaginary conference we met at. Remember? You asked what I did, in the break, and I broke out into a lecture?)

Taking care of business

So. How do I know if this content is doing what it should? There are two aspects to this. In the short term, I like to do some testing. A/B testing or multivariate testing of some aspects of the copy or a new screencast helps identify if your users are adapting to the new content well. Web analytic tools will also help measure if the content is doing the job you want it to do.

Google Analytics

Right back at the beginning, when I was asking all those questions about your business and your current site, I was looking for the areas the content could improve and what about your business it could improve. Whether it is reach, penetration, upsell, customer retention or brand recognition (or any of a dozen more), we can use analytics to tell us if people are doing more with your site now than they were previously, or what might need tweaking.

And here is the long-term goal: Keep revising your content. A content strategist will rework the original audit to keep track of what had been created. Sign off on a project will involve the ceremonial handover of a spreadsheet telling you what you have, how it is performing, what is key to keeping it fresh, who is responsible for it within your content creation team and when it needs refreshing.

Content that gets written and then left to rot is no more of interest to your customers (and the health of your business) than the August 1997 copy Good Housekeeping in your doctor’s surgery. You only read it if there is nothing else. Unlike in the waiting room, your customers have plenty of other choices to go read on the web. Make sure the content you have keeps them reading and has them coming back, regularly, for more. Too many sites are a compost bin of rotting content that never gets reviewed, updated, polished or considered at all until someone thinks it stinks and gives it an annual forking through and turning over. That’s when content starts to seem like a big deal.

But here’s the thing: You – Yes, you! – can start this content revision process today!

Start by looking at what content you have right now and if it really matches up to what you would be telling your customers if they were sat with you, at your desk, or in your showroom, factory, wherever. The biggest difference you can make to your site is to look at every which way round your content, copy and those little interactions you make with every user. I promise you’ll find something that sparks a new idea for creating more custom.

So, go! Do it now! Open a spreadsheet program and type:

‘Title | URL | Content on page | Up to date? | Metadata | What could change?’

Start a content revolution, one page at a time.

(I’m so sorry. You just stopped for coffee in the break at this imaginary conference and I’ve gone into a full spiel about my work and it’s gone cold. Let me get you another one.)

And good news! Now if anyone asks what I do I can say ‘Here, take a look at this post on the Boagworld site.’

Even better news! You can discuss your content with Relly in her content clinic.

Design and copy pirates: Should you care?

Posted in Working in web design on April 1, 2010 by Paul Boag

Websites like Copyscape make it easier than ever to find other sites who have stolen your copy. However, should you care and how can you stop thieves.

Dylon Garton recently contacted me with the following issue:

I have been affected by the issue of plagiarism. I really struggle to write good web copy so when I manage to get some good copy into one of my web pages I am quite pleased. I am less pleased when I discover several other websites have lifted the copy word for word.

I am wondering how you guys deal with content theft. I have discovered a great site called Copyscape and this is how I have managed to find all of the sites that have ripped me off. I will be interested to hear how you guys deal with it.

There is no doubt that plagiarism is widespread within web design and across the web as a whole. Sites like Copyscape make it easy to find copy thieves. However, the problem is just as prevalent in design.

Copyscape

Our work has been ripped off a number of times and I know many other designers have experienced the same thing. Elliot Jay Stocks has been particularly vocal on the subject after suffering himself.

Let me be clear…

Ripping off somebody else’s work is wrong. Its lazy and it’s damaging. Not just damaging to the reputation of the individual who you ripped off, but damaging to the thief too. And I am not just talking about when you get caught. It is damaging because it leads to unimaginative thinking. Your own creative skills atrophy over time to the point where you can no longer create original work.

That is not to say you cannot be inspired by other people’s work. However, there is a line, and although we may pretend otherwise, we all know when we have crossed it.

The unfortunate reality

Although plagiarism in all its forms is wrong, it is not going to go away. It has existed before the web and will exist after it. The only difference is that because the web is such an open platform it is incredibly easy to copy work. However, in my opinion that is a price worth paying for an open web.

Once you accept that plagiarism cannot be defeated, it fundamentally changes you attitude towards it. There is little point in getting indignant or angry. You learn not to waste too much time or energy on people who are essentially just rude.

Does that mean that I ignore plagiarism? Not at all.

How I deal with it

99% of the plagiarism I have been confronted with has been resolved with a simple email. I write to the individual involved drawing attention to the problem and asking them to rectify the situation. I don’t make any legal threats and keep things as civil as possible. I make the presumption that the person I am writing to is unaware of the problem.

The reason I take this approach is because it doesn’t put people on the defence. They can easily write back blaming somebody else, apologise profusely and remove the offending content. However, if you start making legal threats they are forced to defend their position.

On the rare occasion when people do dig their heels in I shrug my shoulders and move on. If they want to continually follow in my wake that is fine. I will just move on to the next thing and produce something new. I am not going to waste my time on them.

The Ultimate Website Prelaunch Checklist

Posted in Mobile, Web strategy on February 8, 2010 by Andy Wickes

All of a sudden the site you have been working on for months is approved and the client wants it live. However, things can still go horribly wrong if you are not prepared.

We’ve all been there.

After months of development, meetings, conference calls, protracted arguments over typography, photography, colour ways and copy. All of a sudden the site is approved and the client wants it live.

Do you think to yourself, ‘I know every pixel on this site inside out’ and put it live?

Hopefully not. You’ll have a printed checklist which you complete before you go public.

By no means is this an exhaustive list. Neither is it presented in any particular order. Your own checklist will be very much tailored towards your own individual clients and the type of project you are delivering. Be sure to add your thoughts and suggestions to the comments at the bottom of the page.

Either way, get your team together, get out the red pen and start ticking them off.

Copy Checks

Check your spelling.

If it comes down to a web designer to highlight the smelling pistakes of a copywriter then so be it. Show the world you are no slouch and run a spell check. Better still, get your copywriter / project manager to do this. Be sure you check for widows or orphaned items in important paragraphs too.

Check your tone of voice.

Ensure this is consistent across all your pages, that your audience is being addressed the same way throughout the site. If your services include ‘Research & Development’ ensure it is expressed using ‘&’ everywhere it appears, always with capitalisation, and if you display times and dates be sure to express them the same way throughout. This is a cornerstone of well-crafted, easily scannable copy.

Check your details.

I’m quite serious about this. Phone all phone numbers you have been supplied. Do they work? If you’re building a site for The Royal Albert Hall, do they answer? And are they aware you are shortly going to launch a site, with their number on it, inviting thousands of people to call for more information? These are crucial checks to ensure that the entire marketing process, right down to (phone) calls to action are prepared for the site going live. Check email addresses you have been supplied and make sure they work and are being received by someone. Oh, and check they are not still pointing at you for testing – make sure the clients email address is specified when the site goes live.

Check through any ‘hidden’ copy on site.

Look at ALT text and ensure it is descriptive and not just ‘XXX’ – read through any text within Javascript functions, failure or alert messages, and also and remove anything potentially embarrassing or plain unnecessary.

Make sure you are not going live with any test copy on your site.

Check for instances of ‘For more information call XXXX,’ or worse still, ‘At ACME and Co we pride ourselves on [Dave, has the client approved the mission statement yet]‘ You get the picture.

SEO

Check your keywords.

Ensure you have your meta description in place, and that any keywords are suitable for the site. Do the keywords appear in your site copy where appropriate? Turn off your style sheets and read your site as a search engine will, and check your keywords are written in HTML and not all contained within images.

Check your titles.

Do you pages have relevant and descriptive title tags, and are your page names suitably descriptive.

Check your URL structure

Google has taken considerable steps within Webmaster Tools to reward site owners for declaring, and being consistent about canonical URL’s. That is to declare to Google which URL structure you will maintain on your site, to avoid the duplicate content penalty. So if you choose example.com/products over www.example.com/products, then check to ensure the links within your pages follow this convention.

Check you have a sitemap.

Generate an XML sitemap and submit it to Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Gsite Crawler is a great tool to help create these automatically for you.

Set up analytics on your site and schedule any weekly reports that might need sending to your clients, and also set up any statistical alerts you might need to notify you of any spikes in traffic that might signify malicious activity. Stats packages worth your attention are listed in the URL’s below.

haveamint.com

Standards and Validation

Clearly this is not something that should be left until the last few days prior to launch. But you should always make one final sweep through your content to check for validation issues. You should be checking your HTML, CSS, Accessibility and your Javascript. Quite often you can encounter validation issues late in the project with the addition of javascripts from a third party if a client has reporting software they wish to use, or if you are carrying advertising or inviting referrals from an affiliate network. As these are so often just thrown in to the code at the last minute it is vital to check that they don’t interfere with functions that were (up until then) working just fine. The Developer Toolbar for Firefox is a great time saver when it comes to validating your HTML and CSS, with the WAVE toolbar being similarly indispensable for checking against WCAG guidelines. That said there is no substitute for a good working knowledge of the WCAG guidelines as so much of them cannot be checked against by a plug-in, and requires common sense and a keen eye to avoid problems.

Web Developers Toolbar

Site Functions

Does everything work?

Again, this should have been tested long before now, but don’t go live without checking it. Often you will have moved a site from a development server to a production server in the run up to putting it live, and that may have upset your file structure. Maybe you have an API which relies on the address of a development server to work and will need altering if it is to work at the live address.

Check your search facility

Check your search facility if you have one and make sure that is pulling in results. Also check for dead links across the site with something like Xenu’s Link Checker.

Screenshot of Xenu

Check all browser variations

Check all browser variations that you promised to support, all screen resolutions and ensure that your site degrades gracefully without the support of Javascript and Flash. Your site should be easily interpreted by a screen reader with CSS switched off, and this can be checked by downloading a text only browser such as Lynx for the PC.

Think about common web conventions and whether your site breaks them. Are all your links consistently styled? If all links are underlined, check that no text is underlined for presentational reasons that people might mistake for a link.

Don’t forget to set up a print style for your site.

It is stunning quite how often this ignored. Insert this line into your <head> tags and create your print style sheet.

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="print.css" media="print" />

Security

Ensure you have your site files backed up, but assuming that this is something you do as a matter of course, ensure that you are backing up any databases on the website that might contain important customer data. There are services and applications who can automate this for you such as Site-Vault and Iron Mountain, providing you with the peace of mind that only a reliable backup can bring.

Screenshot of Site Vault website

Check your form fields against SQL injections, and test any anti-spam functions you have in place to prevent spam bots.

Protect any sensitive pages

Protect any sensitive pages or folders from being indexed on search engines by putting in place robots.txt files and by excluding them from within Webmaster Tools / Bing / Yahoo Site Explorer and also consider whether you need to use an htaccess file to disable folder view within directories.

Performance

Increasingly this is becoming more an issue. With rumours of Google rewarding faster sites with better rankings it is crucial that your pages load as swiftly as possible.

Safari 4 has a great tool within its developer menu which checks the speed of your pages downloading, and highlights which elements take the longest and therefore might need attention.

Check your image optimisation with a tool like Smushit.

Smush.it website

Check you have caching enabled if appropriate.

If possible consider the use of image sprites to reduce http requests to your site. SpriteMe.org offers simple online solution that might get you started.

Minify your Javascript and CSS files using a tool such as YUI or YSlow from Yahoo to ensure your code is delivered as swiftly as possible. Firefox add-ons such as Dust Me Selectors can help to remove unused selectors from style sheets, helping to keep file sizes down.

Legal

Those lawyers get everywhere. Links to legal policies are so often added to a footer element on a website and then given no further thought until moments before go live.

Copyright

Check that this is set to automatically refresh from the time stamp on the server, and that the copyright owner stated is correct. It won’t always be the client or brand who should be credited.

Terms and Conditions

If your site has a promotional element or takes payment then you will need to make available t’s and c’s. Always consult either the Institute of Sales Promotion or a lawyer for the best advice on these, or if they are supplied to you then make sure they have been checked.

Privacy Policies

If you use cookies, capture data, or distribute data, then you need one. The best advice is always to be honest, and to state clearly what you collect data for, how it is stored, and to whom might it be passed. So if you this might be you then be sure you have a clear statement explaining all of this, or least provide details of how you can be contacted for further information.

Company Registered Information

If you are a registered company then you must display on your website the registered company name, number, and address. Simple, but so often forgotten about. For more information visit either Companies House or Business Link online for more information.

Companies House website

Add icons and error pages

Add your favicon.

And while you’re at it, do you need one for mobile devices such as iPhones? Add this into the <head>

<link rel="icon" type="image/x-icon" href="/favicon.ico" />

And this for an iPhone

<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/favicon.png" />

Create 404 pages.

Crucial for so many reasons. If the project is a re-design then search engines will have cached links to pages that will no longer exist. Use 404 pages to present users with links to where that information is now located. Webmaster Tools provides an easy way to produce 404 pages if you aren’t an experienced developer, but ignore these at your peril.

Example error page

199. Time to generalise

Posted in Classic shows on February 5, 2010 by Paul Boag

This week on Boagworld: The changing role of web designers, Colin Firth on content and Becky Jones talks about the changes at Google.

Podcast: Download (Duration: 49:00 — 33.7MB)

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Housekeeping

Next week is our 200th show! Hard to believe isn’t it.

To celebrate this momentous achievement we are going to do a 12 hour live podcast marathon.

The show starts at 10AM on Friday the 12th February and finishes at 10PM that evening (times are UK based). We have too many guests to mention, but lets just say you will not be disappointed!

To listen to the live show go to boagworld.com/live/.

Obviously we will not be recording the whole show but hopefully will release edited highlights over the coming weeks.

News

SVG is back?

There are a lot of articles this week about SVG. A List apart describes SVG as…

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) consist of circles, rectangles, and paths created in XML and combined into drawings on web pages. You can apply solid colors, gradients, and a sophisticated number of filters to SVG—although not all browsers implement all filter types. You can incorporate text, as well as images, and you can copy and clone your SVG as much as you want. Mostly, we use SVG for graphics programs, charts, illustrations, or animations.

In principle SVG has always sounded like an exciting tool. However it became a casualty of the browser wars, where support was patchy at best.

It also was somewhat surpassed by Adobe Flash, that became the standard for vector based graphics.

However, browser support has significantly improved and so we are seeing more interest in the technology again. This week alone there are articles on both A List Apart and Sitepoint.

Although it is interesting to read what SVG can do, I have to confess I do not understand the continued interest in this technology. I admit I am no expert on the subject, but it strikes me be that SVG is somewhat pointless for three reasons…

It’s still not supported natively in Internet Explorer. Although there are ways of overcoming this, it is a significant barrier to adoption.
The near universal adoption of flash makes this a far more obvious choice. Also, now that Adobe have opened up the platform many of the old arguments against flash are less relevant.
All modern browsers now support page zoom and so there is less need for a technology whose primary benefit is its ability to scale.

Perhaps I am missing the point and if so please correct me in the comments. However, the only ray of hope I see for SVG is Apples stubborn refusal to add flash support to devices like the iPod Touch, iPhone and iPad.

The best products sell themselves

When I saw the title of Andy Budd’s latest post ‘The Best Products Sell Themselves‘ I was ready to disagree with him.

I thought Andy was going to claim that if you have a great product you do not have to promote it. I thought he was going to argue that in the age of social networking, word of mouth recommendation was enough.

Instead I read a passionate article about providing a delightful experience that inspired and challenged me…

To sell products in a networked world, you need to differentiate yourself by more than just brand attributes and a check-list of features. You need to create remarkable products that rise above the competition and get noticed. Products that your users will rate, recommend and tweet about. In fact, what you need to create isn’t a product at all, but an experience.

He goes on to write…

Mediocrity just doesn’t cut it anymore. Instead, we need to create products that sell themselves. Does this mean that marketing no longer has a place in the networked society? Far from it. Marketers often understand customer needs and pain points better than anybody. In fact, this can sometimes be the cause of frustration in itself. I know plenty of people (myself included) who’ve been wooed by the notion of integrated phone, TV and Internet services only to find yourself dealing with completely separate business units and billing systems. The marketers were ahead of the curve. It’s the product that was lagging behind.

The idea of delighting your users by going above and beyond expectations is something that has been very much on my mind at the moment. It is something I am keen to introduce more into the work we produce at Headscape. Andy’s article could therefore not have been more timely.

I am reading a book at the moment called Made to Stick. In this book it gives the example of a departmental store that prides itself on delighting its customers. They give two examples in the book. The first was a member of staff who ironed the shirt for a customer going to a business meeting. The second was of clerk who gift wrapped items bought from a competitors store.

This is the kind of exceptional service website owners should be incorporating into their websites, and web designers should be providing their clients.

The principle of proximity in web design

I seem to be featuring a lot of posts on the basics of design recently. I think this is for several reasons…

Everybody involved in the web has to do some elements of design.
There are a lot of people listening to the show who are just starting out.
The website owners listening need to understand design principles if they are to work with a designer.

This week’s contribution to the cause is ‘The Principles of Proximity in Web Design.’ It is essentially a post on layout. It takes principles that have existed for a long time in print and applies them to the web.

It is a solid introduction to layout and tackles issues such as:

Whitespace
Visually grouping elements
Creating visual hierarchy
Improving scanability
The use of grids
Leading the user

The article concludes by summing up the benefits of understanding these principles…

Proper visual hierarchy by way of proximity helps users delve deeper into your website without worrying about where they’ve been or where they’re going.

They’ll always feel comfortable, and they’ll get to the most important sections of your website quickly and efficiently.

A worthwhile read for anybody new to design and a useful reminder to those of us who are old hands.

Google is changing and it will affect your website

Have to noticed that Google has been changing a lot recently? Probably not. You may have noticed the fade effect on the homepage. However, there are many more subtle and yet significant changes going on.

In an article for boagworld Becky Jones outlines some of these changes and how they may affect your website.

Changes include the introduction of…

Real time results
Breadcrumbs
Personalised search (even when not logged in)
Regions
Search features in the search bar
Anchor links in search results

What is significant about the list above is that they each have an influence on your rankings.

These changes really are turning the world of SEO upside down and having an influence on how websites are built.

However, what interests me the most is the new prominence of real time results. With posts from Twitter being placed at the top of listings, this makes social media a crucial component of search engine optimisation.

If you care about your website’s ranking (which we all do) then this is a must read.

Feature: Website owners need more than web designers

Why is it many website owners are changing their web designer even when he or she has built them a great looking, usable website? What more are they looking for?

Read ‘Website owners need more than web designers’

Colin James Firth: Content is King

If ‘content is king’ then the designer is like the King’s tailor – there to make the King look fabulous without taking any of the limelight for themselves.

Read ‘Content is king’

Content is King

Posted in Site content on February 2, 2010 by Paul Boag

If ‘content is king’ then the designer is like the King’s tailor – there to make the King look fabulous without taking any of the limelight for themselves.

Just because content is king doesn’t mean, however, that the designer’s job is any less important. How seriously would people take the King if his suit was poorly made? It has to look good.

An unhealthy obsession with aesthetics

I’ve been a designer for 15 years and I started out with a very unhealthy obsession for aesthetics. It was always about how good, or trendy, or innovative a design was. Making it readable was just an irritating request from the copywriters.

Thankfully, I soon realised just how important content is and began to change the way I worked to suit. And quickly went from being obsessed with immitating every fashionable design going to really thinking about how messages should be presented. Which is pretty important, really, because the message is usually conveniently encapsulated in the copy – which should make it a lot easier to choose the right design style.

It sounds obvious now.

Are you weakening the message?

But I still see bucket loads of designs that don’t do the content any justice because they ignore it and go off and do their own thing.

They end up giving conflicting messages – weakening the overall effectiveness of the piece. I’ve seen many ill-conceived designs that probably damaged the brand that the designer should have been going out of their way to enhance.

The problem is, a lot of designers have a gaping hole in their CV that leads to this misunderstanding about the importance of content. They’re missing experience of working with copywriters.

I’ve been really lucky to have worked with loads of copywriters over the years. There’s one who I’m still in touch with today – who incidentally gave me a lift to my first interview for a design job.

He’s very talented and I learned a great deal from him. He’s very passionate about words – and grammar and punctuation – and it he had a positive influence on me very early on in my career.

These days I’m part of a small – and very active – design team supporting a very large and knowledgeable group of content people. We are a PR agency, so you’d expect a lot of writers! But the crucial thing for us is as an agency we seriously care about the quality of the content we produce for and on behalf of our clients. It can’t help but make a positive influence on our designs.

What can a copywriter teach you?

So what can a copywriter teach a designer? Actually, a lot. A good writer will have done their research for a start. So the copy they’ve written should be looked at as an integral part of the design brief.

It should tell you in black and white how you should approach the design – regardless of whether it’s online or for print.

Copywriters also tend to know how to spell and, vitally, how to use grammar properly. If you’re a designer and you doodled through English lessons at school, you should do all you can to catch up on your grammar and spelling. A miss-placed apostrophe or hyphen could change the entire meaning of your piece. At which point you’ve failed as a designer.

It also makes proof reading much easier because you’ll actually know what to look for. Trust me when I say copywriters think dimly of designers who drop errors into headlines and don’t clean them up before passing the design back for checking. Learn from copywriters and you will end up with fewer mistakes in your designs as a result.

Copy can be frustrating

Even so, after all these years, I still find it a challenge to get the best out of the copy – maybe it’s the pressure of not mucking up the message. But I’m comfortable with that: setting high standards for the design with content taking the lead just adds to the challenge. Which adds to the fun. And design should be fun and challenging.

I really hope that gives some comfort to any designers who are afraid they’ll relinquish some kind of power by embracing content.

Copywriters aren’t totally perfect though. The big thing is that they tend not to be able to visualise their copy in situ while they are writing it. Certainly not in the same way a designer can.

I’ve often been frustrated that copy isn’t fit for the purpose of the design (the writers here do a great job by the way).

The classic one we’ve all had is when there’s too much copy. But there are new challenges – the online world is creating new rules for writers all the time; keyword optimisation and meta tagging are relatively new concepts for copywriters, as is the importance of micro-copy to usability.

Designers have a responsibility to appropriately present the message, but copywriters should be learning too. And to that end, if you’re going to learn from a copywriter, the learning process should be as mutually beneficial as possible.

Don’t expect too much, though. Copywriters are just wired differently and their primary focus should still be on what they’re absolutely best at – figuring out the right message and skillfully organising the words.

So, as a designer you should take the lead. The ultimate responsibility for the message carrier – which is your design – lies with you.

What you can do to improve your content

So, as well as befriending a good copywriter, what else can you do?

Read. Read everything. Read the free newspaper in the morning, the signs and ads on the bus. Or the back of your coffee cup. Read stuff you wouldn’t otherwise read – magazines and ads that aren’t aimed at you are brilliant at widening your design and copy horizons. And if you haven’t go it, get the internet on your phone. The hour I spend travelling to work and back each day is usually spent reading blogs and news stories, and following random links on Twitter – just out of curiosity. If you don’t travel far to work, get up half an hour earlier each day and grab a coffee. Reading lots will hard-wire correct spelling and grammar into your brain and get you used to seeing words in context. You’ll develop an instinct for what works – in terms of copy and designs. And you’ll learn mega amounts of other stuff as an added bonus.

Content really is the King – and it’s what your audience are REALLY interested in. Embrace it, tailor your designs to fit, and enjoy seeing the quality of your work improve immeasurably.

194. Focus on User Tasks

Posted in Classic shows on December 4, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Gerry McGovern talks about user tasks, Colin Firth discusses content and we have a review of Powerpoint alternative – Prezi.

Podcast: Download (35.9MB)

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News

iPhone developers are stupid

Over at Quiksmode PPK has managed to get himself into some trouble with a provocative post entitled “Apple is not evil. iPhone developers are stupid.”

He had to quickly follow up with a second post in which he wrote:

I was wrong about Web apps being able to replace native apps right now. I was wrong about the iPhone developers’ mindset. They aren’t stupid.

Personally I couldn’t care less whether iPhone developers are stupid. What I am interested in is his comparison between Native iPhone Apps and Web Apps.

As you may have heard, Headscape recently had a fun few days playing with the iPhone developer kit. Like most developers we are interested in the platform. However, after reading PPK’s posts I am not sure whether we should be looking at Native Apps, but instead be focusing on the web.

At the end of the day Headscape are web developers. We know how to build using HTML, CSS and Javascript. Our developers are clever chaps but the learning curve in iPhone development is fairly steep.

Mobile Safari on the other hand, is a great browser that allows us to use some pretty advanced techniques. Combined with the APIs available to web apps, it is possible to do a hell of a lot. What is more the iPhone is going to open up even more APIs soon.

Of course, as PPK admits in his second post, there are limitations. The biggest of which is the lack of exposure in the app store. However, in many cases this is not a massive hurdle especially if the application is designed to support an existing website.

What PPK has done in these posts is challenge the perception that all iPhone apps need to be native. If you are a website owner or web designer, look at web apps before rushing into the time and expense of a native build.

Ways to tell a good story

Story telling is an extremely powerful way of communicating. Stories allow us to remember complex ideas and help us to associate and empathise with situations. A good story will draw us in and engage.

As a result stories have a lot of potential to be used in web copy. A story can encourage a user to buy or help them remember your brand. A story can convince users of the worthiness of your cause or ensure the reader does not forget your site.

However other than case studies, few web designers or website owners use stories to communicate.

Pro Blogger has recently published “14 types of stories you can tell on your blog.” However, I would actually argue most of these can be told in any circumstance from a sales pitch to a corporate website.

It’s an inspiring list that contains all kinds of approaches to story telling, which will help you better communicate with your readers. It is certainly worth checking out.

Frequently asked questions that are not so frequent (or questions)

Does your website have a frequently asked questions section? Most do. In fact the FAQ section has been around 26 years! It first started on newsgroups to avoid newbies constantly going over the same old ground.

However, according to a post entitled “FAQs. Supply questions but no answers” just because something has stood the test of time does not always mean it is still a good idea.

This post is actually a very convincing argument against the use of FAQs. The argument is two fold:

Most FAQs are not frequently asked questions at all - They are either a list of questions that the site owner wants users to ask, or it is an area to put content that does not fit well elsewhere.
If they are real FAQs then surely those questions need addressing – The author argues that if a user is repeatedly asking the same question then we should make the answer more obvious. He uses the analogy of running a corner shop. If people keep asking where they can find the butter, surely you would move it to be more visible?

Although I do not believe that the arguments presented in this post are always true, I do think the basic principles are. Too many FAQ sections are nothing to do with meeting the needs of users and even when they are, there would be more effectives ways of doing the same thing.

If you use FAQs, it is time to closely examine whether they are actually the answer.

Learning from Video Games

I have spoken before about looking beyond the web for inspiration. In fact just recently I wrote a post on poster design. However, one area I haven’t mentioned before is learning from video games.

I know this is an area where a lot of UX designers are very excited. A recent post entitled “6 Things Video Games Can Teach Us About Web Usability” shows us there is much to be learnt from video games.

The six areas the post discuss include:

Users have no patience – Video game designers struggle with users dislike of loading screens while web designer fight to ensure web pages load quickly.
It’s all about the experience – Creative interaction and engagement is more important than eye candy. Something that many web designers could do with learning.
Progressive enhancement is good – Video game consoles make use of high definition TV and surround sound systems but do not require users to have them. This is the same progressive enhancement we should be seeking in our websites.
The need to minimise the learning curve – The instruction booklet for games is becoming increasingly rare. Video game developers know that users do not want to learn, they want to play. So instead they use tutorial levels to easy users into the action.
Keep the interface simple – Nobody wants to be confused about where they are or how to get out of the location they are in. This is true whether in a computer game or on the web.
Don’t rely on graphics alone – A game with pure eye candy and no functionality will not last long. In the same way on the web, functionality and content needs to take priority over design.

Actually, I think this list could have continued on. The parallels between game design and web design runs deep. However, this is certainly an inspiring list that is worth reading.

Interview: Gerry McGovern on User Tasks

Paul: So joining me today is if I’m honest, a little bit of a web design hero to me. A guy I have mentioned many times on the podcast and referred to his work a lot… So joining me today is Gerry McGovern. Good to have you on the show Gerry.

Gerry: Thanks very much for inviting me on Paul, it’s a pleasure.

Paul It’s really exciting to have you on because, as I’ve said, I’ve mentioned your Blog posts and various other bits and pieces of your writing quite regularly on the show. I’m amazed that we haven’t gotten you sooner, but I’m glad we could make up for it now. I’m wondering would you mind starting off by maybe telling our listeners a little bit about who you are and what kind of stuff you do.

Gerry: Ok I’m Irish, I live in Ireland but I kind-off travel the world and I’ve been involved in the web since 1994, very, early on I was a kind of looking for something to you know, uh, I kind of tried all sorts of jobs and I was kind of watching out for this opportunity that uh, I could really get hold of and, uh, the first time I saw the web I thought this is gonna, this is gonna change the world. When I was a young kid I grew up in a small farm in Ireland, and we used to, I used to love to watch the westerns, because there was this enrage of kind of going out west where I lived there were no opportunities and there was very little you could get out of life and I kind of envied this sense of people going out into these new territory, I made a promise, and I said, If you ever see those wagons going out west, you get on them… and the first time I saw the web you know even though it was the very early days, there was this real sense of this is a new world and even today, you know sometimes you get bored or stressed out but I still feel were in the middle or beginning of this whole revolution, you know.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: You know, basically my background had been in writing and journalism and marketing and that area and I came to the web from a content point of view, than I suppose from a technical or a classical design point of view and very much that’s how it evolved and very much from initially the content but I realized at some stage I don’t know very much from initially the content but, I realized at some stage, I don’t know… maybe in early 2000 that it had kind of giving a website to a communicator was like giving a pop to an alcoholic.

Paul: [chucking... laughing...]

Gerry: You know… and these websites were just going massively out of control. You know, I tend to deal with a lot of big organizations like you know, the Microsoft’s of this world.

Paul: Yeah

Garry: And I saw… this pump of stuff and I realized that managing the content wasn’t the solution to really getting a successful website, so essentially what I began to really focus on was this concept of task management, that it’s not about the design, it’s not about the technology, it’s not about the content. That the web really is about the task so that’s a quick synopsis.

Paul: Yeah, I mean that’s, that’s really interesting because when I first came across you I got the impression that you were someone really focused on usability and I remember that we had a very brief conversation a while back and it surprised you that I viewed you like that because you view yourself more as someone from a marketing background so it’s interesting to see how your career has evolved I guess, and how your interests have changed over the time.

Gerry: Yeah, but you’d be right, you know, a lot of what I end up doing I suppose it’s a different form of marketing. Traditional Marketing is often seeing is getting people to do things but I think web marketing is about helping people do things. like if you’re doing good web marketing and that’s very close to usability.

Paul: Yeah, very much so. Now you talked the fact that you tend to work on you know, large websites, you said the Microsoft’s of this world and those kinds of people and that has a lot residence to me in particular because we work on large institutional websites and so I was just interested. I know that a lot of the people that listen to this show actually work for large organizations like that and I’m interested in what your perception is in terms of the biggest challenges that are faced by these larger institutions that have huge amounts of content and big spawling websites. What are the biggest mistakes they’re making?

Gerry: I think Paul, the biggest mistake is lack of management, uh… most websites aren’t really managed when you really dig behind, you know the names and titles, they don’t have clear lines of entirety they don’t have clear lines of responsibility there are people who are told that they are in charge of the website but they aren’t really.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: You Know, because if some powerful force within the organization says I want my own site on a sub-site or I want it done this way, you basically have to because, you know… the web has not a… kind of earned itself up the table of management and that is a particularly dangerous scenario to be in the larger the organization becomes, because you know… I was saying earlier the Web is… a Website is really a series of tasks and there are thousands of tasks within an organization potentially, most of them minor but I count the tiny tasks.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: But there is very few top tasks that are critically important to the functioning of the website and what I find is large things, they are kind of being nibbled to death by the tiny things.

Paul: Yeah, I know completely what you mean that makes a lot of sense, so how do you… I mean how do you deal with that problem. If you’re working within a large organization, maybe you’re the person that’s responsible for the website supposedly, but you don’t have that level of power. I mean what’s the solution.

Gerry: Paul it’s evidence, evidence, evidence.

Paul: Right.

Gerry: And one of the core realizations or the big breakthroughs I had… and I don’t know when I had it… you know, like most breakthroughs it was probably as a result discovering something else, somebody else was doing or you know an accidental process but… um… it was that everything affects everything else and people think if I add a piece of content, if I add a web page, if I you know… It’s just another page… its not… it’s going to do something positive and it’s not going to do anything negative and the breakthrough I had was showing cause and effect, that it kind of… yeah a low-level task content connected with it can every time you add a new piece of content you at least added one link to the architecture.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: You at least added one link and you added one more search result that comes true and each one of those links and each one of those search results is like another sign post that can send somebody in the wrong direction.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: if they’re trying to do something important and each piece of old content and link has got to be managed. Because if it’s not managed, it will go out of date or loop is relevance and if it stays on it will create even more damage. So I found that getting people to believe that everything you do has three impacts. It impacts the navigation, it impacts the search, and it impacts the manageability of the website, but also that small task and small content has every bit of chance to impact the efficiency of a
top task and one of the best examples out of that is working… I did… I haven’t worked so to speak directly with Microsoft Office, I’ve done a lot of work with Microsoft Websites over the years but a lot of Microsoft Office people have been at my classes and workshops and and stuff like that and they… they… uh, were kind of coming to this approach, you know they were coming from a number of different backgrounds, but you know… I think I nudged them along the way to this concept of top-task management and they’ve had a lot of success because of it, certainly the last six or twelve months and one of the examples that came from Excel was hundreds of thousands of people were coming every week or every month looking up how to add or to sum numbers uh, in Excel. Basic Task hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of people would want to know how to do the in sum function which is a very complicated mathematical function so people would search in the excel website or either search in excel itself and often times the search Add or Sum Numbers and maybe the third or fourth result or maybe the fifth or sixth would be the in sum function and very significant numbers that people would actually click on that because it looked like sum but it had nothing to do with Summing or Adding Numbers. So excel realized, and this was happening in loads of areas like people wanted to print, Address Labels so they would end up some of them, thousands of them, literally tens of thousands of them clicking on the address function and this was just in one tiny area so what they did ultimately to solve this problem is they got rid of all the function pages and they put them all together under a page called Mats functions so when you searched in Excel anymore for Sum or Add or Print Address Labels you never found any address or in-sum functions but they really made that, you know, sum numbers was the top result. So what happened was people were now finding the top task and were not in anyway getting confused that a search result, a kind of looking a bit like sum numbers, that you know, they might click on and as result of that there, and other such initiatives for the first time in many, many years their customer satisfaction figures significantly started to grow because they made it easier for people to do the most important things and more difficult to do the least important things because often the least important things have a kind of neither words or connections that somehow could confuse someone into thinking that Oh I’m actually a top task when the reality is they’re not.

Paul: Hmmm… I mean it reminds very much of the book, Laws of Simplicity that talk about, you know, the need to remove and to simplify and to hide away those more minor tasks, and I mean that’s the thing that strikes me quite a lot. Organizations don’t have really have really anybody who is responsible for removing content.

Gerry: No, No, and see if you are measuring so, we’ve created a number of processes or methodologies, one connected way, identifying your top task in a defensible manner, but the other is to measure the efficiency of the top task and if you can show as, as, as, excel we’re ultimately able to show that a minor task actually impacts a top task. That this page may have two people that are satisfied with it but it has two-hundred people that are annoyed with it. So your measuring, satisfaction and dissatisfaction but your showing how because people say it’s only another page it’s only another update, why do I have to update but if you can somehow show some sort of impact that this content is having on something that is critically important to the functioning of the organization like a book of life. I think every website has a Book of Life, every website has a Book of Room It just doesn’t know it, you know… but every website has it’s… what I call, it’s super-tasks and we’ve done work with these um… agencies that are supposed to help international, or national agencies that are supposed to help grow and export and we did it in four of five different countries for four… you know… coincidently four or five national agencies, one in Scandinavia, one in the U.K., one in Ireland and one another country and the overwhelming top task was Am I eligible for funding? these companies had wanted to grow and export, and their first and foremost thing was I’m thinking of taking on a new marketing manager for the German market, can you give me any help funding?

Paul: Hmm…

Gerry: Number 1, funding and support. So there was this overwhelming super-task that came up but if you looked at these funding agencies websites the ability to find and discover the answer to the question, Am I eligible? was extraordinarily difficult, just like on many university websites today the ability to find a course to find a subject.

Paul: Yeah. [chuckling...]

Gerry: And wouldn’t you think Paul that’s an absolute no brainer.

Paul: Yeah, I know it just amazes me, you know I did a talk quite recently called, The 10 Harsh Truths about institutional websites. and talking to HE Sector and I just went on and on about the course finder and the fact that you cant find this thing and the fact as well, the other thing that really interests me as they’ve taken to calling their courses programs now, which is a term that nobody knows except internally within their organizations… it’s very bizarre.

Gerry: And Actually you just reminded me, I downloaded your… you did a bit of a report on that didn’t ya.

Paul: Yes, Yes.

Gerry: I have that in my folder to read so if you see a new thinking coming up over the next, I’d definitely cork it because it some I mean it’s extraordinary but I think in ten or fifteen years we laugh and say, it didn’t even… I mean it was so obvious how come for ten years they didn’t do it and I think it’s always internal pressures.

Paul: Yeah…

Gerry: You look on all these e-grads and schools and they don’t want too actually. I’ve heard people say… senior managers in universities say it shouldn’t be easy let them… you know… let them be hassled…

Paul: [laughing]

Gerry: Literally… It’s extraordinarily and they’ll pay the price.

Paul: Yeah

Gerry: For That, because I think at core a lot of this Paul has to do with… the web reflects a new society where customers are in control, much more in charge and as I say on the web the customer isn’t king the customer is dictator.

Paul: Hmm… Yeah

Gerry: and if you don’t meet, if you make it difficult for the customer, they’ll leave… they’ll just go somewhere else…

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: and it really doesn’t matter how many many hundreds of years your around or if they’re really really that if your Oxford if your a few of these absoulutly super brands you know that have extrodinarly pulling power but most organizations are not they’re not in the super league of brands, they’re down in the preparatory league or in the championship and if they piss off the customer they lose the customer.

Paul: Yeah, yeah completely. What I like about this whole thing you’re talking about with top tasks is that it can apply to any size site. You know it doesn’t matter what site your working on, there are top you know kind of user tasks that people are wanting to complete. What I’m quite interested in is how you go about working out and defining what those top tasks are. What’s important and what’s not? What kind of methodology do you use?

Gerry: Ok, good question. Basically something I’ve evolved over the last 7 or 8, 9 nears. It begins where you say, let’s look at everything that exists connected with this website from the point of view of words right. A nice starting point is often the H was that index, if it doesn’t you take level 1 and level 2 of the architecture so you begin to dump all this stuff into a spreadsheet right, you know we’ve got a number of columns but at a basic level it’s a single spreadsheet, right? You’d also look at search terms, you’d look at most visited pages, you’d look at help desk inquires, you’d look at competitor websites. You know we did a big project for NHS Choices and where we went there was we also went out to the Google AdWords tool because you know, where there’s a lot of public search according for these tasks you can often discover how people are searching, not just for your website but searching the web in general for this sort of stuff. So there’s a broad sweeping course, now usually this takes 6 weeks to do.

Paul: mhm

Gerry: Initially you’d start off, you’d have this massive list of stuff and there’d be loads of duplicates and you know when we did it for NHS there was, we’d have come up with phrases like you know, women, women’s health, health of women, and stuff like that and book an appointment, and woman’s health and health of woman and just appointment reminders, and all sorts of almost identical, semi-identical ETC.

Paul: Right. Yeah.

Gerry: Gradually, we’ve developed this intricate process where we iterate it down and things that you want to get rid of are organizational unit’s needs, the tool needs. So we’ve done a lot of work recently for large IT companies, big, big American IT companies and they love their tool needs. So it might be the sunshine finder, crazy needs you know?

Paul: haha

Gerry: You know what I mean, if you absolutely didn’t know, you wouldn’t have a clue what it did.

Paul: yeah.

Gerry: So what we’d say is What does the tool do? and that’s an extremely difficult process for a lot of people to actually deal with because they’re so used to saying well it’s The Bla, Bla Tube or it’s The Bla, Bla unit of the organization. So we force them to say, no, no, no what does it do? What can the customer do here? and sometimes there’s two or three discrete tasks.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: So we get rid of all sorts of organizational names, tool names, and we bring it down to actually task needs. So with the NHS Choice it was Book an Appointment Online, Basic Facts about a Disease and Condition but there was one super task that emerged and we got this about 2 ½ thousand people voted. We’ve got this technique which shouldn’t work right.

Paul: [chuckling]

Gerry: But was discovered by accident and literally what we do is we bring the list down to one-hundred or less.

Paul: mhm

Gerry: Well, found over the years and tested at all sorts of levels but found at a hundred or less, somewhere in between 70-100 and we literally give that list to people in an online environment.

Paul: Can I ask who you’re giving it to? Are you giving it to internal stakeholders or users?

Gerry: Good Question. We give it to both but we give it separately.

Paul: Ok.

Gerry: So we give it to both groups but separately right. We made sure with NHS Choices that we got the general public, you know we got an appropriate proportion of the target audience. So Nurses, Carers, People from North of England, South of England, this is NHS Choices who actually only deals with England, it doesn’t really deal with Whales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland so it was the English Population. So you need to be very, very careful that you get a representative sample of your population because otherwise this is a journey of facts not opinion right? So you need to get a minimum of about 400 people to vote but NHS Choices we got thousands, right?

So basically to get this long list, right. If you talk to any professional survey company and we’ve had some of the biggest survey corporations in the world literally try to go to senior management in big organizations to stop us. Because, they might have been scared in some degree of us getting in on their account.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: But, then what they said was this won’t work. There’s forty years of research that says this won’t work but we’ve got 70,000 people in fifteen countries and loads and loads of good, solid revenue deliverable results that shows that it does work. This big long list and I can only chose the five most important to them.

Paul: Ok.

Gerry: and then they have to vote.

Paul: Right

Gerry: They’ll choose randomly, but we don’t. We don’t even give them the list alphabetically we give the list randomly which makes it even harder.

Paul: Ok.

Gerry: But the model of how this works. Someone once said to me it’s a bit like the cocktail party model in psychology. The story of the cocktail party is you’re at a cocktail party there’s loads of loud noise and you hear your name being spoken from the other side of the room. Now, you didn’t hear anything from the other side of the room until you heard your name.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: And I think what happens is why this works, you come to a website already with your tasks.

Paul: hmm

Gerry: So, you’re scanning this list and even though you don’t know it you already have your top tasks so what happens is, what really, really matters to you jumps out from that list.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: and what doesn’t matter doesn’t jump out. Now, when we got people to vote here is the classic model of what happens. If we’ve got 100 things on the list and we’ve done this universities, business, financial. Typically what will happen is 5 tasks will get 25% of the vote.

Paul: and why is that?

Gerry: They’ll get And this happens again, and again, and again whether it’s students, old people, young people, Americans, Doctors, Engineers, people going on holiday, right? These same patterns keep coming up again, and again, and again. So five tasks will get 25% of the vote and the bottom 50 tasks will get 25% of the vote so the top 5 tasks will get as much of the vote as the bottom 50.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: In most situations.

Paul: Right.

Gerry: so that gives tremendous clarity. Now the top task might have a vote of 2 ½ thousand, right. So the number one task. So people have voted 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Paul: Right.

Gerry: The bottom task might have a vote of seven.

Paul: Right [chucking] yeah

Gerry: There’s a big so that gives you and the list then becomes a league table. The list is very powerful because now you’ve got a kind of the tasks within your organization, right. That everyone has contributed too, so you’ve made sure that everyone got their say and then they all signed off on the task list and then they got this priority list and from that you can start building the narchitecture. So what we do then is we’d start building the narchitecture and all the classification downwards from the top tasks.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: So, you’d be arc and we’d put in some rules and say you can only create new classes within the first 20 tasks.

Paul: Right.

Gerry: So that you cannot introduce a new architecture a new classification below the twentieth.

Paul: Right.

Gerry: So what it does is it creates an architecture based on the top level tasks.

Paul: Right Yeah.

Gerry: And forces the lower level tasks into that architecture. Some of them won’t fit but as I say it’s tough in the tail.

Paul: Yeah. So you’d almost remove those lower tasks.

Gerry: Sometimes you would. Now if they have to stay they would end up being at level three or level four or level five of the classification.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: They’re forced down. They are either forced out of the environment or they are definitely forced way down the architecture and the architecture becomes architected from the top-tasks point of view.

Paul: All right. That’s so interesting and I think that you know that kind of approach could even be applied on a smaller scale to you know, cheaper budget websites that maybe don’t have the kind of budget that you’ve been talking about but I think that principal of identifying those top-tasks and prioritizing them is just so important and so often doesn’t happen. I mean my impression is that so many organizations go What do we want to say? you know, What material have we already got produced let’s shove that online and they’re not approaching it at all from the kind of user prospective, the user tasks or what tasks the user is wanting to complete. So yeah, absolutely brilliant. Before we wrap this up I just want to change direction entirely on you just for a second because normally every time you post something I sit there and I find myself nodding in agreement and agreeing with everything you write. And then recently, you wrote a post that hurt me to the core Gerry. [Chuckling] Well it didn’t really. I didn’t disagree with it actually but I wanted to bring it up. You wrote a post, The best websites are ugly and it felt like I was listening to Jacob Neilson being channeled through you. Um So I thought tell us about that and what spurred that particular post.

Gerry: Yeah and isn’t it interesting that we talk about this just as IKEA has announced their change of font.

Paul: Yes!

Gerry: And I think what it is, is it’s almost to shake up the world of design and say we are much too concerned with how the website looks, right? Of course it’s important but every time when I do talk to communicator’s or designers or whatever they’re in love with their website. It’s like it’s something very sensitive and the customer doesn’t care nearly as much about it as we think they do. I was reading today, this designer was almost crying about Ikea saying, They are going to ruin everything they’ve done since the 1940s it’s going to be ruined. They’ve destroyed their brand and you got to say Get Real. Ikea’s are successful not because of a font. They’re successful because they make affordable stylish furniture, you know.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: And it kind of I use that word ugly not really meaning but kind of saying, Get Real. What makes the website successful is the craigslist’s or the YouTube’s. Have you noticed that most of them started off extremely ugly. Extremely basic but now as they mature and as they go into maturity it’s a bit like the Ford T as we get all these usability things sorted ETC. We will move into a world where we’re still probably 5-10 years away from it. The sense of the small things have become very-very important.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: But Right Now, Right Now we need to make the website work. We need to the get the customer in and out as quickly as possible. We need to make it as simple as possible and we need to be useful. And too many in the design world, they are not focused on use. They’re focused on You know you can almost see they’re not really being designed for the customers. They’re being designed for peers within the design community.

Paul: Mhm.

Gerry: You Know, to win a awards which is almost the worst thing you could do for a good website. How many great websites have ever won an award?

Paul: Yeah, no it’s a very fair comment. And you know I come from a design background and design is extremely important to me but, I fully except what you’re saying in you can’t put the cart before the horse. You need to get the usability the user experience right, and then you can add on you know the design comes afterwards. Sometimes you spend so much time tinkering with the ascetics of the site while there are major usability problems that need addressing first. You know design I believe very passionately that design has this very powerful emotional connection with people but, you know, you can connect with people on an emotional level but if they cannot use your site then that’s a waste of time. That sounds like the kind of thing you’re getting at.

Gerry: It sounds and Paul I think you know you are. We’ve got to bridge the gap or break down the barriers that say design is visual.

Paul: Yeah. Oh Yeah.

Gerry: You know design is you know, Whatcha call the guy who does the wonderful vacuumed cleaner Dyson.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: You Know, he makes beautiful products doesn’t he?

Paul: Mhm!

Gerry: And he came out there about six months ago, he says we gotta, I was really complaining about how in England manufacturing and design. You know was really championing design and how so much of it you know manufacturing shops and the great engineers and designers were disappearing in England. But he saying that this visual design is a 20th century or a mid 20th century conceit. Great designers have been hijacked almost by surface design and that you Paul, everything you do why should design be separated from usability? Why should it be?

Paul: No Completely.

Gerry: Everything you do and everything I’ve read and seen about you, you’re as concerned about usability.

Paul: Mhm.

Gerry: As the designer should be just as concerned about the use of the product as with the look of the product. Why the separation. So we’re in this phase now of the web, it’s like the early days of car manufacturing or whatever. It gotta bloody work.

Paul: [chuckling]

Gerry: Because, the early cars you almost had to have an engineer with you.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: You Know In driving, because they broke down so much. There was so many things that went wrong and we’re kind of in this early phase of explosion. The bloody thing gotta work.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: and we love Craigslist, and we love YouTube’s and Twitters because they were actually useful and they worked but I think in a way it’s bringing design. I think design was hijacked by clever physiologists.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: That said it looks beautiful pay us more.

Paul: [chucking] You Scenic, you. [chuckling]

Gerry: Well, I had a very interesting conversation with, this may be rambling on a bit. I was getting me haircut this morning. Kind of a traditional barbershop I was walking by and said, God I need to get my haircut. I was sitting out, we just sat there chatting and the barber says to me, I always talk about the weather in Ireland first, and then we were just talking about the recession because Ireland got really hit hard.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: and he says I think that the recession will probably be the best thing that ever happened to Ireland because he says You can see now that prices are really beginning to come down and people are beginning to become much more focused on value. And he says, You Know, The Irish consumer is very brand loyal. If it’s kind of not advertised on TV, they don’t want to buy it right. Aldi and Lidel have had a very hard time getting hold in Ireland but now they’re beginning to really catch, a lot more people visit them and he says IKEA have just started ETC. I think what he said was extremely important and you know what, in that world you almost say the lack of sophistication = brand loyalty. Because the Irish customer was not that sophisticated. I mean as much as I love Ireland and everything like that Ireland has a kind of modernized in the last 20-30 years in some ways we were extraordinarily modern in literature ETC.

But in our buying habits I think we were exploited by the big brands because if you advertised in Ireland you could, 20% more than what you were getting in the UK for the exact same product. That has been known for many years but yet, Irish customers continue to buy the brand because the brand was advertised and I think what has happened in Ireland with the recession and with the web is that the Irish customer and other customers have a kind of woken up and says, No you cannot charge me an extra 20% more because it’s just a brand. In the since that the brand became the advertising.

Paul: Yeah.

Gerry: The Brand needs to return to, it’s a beautiful product, it’s got great materials, it’s well engineered. The brand is more. So me and you, our job is not the surface of the website it’s the whole website.

Paul: Yeah, Yeah. I completely agree with that. And I think that’s probably a really good place for us to stop even though I could continue this interview forever. Thank you much Gerry for coming on the show that was really interesting stuff and I think it kind of gives a different perspective on things because the size of projects you work and because the type of projects you work on. I think it’s been very valuable. Thank you very much for your time.

Gerry: You’re very welcome Paul, Thank You.

Thanks goes to Nick Frandsen for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Content is King

Colin James Firth, Head of Design and Digital at Citypress PR agency shares his thoughts on the role of content.

If ‘content is king’ then the designer is like the King’s tailor – there to make the King look fabulous without taking any of the limelight for themself.

That doesn’t mean, however, that the designer’s job is any less important. How seriously would people take the King if his suit was poorly made? It has to look good.

I’ve been a designer for 15 years and I started out with a very unhealthy obsession for aesthetics. It was always about how good, or trendy, or innovative a design was. Making it readable was just an irritating request from the copywriters.

Thankfully, I soon realised just how important content is and began to change the way I worked to suit. And quickly went from being obsessed with immitating every fashionable design going to really thinking about how messages should be presented. Which is pretty important, really, because the message is usually conveniently encapsulated in the copy – which should make it a lot easier to choose the right design style.

It sounds obvious now.

But I still see bucket loads of designs that don’t do the content any justice because they ignore it and go off and do their own thing.

They end up giving conflicting messages – weakening the overall effectiveness of the piece. I’ve seen many ill-conceived designs that probably damaged the brand that the designer should have been going out of their way to enhance.

The problem is, a lot of designers have a gaping hole in their CV that leads to this misunderstanding about the importance of content. They’re missing experience of working with copywriters.

I’ve been really lucky to have worked with loads of copywriters over the years. There’s one who I’m still in touch today – who incidentally gave me a lift to my first interview for a design job.

He’s very talented and I learned a great deal from him. He’s very passionate about words – and grammar and punctuation – and it he had a positive influence on me very early on in my career.

These days I’m part of a small – and very active – design team supporting a very large and knowledgeable group of content people. We are a PR agency, so you’d expect a lot of writers! But the crucial thing for us is as an agency we seriously care about the quality of the content we produce for and on behalf of our clients. It can’t help but make a positive influence on our designs.

So what can a copywriter teach a designer? Actually, a lot. A good writer will have done their research for a start. So the copy they’ve written should be looked at as an integral part of the design brief.

It should tell you in black and white how you should approach the design – regardless of whether it’s online or for print.

Copywriters also tend to know how to spell and, vitally, how to use grammer properly. If you’re a designer and you doodled through English lessons at school, you should do all you can to catch up on your grammar and spelling. A miss-placed apostrope or hyphen could change the entire meaning of your piece. At which point you’ve failed as a designer.

It also makes proof reading much easier because you’ll actually know what to look for. Trust me when I say copywriters think dimly of designers who drop errors into headlines and don’t clean them up before passing the design back for checking. Learn from copywriters and you will end up with fewer mistakes in your designs as a result.

Even so, after all these years, I still find it a challenge to get the best out of the copy – maybe it’s the pressure of not mucking up the message. But I’m comfortable with that: setting high standards for the design with content taking the lead just adds to the challenge. Which adds to the fun. And design should be fun and challenging.

I really hope that gives some comfort to any designers who are afraid they’ll relinquish some kind of power by embracing content.

Copywriters aren’t totally perfect though. The big thing is that they tend not to be able to visualise their copy in situ while they are writing it. Certainly not in the same way a designer can.

I’ve often been frustrated that copy isn’t fit for the purpose of the design (the writers here do a great job by the way).

The classic one we’ve all had is when there’s too much copy. But there are new challenges – the online world is creating new rules for writers all the time; keyword optimisation and meta tagging are relatively new concepts for copywriters, as is the importance of micro-copy to usability.

Designers have a responsibility to appropriately present the message, but copywriters should be learning too. And to that end, if you’re going to learn from a copywriter, the learning process should be as mutually beneficial as possible.

Don’t expect too much, though. Copywriters are just wired differently and their primary focus should still be on what they’re absolutely best at – figuring out the right message and skillfully organising the words.

So, as a designer you should take the lead. The ultimate responsibility for the message carrier – which is your design – lies with you.

So, as well as befriending a good copywriter, what else can you do?

Read. Read everything. Read the free newspaper in the morning, the signs and ads on the bus. Or the back of your coffee cup. Read stuff you wouldn’t otherwise read – magazines and ads that aren’t aimed at you are brilliant at widening your design and copy horizons. And if you haven’t go it, get the internet on your phone. The hour I spend travelling to work and back each day is usually spent reading blogs and news stories, and following random links on Twitter – just out of curiosity. If you don’t travel far to work, get up half an hour earlier each day and grab a coffee. Reading lots will hard-wire correct spelling and grammar into your brain and get you used to seeing words in context. You’ll develop an instinct for what works – in terms of copy and designs. And you’ll learn mega amounts of other stuff as an added bonus.

Content really is the King – and it’s what your audience are REALLY interested in. Embrace it, tailor your designs to fit, and enjoy seeing the quality of your work improve immeasurably.

Review of Prezi

Aaron Rester reviews Prezi:

Hello Paul and Marcus and the rest of Boagworld. My name is Aaron Rester and I’m a Manager of Electronic Communications
at the University of Chicago [?] School and a freelance designer and web professional. You can find me online at
aaronrester.net and today I’d like to share with you a review of a web app called
Prezi.com bills itself as a tool to “create astonishing presentations live and on the web.”
I had a chance to use Prezi recently for a presentation and I have to say I could not be more impressed with the product.

Like PowerPoint, Prezi is intended to help you communicate the key points of your presentation through visual reinforcement.
Unlike PowerPoint though, Prezi has jettisoned the boring, linear, bullet-point structure we’ve come to expect from such programs
and replaces it with a user experience in which the viewer feels as though they’re flying up above a giant map of your presentation
and then zooming down into the points that you’re trying to make. You can even change the structure of the presentation on the fly
in order to react to your audience’s questions. It really has to be seen to be believed.

Prezi’s user interface for creating presentations is equally as innovative as the interface for displaying them. Instead of a
standard toolbar, the tool menu items are presented as bubbles attached to a larger bubble that rotates when clicked upon. When
you place an object onto your map, a set of concentric circles is overlayed and each circle does something different: One allows
you to drag the object through 2-D space, one allows to resize and one allows you to rotate. It is, for me at least, a brand new
way of thinking about how to interact with content in a web app.

I do have a few quibbles with the product of course. While you can change the basic look of your presentation, you can’t choose
custom colors or fonts, or change the shape of your frames. A great deal of precision is also needed to select multiple objects in
editing mode, which sometimes means performing the same action 3 or 4 times before you get it right. Also, while you can embed many
different types of media from still images to video, there’s no way to embed links to a live website – which would make for a much more
dynamic presentation than simple screenshots of a website.

Prezi should prove useful to designers in several ways. Of course if you give presentations or make client pitches, the benefits of
Prezi’s ease of production and its added ‘Wow’ factor will hook you right away. But the unique interface should also prove inspirational
to designers as it illustrates the power of rethinking design elements that we tend to take for granted, such as navigational bars.

Finally, it should be useful to information architects as a mind-mapping application. I’ve tried several such applications over the years
and Prezi beats them all for ease of use and actually getting your ideas down on screen and illustrating the relationship between them.

Like most web apps there’s a three-tier pricing scheme and the Free version includes the Prezi logo on all of your presentations, while
the next level removes that and provides more storage. And the most expensive level allows you to edit your presentations offline. All
versions inlude the ability to play presentations offline. The Free version is definitely worth a trial run to see if it meets your needs.

So that’s it. The website is Prezi.com and I hope this review proved useful. Keep up the great work Paul
and Marcus and I’ll see you all on Boagworld.

Thanks to Simon Hamp for this transcription

10 problems your content management system will not solve and how to overcome them

Posted in Development on October 30, 2009 by Paul Boag

Content management systems are often perceived as a silver bullet that will solve all your content problems. In reality having a CMS is not enough. You must also address broader issues associated with the content of your website.

So many website owners hate their content management system. This is often because it has failed to live up to their unrealistic expectations.

Many organisations purchased their CMS hoping to solve a wide range of issues surrounding content production and delivery. In reality, a CMS is only capable of overcoming relatively few. In fact often a content management system will solve one set of problems only to create more. It is these new problems that I wish to address here.

What follows is a list of 10 issues that are either directly created by content management systems or that a CMS will fail to solve.

1. A lack of editorial control

One of the primary reasons organisations purchase a content management system is to de-centralise control of content and therefore remove the bottlenecks that surround posting content to the web.

The consequence of this approach is a lack of central control to ensure the quality and accuracy of copy produced. This can lead to contradictions and varying styles of writing across the site.

Although many content management systems provide the tools for central editorial control, they are not always used and require somebody with the editorial experience.

The Solution: Get an editor

Unfortunately this is one problem that technology cannot solve. What is required is a content editor. Somebody who checks what is being produced and ensures it communicates a consistent message in a consistent tone.

Ideally this should be somebody who has experience in writing and editing online copy. However, the most important thing is that this person feels confident in editing copy, and has the authority to remove inappropriate material.

This person will also require a vision for the site and in particular what personality it should be projecting.

2. A lack of personality

Many websites lack real personality. They either ooze marketing BS or come across as singularly bland. This is largely due to the fact that they have been written by people more interested in communicating facts or selling stuff, than wishing to engage with users.

Websites with great copy that is full of personality, stand out from the crowd. They do more than convey information. They actively seek to make a connection with users in much the same way people do face to face.

Unfortunately the distributed nature of content production through the use of a CMS undermines that.

The solution: Decide on your sites personality

The first step towards overcoming this problem is to define who you are. If your website was a person what type of person would it be? What words best describe your sites character? Is it playful, serious, enthusiastic, or friendly?

Next put together a content style guide. This will include examples of writing styles that should be used on your website. It will also include guidelines in terms of tone and wording. This document should then be distributed to your content providers.

Producing an effective content style guide is not an easy task. You might wish to consider employing a freelance web copy writer if you do not have somebody in house. However once it has been produced, it should provide everything your content providers need to add some
personality into your copy.

Of course that does still require your content providers to be committed to the cause.

3. Uncommitted contributors

One of the great selling points of having a content management system is that they allow anybody to post to your website. Unfortunately, just because your staff can edit the site, does not mean they will.

It is not unusual to find that content management systems go unused except for by a few individuals. The belief that content management can be easily decentralised is false. There are two primary reasons for this.

Firstly, some people do not see it as their responsibility to provide web content. They see the website as a marketing or sales tool and so should be managed by marketeers.

The second reason is that most people do not have the time. Writing web content is often seen as a low priority and constantly gets pushed out by “real work.”

The solution: Recognise the importance of the web

The solution to this problem has to come from senior management.

The website needs to be seen as a critical business tool and job descriptions must reflect this by making site maintenance a key component of people’s job. This should include website duties being apart of employee assessment.

There is however another reason people do not using the CMS – they don’t know how to use it.

4. Poorly trained authors

When an organisation rolls out a new content management system they almost always offer some form of training. However, in many cases it is not enough.

Normally training consists of an intimidating manual and one off training session. For the few people who are updating the website regularly this is probably enough. However for more infrequent content providers, this is inadequate.

The trouble with one off initial training sessions is that by the time the content provider comes to update the website, they have forgotten what they learnt. Admittedly the information they need may well be contained in the manual, but who reads those?

This can easily lead to only a few people capable of making updates to the site, thereby undermining the very reason for having a CMS in the first place.

The solution: Provide video training material

The combination of occasional users and new employees, means that most organisations need a long term strategy for training people in the use of their content management systems.

We have found that a series of short video tutorials covering key functionality works much better than training sessions or intimidating manuals.

We still run training sessions for frequent users. However, the video tutorials allow users to work through the material at their own pace. Also, unlike a training course they can learn only the parts of the system they actually need.

However, training in the technology is only half the battle. Content contributors also need to know how to write compelling copy.

5. Bad copywriting

The harsh truth is that not everybody can write good web copy. Even somebody who writes brilliantly in print, does not necessarily write well for the web.

There is an art and science to writing good web copy that many people are unaware of. Copy written by content providers is often verbose, un-engaging and hard to scan.

The solution: Provide a structure for content production

The solution is three fold:

First, the introduction of an editor means that content providers do not have to worry about writing perfect copy. It should be the job of the editor to take the raw copy they provide and re-write it for the web.
Second, the training provided with a content management system should extend beyond the functionality and also include advice on writing good web copy.
Finally, by producing a basic template for content providers you can help them focus their writing. A content template should ask questions such as who is the audience, what is the key message for this page and what is the call to action?

However, the problem is not just limited to the quality of content but also the quantity.

6. Bloated websites

Much like this post, most websites end up far too bloated. This is a problem that content management systems only serve to exaggerate.

By removing the barriers to putting content online, you encourage people to add more. However, more is not always better.

Content providers often approach the website with entirely the wrong mentality. They look at the content they have or can easily produce, and decide to put it online because “somebody will find it useful.” They are driven by what content is available, rather than user’s need.

The problem is that the more they put online, the harder it is for users to find the content they want. It is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.

The solution: Focus on users and remove

The best solution is to prevent this from occurring in the first place. This is done by fixating on user needs. Before putting anything online ask two questions:

Is the content aimed at your primary audience?
Is the content essential for helping those users complete their objectives?

If you cannot answer yes to both questions, then seriously consider whether putting the content on your website will cause more harm than good.

Of course, you may already have a bloated website. If this is the case then you need to review each page of your site and apply the principles above. If a page fails to cater for a specific use case of your primary audience, then it maybe time for it to be removed.

The problem is that most organisations have people responsible for adding content to their websites. However, few have somebody charged with removing it. This is an important role and one your web editor should have the power and time to do.

However, user needs is not the only criteria for judging the worth of content. There are also calls to action.

7. No clear calls to action

As I have already said, most content providers are focusing on conveying information rather than meeting users needs. However, they are also neglecting the business needs too.

With the exception of marketeers and sales people, few content providers are thinking about calls to action. What is it that you want users to do next? How do you wish them to respond?

Even when content providers are thinking about calls to action, they are focusing on the big actions such as “contact us.” Until the user is ready to take those major steps they are left to wander around the website.

The solution: Always guide the user to the next action

It is important to consider the main calls to action for the entire site. Typically they consist of one or two major actions such as buying a product or completing a contact form.

However, there is also a need to think about the calls to action of each page. Avoid leaving your user with no obvious next step.

Take for example this page. Directly below this article you can take three actions:

Leave a comment
Provide feedback – That leads to videos offering a number of next steps
Read a related post

At no stage is the user left without a next action.

A big source of next actions is your information architecture. Unfortunately most navigation is not focused on users needs, let alone business objectives.

8. An organisational focused IA

An unfortunate side effect of running a content management system is that it encourages information architecture built around organisational structure rather than users needs.

If you look at most organisations CMS driven websites, their information architecture closely mirrors their internal structures. This is because it is easier to divide up responsibility for updating various parts of the site if it is structured along departmental lines.

The problem with this approach is that users do not think in terms of organisational structure. They are task focused and so often an organisational IA is entirely inappropriate. It leads to confusion and frustration among users.

The solution: Focus on user tasks

The only solution to this problem is to stop structuring sites around organisations and start focusing them on users.

Although it is easier in most content management systems to allocate permissions based on a per section basis, there is not normally a specific need to do so. It is just as feasible to give access on a per page basis making it unnecessary to organise around internal structure.

Ultimately your site should be about your users and that includes your IA. However, it does not stop there. The community you build around your site is important too.

9. No sense of community

Increasingly content management systems come with some great community tools. They have forums, comments and integrate with everything from Facebook to Twitter. However, great technology does not build great communities.

Many organisations implement these community features on their site and are disappointed when they are not used.

Worst still some organisations launch these features but moderate so heavily that users respond negatively. Eventually the functionality is removed entirely.

The solution: Build relationship not functionality

It is important to realise that online communities are about relationships and not technology. If you want to build a successful community around your website, you need to actively and regularly engage with users.

This involves having people within your organisation who are constantly talk to users, asking and answering questions, and getting to know people through open and honest relationship.

Of course, the problem here is the same as content production. This is not seen as an official role. Instead it often falls to enthusiastic individuals. If you want your community to succeed you are going to require passionate people who have the time and resources to sink into that community.

And it is a lack of resources that leads us to our final problem that content management systems cannot solve – single language content.

10. Single language content

The majority of invitations to tender Headscape receive for content management builds, request multi-lingual support.

In the end few of the sites we build actually make use of that functionality. In effect they are paying money for something they will never actually implement.

There are two many reasons for this.

The first is aspirational. Many organisations request multi-lingual support because they have dreams of expanding in the future and unfortunately those dreams do not come true. I can at least respect this viewpoint. There is nothing wrong with planning for functionality you might need at some point in the future.

However, the second reason is not so admirable. A lot of sites fail to implement their multi-lingual support because they have not fully thought through what that involves.

Implementing a CMS with multi-lingual support is easy. Creating a multi-lingual website is hard. You have to decide what content is going to be translated. You need to find a translator and then you also need to maintain that content over the long term.

The solution: Think twice before requesting multi-lingual support

There has to be a good business case for implementing a multi-lingual website. Unless you are sure that you are going to make money from a foreign market, it is probably not worth investing in language support.

If you aren’t serious about supporting other languages do not add it to your ITT, at least not as a primary requirement. There is no reason to rule out a CMS for not supporting multiple languages unless you are sure you are going to use that functionality.

Conclusions

You could interpret this post as a criticism of content management systems. That is not the case. I believe content management systems are a valuable addition to most websites. However, as I said at the beginning they are not the silver bullet may perceive them to be.

The success of your CMS is largely reliant on you being aware of its limitations and being prepared to deal with these restrictions. If you do then a CMS could be the best investment you ever make.

Introducing compelling content

Posted in Site content on October 17, 2009 by Paul Boag

Andy Kinsey shares 5 directives for writing compelling content.

As part of my role at AK Designs I am responsible for all the copy on the “home sites” as well as the copy on many client websites. In this role with clients I often face issues (and from some staff who think the same way) … On of the biggest issues that occurs on a regular basis is simply that the website owners or the company investors seem to turn around with ideas of what the copy should be, and I have always found (so far) that all they want to do is convince the end user.

Now don’t get me wrong, sometimes this fits the site and the audience you are trying to get to understand something, but most the time it isn’t.

The battle generally means I turn around and compromise, I mention AB testing of the copy to see what will produce the best results. They agree to the testing and 95% of the tests end to come back in my favour. So to help everyone get to grips with this idea I’ve created 5 directives of writing compelling copy.

5 Directives to Write Compelling Copy

Know Your Audience

Think of each page or email newsletter as being read by a single person, a person from your target audience. Give him or her a name, an age, a relationship status & maybe a background story. Now write you copy for this person alone, you are not wanting to convince her of anything but rather to feel compelled to visit again, tell a friend or even better to follow your call to action… if your audience feel preached too or spoken down too then they will switch off… where as if you can engage on a one-2-one basis then you will get some real business.

Use a present tense and Positive subject line

Imagine reading “10 websites were developed” … sounds boring and doesn’t attract your attention really, you don’t feel compelled to click and read it… now think about the line “We developed 10 New websites” notice it draws your attention it was us (we) the company and they are “new” so this implies a sense of importance, improvement and excitement. Other good words include “exciting”, “exclusive” and “introducing”.

Avoid sitting on the fence – it gets you no where

If your wanting to sell something, wanting to compel them to take an a particular action, be definitive. you are the “expert” otherwise they wouldn’t be visiting your site! So don’t use words such as “should”, “could”, “maybe” or “possibly” they have negative implications on most audiences, they make them question you and your product or site.

Be Concise

Don’t ramble on endlessly, get to your point quickly and clearly. Cut the rubbish and the jargon, no one wants to hear it or see it … it confuses the average person which is why there are so many sites claiming to be jargon busters or having jargon busters built in… save you and your customer sometime.

Connect

Connecting with your audience will never be easy, it will never be 100% successful even if you’ve got everything right on your site. What you need to think is that your customers will have something else on their mind, maybe someone is in hospital, maybe someone just knocked on the door or maybe they are hungry… a tiny little thing can distract and you will loose a sale (or however you call to action is built). So connect, make the user think positive thoughts, so even if they are distracted they will feel compelled to return.
I know these tips will help many of the website owners I know, and I know it will help your site be a success.

Image provided by The Trial

About the Author

Headshot of Andy Kinsey

Andy is director & chief designer @ AK Designs. Addicted to SEO, Designing, Twitter, His Googie (G1) and all things tech in general. AK Designs (andy kinsey designs) has worked with clients of all sizes from small local charities to larger national fiscal companies and a number of large multi-national organisations. Andy’s motto in life is simple, ”To under-promise and Over-Deliver” something continued into the AK Designs mission. The AK Designs website is also the home of Andy’s SEO articles.

10 Harsh Truths About Corporate Blogging

Posted in Marketing, Site content, Web strategy on August 10, 2009 by Paul Boag

Every company in western civilization seems to have a blog these days. But are they worth it, and why are so many terrible?

I have reached the conclusion that most organisations have a blog simply because they feel they should. Many marketing departments fail to ‘get’ blogging and have poorly visited blogs with few comments. Because their blog fails to perform they conclude that blogging is an ineffective marketing tool and either remove it entirely or leave it to languish.

However, it does not need to be this way. Corporate blogs can be a powerful communication tool that builds brand awareness and nurtures a sense of engagement. You only need to look at the vibrant community surrounding the 37Signals blog to know that corporate blogging can work.

This post asks the questions – why are most corporate blogs failing and why do the few succeed? To do this we need to face a few harsh truths.

1. A blog does not magically generate traffic

When companies first started launching corporate websites they perceived them as a marketing channel that would generate leads. They had a ‘build it and they will come’ mentality. Over time they realised that a website is more like a storefront. A few people might wander in off the street, but most of the time you need to advertise to attract trade.

Many marketing departments are making a similar mistake with corporate blogs. They perceive them as a way to generate new traffic, when that is not their primary role. Admittedly the keyword heavy nature of a blog will help your organic rankings, but that is a secondary benefit.

The real role of a blog is to generate repeat traffic which is considerably more likely to complete a call to action. A successful blog has a regular readership who is being constantly reminded of your brand and products.

Of course building up a readership takes time.

2. Blogging takes long term commitment

Building a readership is a long term commitment. It can take months for users to recognise your blog as a consistent source of useful information. Only then will they start visiting it regularly and recommending it to others.

It doesn’t just take time, it also takes commitment. That means posting regularly and to a schedule. Users are more likely to visit your blog if they know you release a post on a certain day each week.

Of course ultimately you want them to subscribe so they don’t need to continually check your site for new content.

3. Teaser feeds are a wasted opportunity

Users can subscribe in a couple of ways. They can either sign up to receive email notifications or subscribe to an RSS feed. This is a crucial step in engaging readers. That is because users are effectively giving you permission to remind them about your site and brand.

However, it is remarkable how many organisations fail to grasp this opportunity. Instead of using the chance to push content to users, they only provide a teaser of blog posts. This means users have to click through to view the whole post.

This practice is born out of a false belief that users need to see your site. They don’t. Unless your revenue is driven by site advertising, there is no need for users to click through to read your blog.

The purpose of most corporate blogs is to build and maintain brand awareness while motivating users to engage. None of that needs to happen on site. The blog post itself builds and maintains awareness, while requests for comments or calls to action motivates users to engage. Users do not need to see the rest of your site to respond to the copy of a blog post. Of course for that to be true, posts need to be engaging.

4. Your not ‘engaging’ anyone

The most successful blogs are more than a broadcast tool. They are a dialogue between the individuals within your organisation and your users. It is important to listen, as well as speak.

Unfortunately the majority of corporate blogs fail to engage. Instead they focus on telling readers how great their products and services are. Rarely do they ask for feedback or ask questions. In fact it is not unusual for companies to disable comments for fear of criticism.

Instead you should be encouraging users to contribute to your blog through comments and constructive criticism. It is a superb opportunity to get free feedback from your customers, something many organisations pay market researchers for.

Part of the problem is that most corporate blogs offer nothing more than rehashed press releases.

5. Press releases shouldn’t appear on a blog

Let’s set aside the debate over whether press releases have a role in today’s web centric world. Whether they do or don’t, you need to realise that a press release preforms a different role to that of corporate blog.

As the name implies a press releases is meant for professional journalists. It is designed to encourage journalists to write about your product or service. It is not designed for your customers.

A blog on the other hand is meant to be read by prospective and existing customers. It should be engaging, informative and helpful. When writing a blog post you should always have the end reader in mind. What will they learn? What insight will this give them into who we are? How will it help build our relationship with the reader? You should never simply copy and paste press releases or news stories.

The other problem with press releases is that they are corporate statements. A blog should have a more personal tone.

6. You sound like a faceless corporation

People don’t like interacting with organisations, corporations or machines. People like conversing with people. One of the things I have learnt about selling web design services is that once people have established that you offer a good service at a reasonable price, the next thing they care about is you. Do they like you? Do they trust you? Do they think they can work with you?

People don’t like, trust or want to work with corporations. We associated those feelings with individuals, not companies. It is therefore important that a corporate blog is about the people within your organisation, not the organisation itself. Your blog should focus on different people and the role they perform with your company. They should be able to demonstrate some of their personality as well as share their expertise.

A blog is a place to let readers see behind the marketing spin and glimpse the real people within your organisation.

7. You need to show the warts and all

If you are a marketeer this may all sound a little scary. Its hard to control ‘the message’ when you are blogging. You have multiple bloggers from across your organisation who are effectively becoming corporate spokespeople, and you are allowing users to publicly criticise you on your own blog. This is a long way from traditional marketing.

However today’s consumers are very savvy. They are distrustful of traditional marketing and can sense when they are being sold at. A softer approach is required, one that is more ‘real’ and less managed. One part of that is admitting when you make mistakes.

Dell constantly ignored criticism they received about poor customer service. They ignored the voice that the web provided their customers, until eventually a single disgruntled user stirred up a major PR nightmare with a single post entitled ‘Dell lies. Dell sucks.‘

Contrast this with the ‘warts and all’ approach adopted by photo sharing site Flickr. When faced with community criticism over the poor performance of their website they wrote a post on their blog entitled ‘Sometimes we suck.’ They acknowledged the problem and laid out a plan for correcting it. This non traditional approach to their brand image allowed Flickr to quickly defuse a situation that could have grown out of control.

Perhaps when it comes to corporate blogging, marketing is not always best equipped to handle the task.

8. Marketeers often make bad bloggers

Let me be clear. I am not saying that all marketeers should be banned from blogging. What I am saying is that traditional marketing skills are not always best suited to the medium. Because blogging should be personal, transparent and not shy away from an organisations flaws, it can seem an uncomfortable communication tool for some marketeers. Also the traditional writing style of many marketeers does not fit well with the informal style of a successful blog.

If you are a marketeer responsible for the corporate blog, look for ways to encourage others within your organisation to blog. Think of yourself as an editor rather than an author. Target people who are particularly knowledgeable or already act as spokespeople for your organisation. Encourage them to blog and act as a copy editor tweaking and refining what they write.

You may find it hard to encourage others to blog. If that is the case try interviewing them instead. You can then turn those interviews into blog posts and hopefully encourage them to respond to comments. But remember, whether you are posting an interview or an article, do not expect too much from your readers.

9. You expect too much from your readers

Most of the corporate blog posts I have read are long, text heavy and boring. They take considerable commitment to wade through. In short, they ask too much from readers.

With so many blogs online you need to make your posts stand out from the crowd. Always ensure users can get the gist of what you are saying by just scanning the post. This can be achieved using a number of techniques…

Summarise a post at the beginning and in the title. Don’t leave users guessing what the subject is.
Be controversial to grab users attention.
Use headings as a way of grabbing attention and summarising content.
Use images to break up the copy and communicate key points.

Do not feel all of your posts need to be an essay. Short posts that propose a question or draw the readers attention to another site are just as engaging. Anything that is of value to the user is worth posting.

Finally, remember that not all blog posts need to be textual. Consider buying a flipcam and recording some video interviews with people around the company. Record an audio interview or post some photographs of corporate events. Just don’t expect users to read lots of copy. The only people who do that are your competition.

10. Your competitors will read your blog – Get over it!

I am amazed at how many organisations will sensor their corporate blogs because they are worried their competition will read it and rip off their expertise and ideas. Although it is true that your competition will do exactly this, what is the alternative? One the primary opportunities a blog provides is the chance to demonstrate your expertise. People will be motivated to buy from you because they understand you ‘know your stuff.’ However, if you don’t talk about your expertise, how will they know? You might be the best in your field but if nobody knows it then what is the point?

I write about my knowledge of web design all the time. I know that many of those who read my posts are competitors and learn from what I share. However, I know a lot of prospective clients read the content too. Should I silence myself for fear of being copied or should I prove to my clients that I know what I am talking about? I think the answer is clear.

Conclusions

Many organisations are still finding their voice online and corporate blogging is one way they can achieve this. It is not surprising that they are still making mistakes. The secret to success is accepting that a blog is not a traditional marketing tool. In my opinion, it has more in common with a customer services. Once you realise that and release it from the shackles of press releases and corporate news, it will begin to generate return on investment.

174. Twitterverse

Posted in Classic shows on July 15, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: The entire boagworld community shares its thoughts on web design and Megan Fisher gives us practical advice on building a mobile website.

Podcast: Download (32.5MB)

Download this show

Launch our podcast player

Housekeeping

We have two pieces of housekeeping this week…

Charm Clients, Win Pitches

I am running a workshop on the 23rd of October that you maybe interested in attending if you are a freelancer or involved in selling web design services. The workshop will teach you how to sell yourself to prospective clients, how to generate sales opportunities and how to work effectively with your clients in long term partnership.

If you are interested in attending or want to find out more visit the ‘Charm Clients, Win Pitches’ web page.

As an added bonus, enter the code CWPB_09 at checkout you receive 15% off.

dContruct Competition

Good news if you are in the UK. Very unusually there are actually a few tickets left for this years dcontruct conference on the 4th September in Brighton.

Normally this conference sells out in minutes due to its amazing line up of speakers and subjects that will leave you feeling like a beginner!

However, we actually have even better news because we have two tickets to give away each worth £115+VAT. To win a ticket you have to complete the following sentence on Twitter…

My perfect web conference would include…

Tweet your answer by the 1st August for a chance of winning. The guys at Clearleft will then pick the two most inspirational/funny/entertaining answers and contact you by email.

News

The importance of microcopy

I have learnt a new word this week – Microcopy. Microcopy is a small piece of text that reassure users and nudges them in the right direction. It is different to the instructional text criticised by Steve Krug in “Don’t Make Me Think“. This copy does not just state the obvious. Instead it clarifies and reassures.

In his post “Writing Microcopy” Joshua Porter provides a number of examples of Microcopy in action.

When signing up for a newsletter, say “this low-volume newsletter”
When people add their emails, say “we hate spam as much as you do”
When subscribing for something free, say “you can always unsubscribe at any time”
When selling an paid-for web application, be sure to let people know if you have a free trial.
When storing customer’s information, say “You can export your information at any time”
If offering optional account creation, say “If you create an account, you’ll be able to track your package”

He also cites a case where he cut credit card processing errors to near zero by adding a single sentence – “Be sure to enter the billing address associated with your credit card.”

Almost all of the examples given in the post have one thing in common – they help alleviate the concerns of users by answering the questions they already have in their heads.

As Joshua concludes: “Don’t be deceived by the size of microcopy. It can make or break an interface.”

Content templates to the rescue

In someways it seems almost pointless to discuss Microcopy when most website owners are having problems generating any quality content at all. Its not that they are doing a bad job. It is simply that they are under resourced. They are relying on ‘experts’ within their organisation to provide copy and either these people are too busy or are terrible writers.

That said, the copy is what users really care about, and one way or another we need to ensure it is as consistent and of a high quality.

One thing that might help is a List Apart article on ‘content templates’. These are not the kind of templates found within a content management system. Rather they are templates that can be given to content providers to help them write better content.

In essence a content template is a form content providers can fill in. It will suggest what kind of content they need to provide and even advice on how to write and present that content.

In the article the author gives an example of a content template for product pages. The template asks for information such as…

Product name
What is it?
Who is it for?
What does it do?
Why does the reader need it?

It also gives examples of how the copy might be written and advice on how to lay it out (using bullets, data tables etc.).

Its a good concept and one that is easy to adopt. Although it won’t solve your content woes it will increase the quality of copy you receive from content providers.

Being original

In 2003 Cameron Moll wrote “Good Designers Copy, Great Designers Steal” in which he explored where designers draw their inspiration. It was not the first article to tackle the subject and neither was it the last. In fact only this week the Web Designers Depot released a similar post entitled “Great Designers Steal?“

What is interesting about this new post is that he defines three levels of designers…

The designer that copies – This is normally a designer who is starting out and who learns from visiting website galleries and lifting designs in their entirety, making only minor alternations.
The designer who steals – Generally more experienced, these designers find inspiration in website galleries but will not copy directly. They will be inspired by a theme or specific detail. However, these elements will be heavily customised and altered.
The designer who seeks originality – This designer actively avoids looking to other sites for inspiration. They turn instead to sources such as print, art, architecture and nature. Their desire is to create something entirely orginal on the web.

The idea of looking beyond the web is far from new but there is something inspiring about the post. His conclusions are particularly ponient…

The pursuit of originality on the web is not a lost cause. The web industry is still young, and some things have yet to be attempted.

Once you understand the basics of design, try to think outside the box, and try new and different things. Be atypical and unique. Experiment. Don’t be afraid to design from the heart. But keep this in mind:

“Things which are different in order to be different are seldom better, but that which is made to be better is almost always different.” —Dieter Rams

Theories and conventions are always being questioned, challenged and broken, and they should. If you believe a better way is possible, you will often find your way to it.

Tools for testing mobile websites

On this week’s show we have Megan Fisher talking about practical ways you can start building a mobile version of your site. It therefore seemed appropriate that we featured a post from Sitepoint entitled “Six Tools For Testing Designs On Mobile Devices” in our news section.

The six tools featured are…

Device Anywhere is a commercial operation, allowing customers to sign up and test “Any Device. Any Network. Anywhere.” There are a range of subscription plans but you can sign up for a free trial.
MobiReady is tests mobile-readiness using industry best practices & standards. After testing you receive a free report outlining how well your site performs.
Opera Mini is a live demo of the Opera Mini browser that functions like it would when installed on a handset.
W3C Mobile OK Checker performs a range of tests on a Web Page to determine its level of mobile-friendliness. The short report produced will tell you where you’re going wrong.
dotMobi Emulator emulates a real mobile phone Web browser. It’s a bit limited as you can only choose from two different phones you like as a skin.
iPhoney, as you could imagine, is specific to iPhone testing. It’s a downloadable application that is precise to the pixel, so useful for the designer working on iPhone apps.

With the number of internet enabled smartphones rocketing, this is an area of increasing importance and these tools will become incredibly useful. Check out the post for more details.

Interview: Megan Fisher on starting building a mobile website

Stanton:Alright so we’re here with Megan Fisher, Hello Megan.

Megan:Hi Guys!

Stanton:Hiya, how are you?

Megan:I’m well thanks.

Stanton:Good, we’ve just seen you onstage talking about designing for mobile.

Megan:That’s right.

Stanton:Designing effective mobile interfaces.

Ryan:Paul checks his badge as we speak, just to double check, you are Megan Fisher aren’t you?

Megan:Yes I am.

Stanton:So I really enjoyed your talk.

Megan:Thank you.

Stanton:So we’re just really asking you about it for all the Boagworld listeners

Ryan:I suppose first of all do you want to tell use who you are, where you’re from so the people who don’t know who you are have a bit of an understanding.

Megan:Sure, I’m Megan Fisher I work for SimpleBits with Dan Cederholm and we’re based in Boston, Massachusetts, small little web design shop.

Stanton:Do you want to give us the overview of what you talked about today.

Megan:Sure, so basically where I’m coming from is I’m a designer for desktop browsers first, and that’s what I’ve being doing for the passed several years, and kind of ignoring mobile web because it seems intermediating and there are so many devices out there with all different resolutions and different CSS support so, it seemed rather scary, but recently Dan’s been working on this new application he’s launching and I decided to take on the challenge of doing a mobile web site for it, so my talk was kind of covering how you get started when you’re first approaching mobile web design.

Stanton:Ok and you gave us three distinct levels of mobile support you can role in, the easy with little work and the benefits with that, and then progressively the more work you put in then the better experience.

Megan:Right, and I think that’s the key with starting with mobile web design, is that you can do it in small steps, it can be iterative, the first step can be showing your markup and that’s obviously the easier step, and then slowly adding a little style so it kind of enhances the site for mobile users and eventually it would be great if we could all design our own mobile specific sites.

Stanton:So in your kind of day to day client work, is this something that you try and roll in to the client saying we can build you this mobile interface, I can tell it’s probably one of the things that’s often gets cut from the budget if you say we can built this fantastic mobile interface for you, or we can give you just the basic level of support.

Megan:Yes, that’s funny. I haven’t had a lot of clients actually requesting mobile sites, and normally I’ll just kind of, you want to make sure your markup is well written and I’ll do a quick little mobile style sheet, sort of when you do your print style sheet that’s like a standard step, and I actually haven’t really offered to do a full on mobile interface yet, that’s kind of a big task and working on dribble is the first step, when you work on your own project you can do these things and not worry about budget and just have fun with it.

Ryan:You talked about three steps in your talk, do you want to take us though those and give us an overview of each.

Megan:Let’s see if I can remember them without the slides

Ryan:I can remind you, I’ve made notes.

Megan:No no no, so the first step is you just want to make sure your markup is always standards based and semantically correct, hopefully most of your viewers, or listeners are already doing this, the benefits of using web standards are well known, they’re faster to load and accessible for a lot of people. So the first step is writing clean and accessible markup, there’s a lot of benefits to doing this as we well know, but for mobile devices specifically they’re going to load a lot faster and if you’re not using tables for layout and you’re using correct semantics in terms of headline tags, and unordered lists and strong tags for emphasis then you’re going to have a much better shot at getting your site to render correctly on a mobile browser.

Stanton:You also talked about mobilising the layout and reordering the content based on the device, and the context in which the site will be used.

Megan: Right, so the first step you can do is making sure your sites one column, and disabling floats is an easy way to do that, and then you want to, display: none is your friend, you want to hide content that’s not going to be useful for mobile users, especially things like flash and all that sort of added stuff, and making sure the most important content comes first and it’s easy to navigate and you can get a clear picture of what the site does, disabling images is another good step because that improves load times of course.

Stanton:And finally it was staying with your brand.

Megan:Right, so a lot of people thing maybe, or maybe people assume because you’re designing for such a small screen space and you want to keep your load times fast that this means you can’t have all your cool branding stuff that would have on your regular web site for your desktop browser, but that’s necessary true you can still incorporate background images and if you use small compressed graphics that are relevant to your branding that would still work, keeping the colour scheme consistent with what you have on your normal web site and the typography you can kind of play with that, and there’s fairly good support for that.

Stanton:You got this asked in the Q&A at the end but I’m going to hijack it and ask you again for the benefit of our listeners, with the adoption of devices like the iPhone and the BlackBerry and consistent UI’s with WebKit and Safari coming into the mobile browser and being able to use jQuery and all that jazz, can you see it getting easier to develop these things and how would you go about testing for different devices.

Megan:Sure, so it’s kind of a two parter, when you’re considering things like the iPhone there’s still a lot of advantages to creating a separate mobile site for these devices, and really the biggest thing you want to think about is the resolution, in the old days of web design we had to design sites that were for 800 by 600 resolution, obviously that was something you considered in the design process, so just because the iPhone renders using WebKit and it looks like it would in Safari, it doesn’t mean you don’t want to design for that screen size, as far as testing for different devices, most of the major devices out there have a rendering engine that you can look at, there’s lots of great tools, one that I used mobify.me and they have support for something like 4,000 devices and they’ll let you test on those and also they have a script you can use that will automatically direct those browsers to your mobile site.

Ryan:How consistent are they between devices, are some devices majorly inconsistent in the way they render sites or are they quite, are we nearly there?

Megan:It’s definitely gotten better especially with things such as zooming, there’s a lot more support for different styles, it’s difficult to say because it really varies in places like Africa they’re using older devices maybe with smaller screens and obviously the iPhone is hugely popular in the States so, that’s what I use to test, it’s difficult with consistency and there’s been a lot written about it, I mentioned in the talk the article on A List Apart about the return of the mobile style sheet is what the article is called, and he kind of goes over that and the consistency and support for handheld CSS.

Stanton:Are there any books or articles that you would recommend people that are wanting to know more about this to check out?

Megan:Yea absolutely, so like I said if you go on A List Apart and just search mobile, obviously A List Apart is a great resource for designers and they have excellent articles on the mobile web as well, Cameron Moll has written a fantastic book called mobile web design and it’s available as a PDF download it’s fairly inexpensive, and that’s what I used when I first started doing my research, also if you go on Delicious and search the tag FOWD09 research you can see all the resources I used for putting my talk together.

StantonOk, well thank you very much.

Megan:No problem guys.

Thanks to Ben Everard for taking the time to transcribe this show.

Listeners section: Web design advice from Twitter

This weeks listener section is going to be a little different to normal. Instead of answering a listeners question, I decided to ask my Twitter followers to help me write a blog post. I posted the following Tweet…

The answers I received formed the basis of my latest blog post ‘Web Design Wisdom from Twitter‘.

169. Type

Posted in Classic shows on June 10, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this weeks show: Paul talks about the power of story telling and shares some tips for “getting in the zone” and Mark Boulton joins us to talk about web typography.

Podcast: Download (24.8MB)

Download this show.

Launch our podcast player

Housekeeping: Jobs and Projects

Whether you are looking for a freelancer to build your latest web project or a permanent addition to your web team, the Boagworld forum is now the place to go.

We have added a new jobs category which lists web design projects and jobs free of charge. So, whether you are looking to post a job or pick up some work you should take a few minutes to check it out. Right now there are jobs for…

A web project manager
A joomla expert
ASP.net developers
PHP developers
And much more.

News

Coding like its 1999

This week Cameron Moll has posted “Coding like it’s 1999“. The reason for this witty title is his decision to return to using HTML 4 and pixel font sizes, both of which were best practice in 1999.

The post is essentially a justification for these two decisions and he puts forward a very convincing argument for both. He credits his decision to move back to HTML 4 to Dave Shea who recently wrote a compelling argument to drop XHTML. Dave writes…

Six years ago, many of us thought XHTML would be the future of the web and we’d be living in an XML world by now. But in the intervening time it’s become fairly apparent to myself and others that XHTML2 really isn’t going anywhere, at least not in the realm that we care about…. I’m not ready to start working through the contortions needed to make my sites work with an HTML5 DOCTYPE yet, which leaves me with the most recent implemented version of the language…. [U]ntil I get a better sense that HTML5 has arrived, 4.01 will do me just fine for the next four or five years.

As for the decision to move back to pixel based typography, Cameron writes…

However, recent versions of every major browser — Safari, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and yes, Internet Explorer — now default to page zooming instead of text scaling… What does all this mean? It means px can again be considered a viable value for font-size. It means the difference between setting text with absolute units or setting text with relative units is negligible for users. For you and me, however, the the difference is substantial. The burden of calculating relative units throughout a CSS document is replaced by the convenience of absolute units — 14px is 14px anywhere in the document, independent of parent elements whose font-size may differ.

Although at Headscape we still work with XHTML, we have moved back to pixel base typography and I suspect will do the same with HTML. I do not think it will be long before most web designers follow suit.

The power of words

Problogger has published a post that demonstrates the importance of our words. It shows how the words we pick can have a real effect on how users act. Word your copy carefully and you could substantially increase conversion.

Interestingly the post does not demonstrate this through example of good website copy. Instead it looks at the language used by successful waiters. The article takes three phrases often used by waiters and explains why they are so powerful. The phrases are…

“Our chef recommends”
“Everyone else has ordered… and they love it”
“So gentlemen, is everything delicious?”

From these three phrases he raises the following points…

Invoking the power of a higher authority will influence decisions - For example using a testimonial from an influential figure.
People believe in safety in numbers - “If others like something then surely I will too”. For example highlight your most popular products or articles.
Positive wording generates a positive feeling – For example “Thanks for subscribing to my email feed! I hope you find every post as exciting as the one that made you subscribe”.

It is an excellent article and there is a lot more detail than I have covered here – make sure you check it out.

10 tips for creating a more usable web

The Web Designers Depot has published “10 Tips to Create a More Usable Web“. Its not exactly the most original post and we have seen similar posts from Smashing Magazine in the past. That said, it is still a worth while read.

The problem is that it is so easy to forget best practice when it comes to web design. There is just so much to take into account as we design a website that we can easily overlook things. Articles like this may not necessarily teach us anything new, but they do bring to the fore best practice that may have been pushed out by more recent issues such as WCAG 2 or web typography. We can never be reminded enough of the principles of usability.

This particular list includes…

Creating active navigation
Clickable labels & buttons
Linking your logo
Increasing the hit area on a link
Adding focus to form fields
Providing a useful 404 page
Using language to create a casual environment
Applying line height for readability
Utilizing white space to group elements
Being accessible

As with all good list posts, each point is accompanied by a brief explanation and some nice examples. Check it out.

Four quick tools

I conclude today with a quick round up of various tools that have been released this week. Its a bit of an eclectic mix but they are all worthy of note…

Google Page Speed – Page Speed is an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on. Webmasters and web developers can use Page Speed to evaluate the performance of their web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
EntityCode – HTML entities are HTML code that is used to display special characters such as the £ sign. However, remembering them all can be tricky. EntityCode is a useful reference that lists some of the most commonly used HTML entities in a very swish AJAX driven format.
Google Web Elements – Google Web Elements allow you to easily add your favorite Google products onto your own website. Widgets include calendar, conversations, custom search, maps, news, presentations, spreadsheets and Youtube news. All of these widgets existed previously but have now been brought together on a single site.
Adobe BrowserLab – Adobe BrowserLab is a browser compatibility service that provides designers screenshots of their pages on leading browsers. There has been a lot of excitement around this one, but I was not overly impressed. Sure the interface is nice and Adobe are a big name. However, the service only offers screengrabs (not interactive sites) and only for a limited number of browsers. In my opinion there are better services out there such as Litmus’ Alkaline.

Interview: Mark Boulton on web typography

Paul: So, the next in our series of interviews from the Future of Web Design is with Mark Boulton. Hello, Mark.

Mark: Hello there.

Paul: So… we interviewed you on boagworld, didn’t we, about… quite a while ago.

Mark: It was a while now, January?

Paul: Yeah

Mark: Something like that.

Paul: Something like that, yeah.

Marcus: What, that long ago?

Paul: Well, in internet terms, that’s forever.

Mark: That’s forty years ago.

Paul: So, at the time, you were just embarking on this odyssey of doing a redesign with Drupal, or you were part-way through it. And we were talking about this very unusual approach of ‘Hey’, you know, we normally discourage people, don’t we, from doing any kind of, don’t show your design to a group and you were showing it to thousands of people.

Mark: Yes, yes.

Paul: And you talked about how great it was going to be and there was this slight fear and trepidation in your voice at various times. How’s it gone?

Mark: It’s gone really well.

Paul: Has it?

Mark: It has. It’s gone really well. It’s been terrifying on a daily basis. Posting comments for… you know, registered users on drupal.org are about 400-500 thousand.

Paul: Right.

Mark: A fairly active, passionate community; a lost of these people have invested time, money and have businesses riding on Drupal. So, however, the vast majority are really in favour of what we’re doing.

Paul: So what, how did it work in practice? You know, were you uploading designs to a blog and just saying: ‘Hey, have your say’ or was it more structured than that?

Mark: It was more structured than that; it wasn’t initially, I mean we’ve learned some painful lessons along the way. But it was a very distributed approach, so we’d have a Twitter group, we have, sorry a Twitter account, we’d have a flickr group, YouTube groups, our own blogs – mine and Leisa Reichelt’s.

Paul: Right.

Mark: We’d have drupal.org, which is the main kind of Drupal page, but we’d also have groups.drupal.org where you can create your own little groups and we’d have a group there.

Paul: OK.

Mark: The view is that, so if we just posted things to Drupal, if we just spoke to the Drupal audience, we’d get a very slanted feedback on what we were doing.

Paul: Of course.

Mark: So, the idea was that we would touch on all sectors of the, kind of all bits of the audience. And then we’d, we were working weekly iterations on a 12-week schedule.

Paul: Right.

Mark: Which was killer.

Paul: Yeah.

Mark: We would not do that again and we would release material, whatever that would be; mostly it was HTML prototypes, fairly lo-fi, and we’d release them on a Thursday and then we’d sit on our hands

Paul: And watch.

Mark: And watch, yeah, with trepidation.

Marcus: Dealing with hundreds of thousands of comments.

Paul: How did you deal with that?

Mark: Yeah, we, we…

Marcus: Ignore them!

Mark: At first, I mean, there’d be the odd occasion where you’d get flamed and things could get personal and nasty and the&helllip; of course, the natural, human reaction would be to get in there and defend yourself and, but we, after a couple of times of trying that, which didn’t work, we didn’t, we really had to walk away from the computer and…

Paul: Yeah, I think that…s a good lesson for anybody running a community or interacting with people.

Mark: Absolutely, I mean the first lot, you know, if you post something up to a community, your first day’s worth of comments are setting the scene and then the following days from that trends will start to emerge &endash; repeated themes &endash; and that’s what we were watching for. So, we’d spend maybe four days, through till the Monday, just watching, you know, over the weekend, which was quite nice because we could do other&emdash;have a life…

Paul: Which is always good.

Mark: Yeah. And then we’d go back over the comments on the Monday and try and establish some themes that we agreed with and we put forward into the next iteration.

Paul: Right.

Mark: But it’s probably worth saying at this point that it was not a design by demo… it was not a, kind of, a democratic process.

Paul: No.

Mark: Because you just end up with mediocrity, I mean, kind of a little bit of a dissing WordPress here, but what WordPress are doing with the voting.

Paul: Right.

Mark: That’s not really our approach. Our approach was… we had a clear design vision.

Paul: Right.

Mark: And we pretty much stuck to that, but it was the way that you presented the material and gathered the feedback, that’s kind of steering that vision.

Paul: Yeah, so did you learn lessons about presenting the material and how to do that?

Mark: Yeah, we’re still doing that, we’re still on a kind of weekly basis.

Paul: Because that’s always the big thing isn’t it? You know, you can’t just take a design, show it to people and say: “What do you think?”

Mark: No, just go: “Here you go” No, which we did early on and it was a disaster.

Paul: Yeah, I can imagine.

Mark: Yeah, it was. It was like: “What do you think of this? I’ve got some ideas for the logotype.” “It’s rubbish!” You know, hundreds of comments.

Marcus: And they all start arguing with each other, no doubt?

Mark: Yeah, and it was… so, you have to put something in place to ask for specific feedback; that’s where we got to. So, it was, if you’re posting up an iteration which involved heave change to the masthead design, we’d steer it like: “What are your thoughts on the navigation? You know, do you think this works, do you think that works?” And wherever possible, we’d validate our design direction with testing and research anyway.

Paul: OK.

Mark: But, recently we’ve been starting doing videos.

Paul: Right. Which is quicker, I’m guessing.

Mark: Kind of, a little, er… yeah, it is. It’s been good.

Paul: I guess, I mean, the videos, did you, so you’re talking over the top of the videos and…

Mark: No, no. I mean, it’s literally we’d… so, I’d come up to London and I’d work with Leisa in the British Museum, or whatever, and after a morning, we’d have a Flip and I’d just video the two of us talking about stuff.

Paul: See, I think that’s really good, because it makes people think twice before criticising, because there are real people behind them.

Mark: They see you as a real person. Absolutely.

Paul: So, there’s probably a benefit to that.

Mark: I think there is, I think… a lot of people hated it. And a lot of people hate the…

Paul: Yeah, but a lot of people hate everything.

Mark: Yeah [All laugh] A lot of people hated the distributed approach because they couldn’t keep track of everything, but i’s not…

Paul: Which I can kind of understand.

Mark: It’s not really their job to keep track of it, they can if they want, they know where everything is and, sorry if it’s difficult, but that’s the way it is. So, this time around we set up a bunch of Yahoo pipes, and things like that to aggregate everything from all over the place and just pop it in a WordPress blog.

Paul: Right.

Mark: That’s the approach that we’re doing for redesigning the back-end, and that’s working pretty well, because people have a framework in which to feedback, they’re not going hunting for everything all over the place.

Paul: I’m guessing that people are even more opinionated about the back-end than the front-end?

Mark: Oh, massively! A lot of people don’t really care about the drupal.org website, I mean it’s looked terrible for years and it’s not done them any harm, so a lot of people are saying like: “Well, why bother?” But Drupal’s almost, kind of, on a tipping point, I think; there’s a lot of big commercial companies using it and it’s important, but the back-end is been developed by developers for developers.

Paul: Ooh, painful.

Mark: Yeah, so to go in there and say that the user experience is broken, which is what we have said, has been interesting.

Paul: Right.

Marcus: Because they know it backwards, I guess.

Mark: Well, they know it backwards and they’re comfortable with it. THe thing with the Drupal, as a system is that you download it and you install it and then you hit this brick wall really hard and then you have to spend six months of a pretty steep learning curve to even get a rudimentary site online. And that’s, we’re trying to flatten the curve. But a lot of developers don’t really understand the need for it.

Paul: That’s developers for you!

Mark: That’s fine. [All laugh] I’m fine with that.

Paul: So, I mean, this is quite an unusual approach that you’ve taken here and it makes a lot of sense because, you know, Open Source software, it has to be an open and collaborative process and all the rest of it. Do you, would you ever do this again and if so, would you only do it with Open Source stuff, or do you think there’s a value in doing it with non-Open Source stuff?

Mark: I think there’s a value doing this with communities, where communities have a vested interest, either financially or with time spent in the community to take that community on board and redesign it for them; I think it’s pretty disrespectful. So, I think it would work for communities, you know, the social side of the web is ever increasing and I think this approach would work for the majority of that, but it takes a certain type of thick-skinned designer to take it on the chin, because it goes completely contrary to the way that designers are schooled and the way that we practice our craft every day, is that we’re the problem solvers with the years of experience and we’re the experts and here’s our solution, it doesn’t work in this sense.

Marcus: Can I ask a sales-y question?

Mark: Yeah.

Marcus: Because I don’t know how you won this work. Was that the differentiation that gave you the… this is what we’re proposing to do?

Mark: Er, yeah, I believe so, yeah. It was the kind of the loose, almost by the seat of our pants agile approach and the fact that we were not ingrained in a process and we were quite happy and willing to break it apart and completely.

Marcus: Because it’s going to take a long time, isn’t, and most clients want it, you know, can you do it in a week?

Mark: Oh yeah, the drupal.org redesign isn’t due to go live for another few months and our involvement was four months.

Marcus: Sure.

Paul: Right.

Mark: So, yeah, it takes a long time, it’s a lot of effort but, from a sales point of view, we’ve now taken on more of a, so we use to work pretty strict waterfall, like a lot of agencies did, and now we don’t, we work, I wouldn’t say we were agile because agile can be as restrictive as waterfall, just a different name. But we work a very iterative design process now and are finding that our clients are loving it because they’re getting involved right away, there’s no time wasting on functional specifications and weeks and weeks and weeks of scoping; it’s getting in and solving the problem, and from a financial and a business point of view, it’s a very scalable model, so you have x number of days at a certain price on a sprint and you can expand and contract that process according to scope and budget. It does require quite a leap of faith by the client, to say: “what, you mean you’re not giving me a fixed price?”

Paul: Yeah, that’s the hard sell.

Mark: I’m like: “No” And that is hard but I’ve found that a lot of clients you sit down and you talk them through it; they can see the advantages.

Paul: Because we’re not at that point, are we?

Marcus: Er, not with new clients. Old, you know, existing clients will accept it because they trust you, but it’s always this… I mean, I don’t know, would I… say, if I owned a business and I was going to hire someone I didn’t know, even if I could see that they’d done a lot of good work etc. etc. it would be like: “Ooh, I don’t know if I could do that” You know.

Paul: Difficult.

Mark: So, a lot, so, in those instances and there have been a few, then phasing comes into it, you know and let’s see how a few sprints go and if you like how it’s going at this price, let’s expand it out and…

Paul: Yeah.

Marcus: Interesting stuff.

Mark: So, yeah, it’s interesting.

Paul: So, you like to do things different, don’t you [all laugh] you know.

Mark: Wherever possible.

Paul: Yeah, and talking of which, you’ve just given an interesting talk about web typography that’s got a bit of a different slant on the whole subject of web typography. Talk us through a little bit, you know, give us a potted version of your talk.

Mark: A potted version is 20-25 minutes. So, this week there’s been a lot of discussion online, based on Comic Sans.

Paul: Right.

Marcus: Right.

Mark: Comic Sans is evil, apparently.

Paul: Yes.

Mark: I don’t think it is evil.

Paul: OK.

Mark: I think it’s the victim of being used in the wrong context for years and years. And I think that, so there’s also been a lot of talk about font embedding, you know people are crying out for it, it’s why sIFR exists, and all of that. The technicalities of how it’s going to work with browsers and manufacturers and the font foundries aside, is it actually a good idea?

Paul: OK. [all laugh]

Mark: And I mean that from the point that the majority, the vast majority of typefaces have been designed for a particular reason and they are primarily designed for print usage first and screen usage doesn’t get a look in beyond the preview of the screen font. Now, Georgia and Verdana and a bunch of the Microsoft ‘c’ fonts have been designed the other way around. They’ve been designed for screen first and print second. Now, we’re constrained by those typefaces and that’s actually a good thing.

Paul: Because it makes sure you’re using typefaces designed for the purpose.

Mark: It makes sure you’re using the right tool for the job. Font embeddign could be opening the floodgates to a whole world of pain, I think, in terms of type, and it’s not the designers that will be at fault, it will be, you know, the people who are going to suffer are the users of the sites.

Paul: So, is there a… I mean, surely that shouldn’t preclude font embedding, but perhaps there is an opportunity here, I don’t know, to limit font embedding to fonts that are enabled for the web, and open up a whole new business.

Mark: Could be, exactly, could be. I haven’t really thought beyond my twitchiness of this being a good idea. I haven’t really, I would like to think: “I don’t think this is good” but, I think the crux of my point is moving beyond font embedding, is to actually, the reason why fonts in other tools, which has led to the usage of Comic Sans is because the tools that people can use don’t allow them to make good design decisions.

Paul: Right. While some constraints do.

Mark: So, with some constraints and some steering, can help, so why not as designers, why don’t we get our heads together and think about how we can, kind of, scaffold that experience for people. How can we make, because every one’s a designer now.

Paul: Yes, for better or worse.

Marcus: Even me.

Paul: Yes, Anna wants to talk to you about your design for your band website, we won’t dwell on that now, in the middle of an interview.

Mark: Everybody’s a designer and everybody’s, you know, someone who uses Comic Sans because they think it’s fun and quirky is right in doing so, but what they’re not considering is their audience, and the context that it’s used and all of that. So, that’s pretty much the, my talk in 3 minutes.

Paul: The crux of the argument. I mean you did in your talk go on and discuss the role of typography more generally, which I thought was quite interesting as well, share a few of your thoughts about that.

Mark: About how I see typography as a craft and that kind of thing?

Paul: Yeah, and how it fits into the whole process and the relationship between design and content and that kind of thing.

Mark: So, it was split down into 4 really. This talk was quite good, it was quite therapeutic, in a way, because it made me really answer a lot of tough, ask a lot of tough questions of myself as to what do I think typography is, on the web, to me, what is it personally. With that is type as kind of structure, which, you know, is a lot of information architecture, really, that to me that is typography; it is type as language, how typography is married with content and how the, we’re in a world on the web where designers are designing systems for content to go into.

Paul: Yeah, template-based design.

Mark: Exactly, and they’re divorced from the content, you know, divorced from the language, in that sense, typography’s quite hard to do, good typography anyway; then there was, what else was there? Type as process, so the Jesse James Garrett’s levels of user experience, with the idea that typography in that instance is relegated to the surface plane, which is the visual plane, you know, it’s: “make this look nice” typography; to me that isn’t typography.

Paul: So, what is typography?

Mark: Typography goes deeper, typography goes deeper than how something looks, it is how information is structured, it is how information in understood, it is how words and language is conveyed.

Paul: Can you give some examples of that, because that’s quite, you know, it sounds very good, but it’s quite hard to get your head around maybe.

Mark: Yeah, OK, so it’s, what’s that quote: “You cannot not communicate”

Paul: Right.

Mark: No matter what you do, you’re saying something to somebody, so your choice of typeface says something about the words that you’re writing.

Paul: Yes, it does.

Mark: If, as a designer, you don’t know what those words are, how can you communicate the message?

Paul: Yeah, I mean it goes back to Comic Sans.

Mark: To Comic Sans, exactly, and that’s one of the difficulties, there’s been a lot of talk about art direction on the web, and I see that as the biggest barrier to art direction is that designers are divorced from the content.

Paul: I mean, this is almost quite depressing.

Mark: Yes, really I…

Paul: It’s not really happening.

Mark: Sleepless nights!

Paul: It’s not happy idea, because, I mean, fundamentally, that isn’t going to change, we’re not going to get into a situation, you know, because rightly want to be able to change and update and alter content on their own website and that makes a lot of sense, which means even if you have the content up-front, it may change further down the line. I guess maybe the tone doesn’t.

Marcus: I was going to say you’re looking at tone here.

Mark: The tone, you’re looking at branding and you’re looking at designers being involved right at the offset.

Marcus: And I think that is better now than it was even two years ago.

Mark: Oh, it is, yeah, it is, yeah, absolutely.

Marcus: I mean, we are looking now at involving copywriters, we are pulling copywriters, we’re talking to our clients about employing copywriters through us, that’s new.

Paul: And from the start of the process as well.

Mark: Yes, right. So, we’re doing the same, we’re looking at employing content strategists rather than actually writers, more from a branding perspective, because that kind of stuff, you know, doesn’t really change, depending on the words that you, the values of the client are still communicated and it’s aligning, it’s the designer’s job to align the typography, not just the font, but the way the information is structured and working with a copywriter to make sure the typeface matches the tone of voice. and all of that is a package. So, that’s what I mean about the surface plane; typography shouldn’t be relegated to: “choose a typeface and away you go”

Marcus: Yeah, I mean, that’s the big thing isn’t it, that’s for me, what I’ve taken from this is your, is the font, the typeface has to match the message, basically.

Mark: Yeah, absolutely.

Marcus: It has to fit with the branding.

Paul: OK, good stuff. I mean, that’s yeah, you’re doing some really interesting stuff. I love the way you’re pushing, kind of, what is the conceived wisdom in lots of areas, which I don’t suppose you think you’re doing, you just stumble into these things, obviously.

Mark: Yeah, I did. Getting together this talk was one thing, this talk did not pan out the way I thought it would and to question the very notion of font embedding is quite a…

Paul: Because our whole culture really is built around the idea of choice, more choice is better, but actually that’s not always the case.

Mark: Yep, so I mentioned that in my talk.

Paul: Oh, did you?

Mark: About the jam stall, have you seen this?

Paul: Yeah, yeah. That classic, tell that story, that’s a good one.

Mark: So, there’s a couple of psychologists, a few years ago did a study where they had a jam stall and they had 26 varieties of jam and nobody bought any and then they reduced the jam varieties down to six and sales increased by 10 and it’s just the choice.

Paul: You could almost be overwhelmed.

Mark: Well, yeah.

Paul: Even as a designer you can, you can open up Photoshop, look down that font list and go “crap!”

Mark: So, this is where I showed a screengrab of TinyMCE and that, out of the bag, has 82 choices for a user, so WYSIWYG isn’t great in those terms, but there’s something within there which is, as designers and the design community could build on, which is this notion of styles and how you can use the styles to create a cascade, through your typography, through your design, so we’d limit the end-user’s choices, but not in a bad way, constraints are good.

Paul: No, I mean, the way we now work, because we use our own content management system with our own adapted WYSIWYG editor it, we’ve taken a third party’s and messed it around, that basically we only allow, by default, obviosuly sometimes clients disagree, but we only allow them to mark up the content semantically, so they’re not at any stage picking fonts, because that’s the designer’s job, they’re just describing what the content is, whether it’s a heading or a sub-heading or whatever else, which, you know, obviously, you know, ensures that design style goes through, but also makes it much easier to use for the user as well, they’re not having, you know, a plethora of options and buttons to deal with, so…

Mark: But it goes beyond the web, I think, and this is what I was thinking as I was going through this, the reason why Comic Sans is all over the place is because Word makes it easy for you to make those bad design decisions, so it goes beyond that and content management systems in 10-20 year’s time could look nothing like what we’ve got now and if we don’t think very carefully about this notion of choice, then we could be in a real mess.

Paul: Yeah. Well, certainly we’ll be in a real mess anyway.

Mark: But, you know, a lot of people would push back on that and say: “What’s your problem? That’s fine. Mess is fine.” I don’t agree.

Paul: A little bit of mess is alright. No, I see where you’re coming from and, you know, I think there is a lot of value in that. I think I would personally still like to see font embedding, but I wouldn’t object to that being limited. I mean, one of the big problems to font embedding, as I understand it, and I’m not as knowledgeable on it as you, but is a licensing problem. So, if we have a new generation, I just look at the font industry, you know, the people that produce fonts and go: “Look, you’re missing a trick here, you know, you could create a whole new range of fonts, designed for screen, licensed for the web, and there we go.” So, if that’s what we end up with, I mean, that’s great.

Mark: That would be great, you know, if we got the calibre of typefaces like the new Microsoft ‘c’ fonts, and we got, you know, a library of 40 of those to use, 50, that would be awesome. If we ended up with a way of embedding up to, you know, Bitstream’s library’s what 28000 fonts, you can choose what you like, I don’t see that as…

Paul: Not so good.

Mark: Not a good thing.

Paul: I mean, even as somebody, I mean, I went to art college and, you know, obviously I had to study typography as part of that, I still feel overwhelmed. When I, I know some people absolutely love, you know, going to some of these foundries with all these different fonts and they spend hours picking through and it’s like buying shoes for, no I won’t say women because that will be sexist but, you know it’s almost like an addiction. For me, it just overwhelms me.

Mark: Yeah, no, I’m the same, I’m never, and this is one of the great things about the web is the restrictions in the typeface you can use because it makes you think more about typography beyond the font choice.

Paul: Yeah, which is only a tiny part of typography.

Mark: Exactly, and it makes you really push typography, and people are still pushing Georgia and Verdana and there’re still pushing it and they’re still making great looking sites. Font embedding can only confuse all that, unless it’s done in a pretty structured way, but like you say, the licensing is one big hurdle to get over.

Paul: Well, that was probably the most eclectic interview we’ve ever done, covering lot’s of random subjects,but very good, thank you for coming on the show, Mark.

Mark: No, thank you very much for having me.

Thanks goes to Simon Douglas for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback

Storytelling

Mark from Taunton writes:

I run a rather dull corporate website for a company who builds and sells pre-fabricated timber houses. It is a competitive market and although a lot of users visit hardly anybody contacts us for a quote. To be honest, I have lost any enthusiasm for the site. Can you help!?

I could answer this question by focusing on the importance of repeat traffic on conversion rates. We could look at generating repeat traffic through the use of articles, newsletters and offers. However, we have covered nurturing repeat traffic before. Instead I want to look at the power of story telling as a way to engage with users.

Users considering purchasing high value products and services have a number of generic questions…

Can I work with these people?
Are they experts at what they produce?
Can I trust them?
Is the product or service of sufficient quality?

In short any corporate website that sells a product or service should be about the product and the people. One way of focusing on these two things is to tell the story of the product/service. In Mark’s case this would progress through the process of designing, manufacturing and building a pre-fabricated timber house. At each stage you would introduce key people involved in the process – the account manager who deals with the customer, the architect, the project manager, the builder etc. The story could even be the experience of one particular customer and so end with a testimonial from that customer. These people could be interviewed on video or profiled in the copy. Either way it gives the user the chance to see the expertise and personalities behind the business. It builds trust and demonstrates the quality of your product and people.

Finally, the story based approach helps the user imagine themselves going through the process and therefore helps them picture working with your organization.

Getting into the zone

Paul wrote a question aimed at Elliott Jay Stocks in our forum that I would like to respond to as well. Paul wrote…

As a designer, I feel times when I am very creative, others when I know an hour infront of Photoshop will be useless. So, fellow designers how do you make yourself get into the zone. I imagine this is even harder for freelancers, or maybe easier actually, as you can pick and choose hours to work.

Like most people I find it very hard to artificially force myself to be ‘in the zone’. However, I have learn’t over the years that there are some things you can do that increase the chance of it happening. These are…

Change your environment – If inspiration is hard to come by I often find that a change of scenery can be a massive stimulus. Go and work in a different room, a local coffee shop or even in the middle of a field. Anything to kick start your creative juices. In my younger days I was even known to work under my desk or on top of a wardrobe.
Use a different approach – Another similar approach to changing your environment is to change the way you are tackling the task. If you are trying to design a site in Photoshop move to pen and paper. Try designing just in black and white or reduce your design to simple boxes. Often approaching a problem from a different angle sparks inspiration.
Create distractions - Everybody always advices that you remove distractions to ‘get into the zone’. However, personally I find this leaves me staring at a blank page until my eyes bleed. An opposite approach that has worked for me is to actually add distraction. For example I will set an alarm for 10 minutes. After that 10 minutes I force myself to take a 2 minute break. These short spurts of creativity seem to work for me and the breaks are a frustration that make me hungry to get back to work.
Take a break – Proper breaks are important too. Sometimes you need to walk away from a problem before the solution comes to you. It has taken me a long time to accept that some of my best work on a problem is done when I am not consciously thinking about it. If I get stuck I find that watching some TV or going for a walk is a very effective way of putting me ‘in the zone’ when I return.
Go with the flow – Finally, it is important that when inspiration strikes you run with it until it has been drained dried. Even if you find yourself in the zone at the end of the business day, do not stop working. Cancel meetings if you need to but make sure you keep going. This is the time when you need to remove distractions and just go with the flow.

Round up of web copy posts

Posted in Site content on May 29, 2009 by Paul Boag

Our copy is probably the most important aspect of our websites and yet we give it nowhere near the prominence we do design. That has to change.

I have found myself increasingly frustrated by the lack of attention copywriting gets on the web. As a result, it is a subject I find myself constantly returning to. In fact by looking back through this sites archive I can see it is a subject I have written about regularly almost since day one.

I have continually tried to encourage others to take their copy more seriously and tried to provide basic advice about writing for the web.

I therefore it was about time I brought the best of my posts on the subject into one easy to access place. I hope you find it useful…

Effective website copy

This post is essentially a list of copywriting tips. Advice includes; avoiding jargon, keeping it short, avoid marketing talk and much more.

Managing site content

This posts asks; is a CMS really the answer to all our site management woes and why are so many organisations unhappy with the way they manage content?

Advice for CMS users

A more detailed breakdown of best practice when writing for the web. This post is an ideal guide for those who have to use content management systems regularly and contains advice not just on copywriting but accessibility too.

How much to blog?

This addresses some of the questions surrounding blogging. Questions such as, is it regularity or frequency that matters and is quality or quantity more important?

The 4 essential web writing tips

This guest post provides a professional copywriters perspective on the subject. The four tips include; write specifically for the web, break it up, make it about the reader and relax.

Copy with personality

Dovetailing nicely with my recent article about site personas this post showcases three excellent examples of copy stuffed with personality.

Your feedback?

But what about you? What are your thoughts on the state of website copy? Do you pay for a professional copywriter and if not why? Do you find website owners unwilling to invest in this area? Finally, are there some great articles that should be included in this list?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

For even more posts check out the site content section of this website.

The 4 essential web writing tips

Posted in Site content on May 19, 2009 by Paul Boag

A website without words would be like Jonathon Ross – entirely pointless and a total waste of money. So it’s crucial to get those words right.

Here are the 4 most important tips for writing good web copy.

1. Write and edit specifically for the web

Don’t lift text off a printed brochure and stick it straight on a website, especially if it’s meaningless. We call this McContent because it fills a space but ultimately doesn’t give you anything except a vague sense of unpleasantness.

Here’s an example from a holiday cottage company website:

Lose yourself. Find yourself. Discover who you are again.

I have no idea what that means, or if I need to bring towels. A better sentence might tell me why the place is so relaxing – it’s in a National Park and has a spa, if you’re interested.

How to do this: As a general rule, cut the copy in half and get rid of anything you don’t understand.

2. Break it up

Look at The Sun. It has a reading age of 12, which is what you usually need to aim for on a website. The sentences and paragraphs are short. Subheadings are used a lot. They avoid any long or difficult words (an exception being this recent headline: ‘Sex with Jordan? That is out of the equestrian.’).

How to do this: Have a look at your copy and see where you can break it. Where can you start a new sentence? Could you split that paragraph into two? Could you substitute a shorter word?

3. Try to make your copy about the reader

I think this is quite hard, because my own thoughts and opinions are so much more interesting than anyone else’s. I’m proving this point in these sentences, talking about me instead of you. A better way of putting it would be:

You might find it difficult to talk about others, instead of yourself. Your thoughts and opinions are so much more interesting than anyone else’s.

How to do this: Use the We-We monitor to see much you ramble on about yourself, and how much you talk about your customer. Then turn your ‘me’ sentences into ‘you’ sentences.

4. Relax

Chill out. Being informal is fine on the web. It’s actually easier for your reader to extract the information they need from informal copy.

Here’s copy from the O2 website:

We provide mobile, fixed and broadband services in the UK…. [blah blah] … customers know us as O2.

Compare it with this from Virgin Mobile:

As a Virgin Mobile customer, you’re entitled to a whole list of privileges and special treatment that your mates would give their right arm for.

How to do this: When you write, imagine you’re chatting to your best mate’s mum or your favourite uncle. You have to be polite still, but you don’t have to talk like a government policy statement.

About the author

Rachel has 15 years’ experience in writing and editing, and currently runs a website company with her mummy. She has won several awards for her work, although one got thrown in the bin because it didn’t go with her sofa.

164. Case Study

Posted in Classic shows on May 6, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Paul shares his experiences of working on the Wiltshire Farm Foods website, we examine the role of Twitter and Ryan Carson shares some more advice on building web applications.

Podcast: Download (25.5MB)

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Housekeeping

Write for Boagworld

I am constantly amazed by the intelligence of those who listen to this show. The talent and knowledge of the Boagworld community is truly staggering. If you don’t believe me spend a bit of time in the boagworld forum.

I am therefore looking to get more people involved in publishing to the Boagworld website. If you have an idea for a post that you think others will be interested in, write an outline and post it to this thread. If the idea is appropriate I will get in touch and arrange for your post to be published.

Obviously, the post will be fully credited to you and will link to your site. Hopefully that will make it a worthwhile marketing opportunity!

News

The importance of sketchbooks

Talk to any designer and they will tell you about the importance of keeping a sketchbook. Ask that same designer whether they actually do it and the answer will probably be no.

The most common reason for not doing so is a belief that you need to be able to draw to have a sketchbook. Believe it or not most designers cannot draw. According to Jason Santa Maria’s latest post “Pretty Sketchy” that is not the case.

He argues that…

Sketchbook’s are not about being a good artist, they’re about being a good thinker.

I have to agree. However, sketchbooks have always filled me with some trepidation. Although I know they don’t need to be a work of art, I still want them to be.

That said, this post has inspired me to start keeping a sketchbook again. I know I am no longer what you would consider a designer, but Jason has made me realise that having an easily accessible place to keep ideas is worthwhile, whatever your role.

I encourage you to read Jason’s post and do the same.

Supporting old browsers

Jonathan Snook has written an interesting post about support for old browsers this week. He begins the post by establishing the importance of supporting older browsers. He writes…

When it comes to market support, I’ve often looked at it as one big pie. You may say that Opera is too small to really care about. It’s only 2%. You don’t care about Firefox 2 users. It’s only 2%. You may not care about accessibility issues. It’s only 2%. Soon enough, you’ve whittled down your potential market to 90% of what it could have been.

This is certainly a slippery slope and one that I personally take very seriously, hence my posts on Graded Browser Support.

However, as Jonathan goes on to point out, graded browser support is not without its problems. Although it is relatively easy to provide alternative basic styling to IE6 and below (thanks to conditional comments), it is much harder with earlier versions of Firefox, Opera and Safari.

Personally, I am not happy to resort to browser sniffing and I am not sure this is a massive issue. Based on stats from sites we are involved in, most users of minority browsers (Safari, Firefox and Opera) upgrade to the latest version.

In the end you can only test on so many browsers.

Approaching content on the web differently

The two articles that have most excited me this week both relate to website copy.

As we have said many times before on this show, all too often website owners are willing to invest considerable time and money in getting design right, but largely ignore their content. If you are willing to pay a designer to work on your site, you should also be willing to invest in a content strategist.

Tiffani Jones from Blue Flavour outlines the role of a content strategist in here post “Learning About Content Strategy“. When describing this emerging discipline she writes…

We kind of know that it lives somewhere between web writing, web editing, information architecture, SEO stuff, web analytics, and production.

She goes on to demonstrate that websites need somebody capable of writing good copy but also understanding SEO, wireframing, marketing and much more.

Of course, many people think they can write good copy themselves. They may infact be able to do so. However as Gerry McGovern points out in our second post about copy, good web copy writing is different from traditional writing.

Gerry argues that some of the rules of traditional writing do not apply to the web. He compares writing online copy to giving an elevator pitch…

Your customer has walked into the elevator, the doors have closed, they turn to you and say: “Convince me before the next stop to buy your product.” Design your website from the ‘I badly need to go to the toilet’ perspective. Your customer needs to act and act quickly. That’s the Web.

Setting aside the dubious toilet analogy, this is an excellent post that really makes you think about whether your copy is meeting users needs or massaging your own ego.

Improve usability through help elements

Smashing Magazine have released a helpful article on help this week.

It looks at the context sensitive help that is becoming increasingly prominent in web applications, ecommerce systems and forms. It outlines the obvious usability benefits and gives loads of examples of how context sensitive help can be implemented.

There are no major revelations in this post but it is useful to see how others have tackled this issue and to be reminded just how important help is.

It is too easy to address help as an after thought and so not properly integrate it into the design. As designers it is often not until a developer asks about error handling that we begin to start thinking about help messaging. We need to ensure it is apart of our design process and that the wording of these messages as well as their design is carefully considered.

Audible recommendation

This week I would like to recommend Nudge on Audible.com, a book about influencing the decisions people make. Although not directly about web design it has had a profound influence on how I build sites. If you want to influence the behaviour of users then I would highly recommend this book.

Best of all if you sign up with Audible you can get this book totally free. Simply go to www.audiblepodcast.com/boagworld and claim your free credit.

If you want to listen to it, Audible has it! With over 60,000 titles and virtually every genre, you’ll find what you’re looking for. Get a free audiobook and 14-day trial today by signing up at www.audiblepodcast.com/boagworld.

Feature: Case Study: Wiltshire Farm Foods

One of the biggest challenges of running a successful website is balancing the needs of users with those of the business. This is especially true when an existing business model conflicts with user needs.

Read the full article

Ryan Carson: Advice on building web apps part 2

Ryan Carson:Hey Everybody, this is Ryan Carson one of the founders of Carsonified.com today we are doing are second instalment of five minute Web App tips for Boagworld. So let’s get started, the first thing I’d say is do not build your billing system from scratch. Now, if you have a Web App that does recurring billing, so you are charging someone’s credit card every month there is quite a bit of code to write for that. When we built dropsend.com there was at least 1200 lines of php code in order to do that, and it’s a very difficult problem to solve. You have to do things like charge someone’s card if their card has been cancelled, send notifications, try to bill them again and in seven days bill them again, another seven days keep track of invoices, cancel them if they cancel their account. It is just a real headache and there is a lot of stuff that can go wrong with that. So, I would say you should outsource something like that to spreedly.com. Basically it’s an API web service that does recurring billing for you, so give it a try. I don’t work for them; I’m not being paid to say that, I just think it’s a good idea. And y’know if you ever decide to switch out of Spreedly the nice thing is that you’ll make a series of API calls out to the service and all that you’ve got to do is bill those services internally if you decide to do so later. So it’s definitely important not to waste time doing that from the beginning. Also, some people may say “Well, what about the fact they are going to take a part of your revenue?”. Well, the truth is, your bank is going to take that cut anyway, so you might as well have Spreely take that cut, there really is no loss there.

The second tip I’d like to talk about today is that you should plan on doing AB testing from the very beginning. When you do all of your site designs, especially your Home Page and your Sign Up/Payment Page, those really need to be tested with AB testing from the very beginning. Have a series of phrases or different graphics you plan on switching back and forth and make sure you measure which ones are working and increasing your paid sign ups. There is a great post on “Signal Vs Noise” about that, if you go to bit.ly/ab-test they talk about their pricing page and how they made some basic changes and they saw huge increases, 30% in sales for instance, it’s really important. On the subject of AB pricing I spoke to Jason Fried over coffee at the Future of Web Apps in Miami. I said “Can you tell me anymore about what you learned during AB testing?” and he told something really fascinating which was, When they changed the words ‘Free Trial’ (or Sign Up for free) on their Home Page to ‘See plans and pricing’, they saw an increase of 200%, so that was a real shocker. What he said was happening was that, people were afraid of signing up. Y’know they thought if they clicked on the ‘Free Sign Up’ button, then somehow they would automatically get an account that they could not get out of. Whereas if you say “Hey, Check out plans and pricing”, y’know no commitment, people are much more willing to click through and then probably
sign-up. So that was really interesting.

Okay, another tip for you is, I would suggest creating a new company for your Web App. The temptation would be to launch it as a service of your current company. So for us, when we launched Dropsend.com it was owned by Carsonified. But when we sold Dropsend it was really hard to extract out that company from Carsonified. So if we had started Dropsend Ltd. or Dropsend LLC it would have been a lot easier to do that. So I would just set up a fresh company from the beginning, it can be owned 100% by your current company which will make selling it, if you ever sell, a lot easier.

The final tip I’d like to talk about today is source control and I would highly recommend you use http://github.com it’s free, it’s a wonderful way to keep track of your repository for code and I’d highly recommend it. So, that’s it, thanks for your time today, and thanks for listening. Goodbye

Thanks goes to Ben Hardcastle for transcribing this portion of the show.

Listeners Questions

Twitter

This week I received two excellent and related questions about the use of Twitter as a marketing tool. The first comes from Teifion who asks…

My question concerns morality and twitter, an odd combination I know. I have several bots on twitter, all day long they download RSS feeds and then tweet links to new articles. A good example would be @design_agg which reads design websites such as Boagworld, it then tweets the relevant links to the post and the post title. There are other bots like them, for example I know that @stanton maintains the @boaglinks bot.

Of course, none of these bots create content, they simply link to it. The question is, is this wrong professionally and is it wrong on a social level? For a list of the bots, just look at who @design_agg follows.

The second questions refers to another automated Twitter account…

Hello Mr Paul Boag, this is Jimmy Nightly from the Swedish online auction site jiiro.com. I’ve recently been following Amazon on Twitter and they’re using several feeds to draw traffic to current campaigns. Their feed Amazon Deals has only 8000 followers and to me it just doesn’t seem that much compaired to how big Amazon really is over here. My point is, if they only have 8000 followers do you then think Twitter is a marketing tool for the future?

Both questions revolve around the subject of automated twitter accounts. These are accounts where the posts are automatically generated rather than the thoughts of a particular individual. Our first question is concerned with their morality and the second is concerned with their effectiveness. Both valid concerns.

Let’s take each issue in turn…

The morality of automated twitter accounts

The fact that Boagworld runs an automated twitter account posting web design related links shows that I do not have a problem with their morality. However, I understand that others do. Let’s look at two potential criticisms.

They are not in the spirit of Twitter – Some argue that Twitter was not created as a broadcast tool and should not be used in that way. Twitter is about community not news/announcements. Although I do agree with this point to some extent (as you will hear later) I don’t think the argument ultimately stands up. Strictly speaking Twitter was created for people to post ‘what they are doing’. In reality it is rarely used in that way. Twitter has grown to be much more than originally intended and a broadcast mechanism is a part of that.

They steal content from others – The second concern is that they are regurgitating content created by others. They are not in themselves creating value. Again I would disagree. Their value comes in the time saved for the reader. Instead of having to manually check sources, they are presented with all they need to know in a convenient form. In my mind it is no different from an RSS feed on Delicious or the news section of this show.

In the end, if people do not like these ‘bots’ they can unsubscribe. However, some do find them useful and there is no reason why they should be denied their services.

Of course, they may provide value to the subscriber, but do they provide value for the owner. Are automated twitter accounts an effective marketing tool?

The effectiveness of automated twitter accounts

Jimi’s question calls into doubt the effectiveness of Twitter as a marketing tool, citing the Amazon Twitter account as proof. It is remarkable that Amazon only have 8000 followers on this account but it is worth noting that their Amazon MP3 account has over 300,000.

However, it is not the specifics of Jimi’s question that I would challenge. It is the entire premise. To me, if Twitter is used well, it can be a lot more than a marketing tool. Companies like Amazon are failing to grasp the full potential of Twitter because they are using it as a broadcast tool, rather than a way to engage with its users.

Twitter provides a lot more than an opportunity to broadcast your latest deals. Twitter also allows…

An opportunity for great customer service
A chance to inform your new products and services
A way of creating passionate evangelistic users
Real engagement with your users

Unfortunately using Twitter to publish automated ‘feeds’ fails to reap these benefits. It in no way engages with followers. It only broadcasts.

Only by engaging with their followers will organisations really reap the benefits of Twitter. Companies like Zappos or Omnigroup are leading the way in this by using Twitter to provide support, inform their future products and engaging with their community.

154. Top Ten

Posted in Classic shows on February 25, 2009 by Paul Boag

On this week’s show: Relly Annett-Baker talks about good copywriting, Paul learns how to be a more efficient designer and we look at the ultimate website launch checklist.

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Housekeeping

SXSW

Boagworld is doing loads of good stuff surrounding this years SXSW. The full details can be found here. However, the highlights are…

A live Boagworld show on Saturday 14th 6.30PM at the convention centre – With guests: Andy Budd, Daniel Burka, Joe Stump and Jeremy Keith. Please sign up on upcoming or follow via uStream.
The Great British Boozeup on Monday 16th at 7:30PM at Shakespeare’s Pub – An evening of great beer and an all British soundtrack. Again please sign up on upcoming.
Boagworld SXSW coverage – Instead of spamming both twitter and your RSS reader with content from SXSW, we are bring it all together on one handy streaming page.

So whether you are actually attending SXSW or not, hopefully there will be something for everybody.

News and events

The ultimate website launch checklist

Making a website live is a scary process. There is so much that could go wrong. However worse still, there is so much you could forget. When it comes to launching a website, you can’t afford to take chances.

Well, BOX UK has been compiling a website launch checklist that takes some of the risk out of the process. This list includes everything from validating your HTML to announcing the launch on Twitter.

If you are responsible for launching websites, then this post is a good starting point for your own checklist.

Mr Budd is on fire (not literally)

Normally when I write about the news, I focus on specific posts that have appeared over the last week. However, instead I want to draw your attention to Andy Budd.

In case you are one of the three people who haven’t heard of Mr Budd,let me give you a quick summary. Andy is a user experience specialist and founder of ClearLeft – an agency that does a mixture of web design work and training. Andy is also author of CSS Mastery, an excellent book that I highly recommend.

The reason I want to focus on Andy is because he has really started to churn out some superb posts recently. Although an accomplished author and speaker, Andy has written less on his blog over the past year or so. However, in this last week he has released two cracking posts.

The first is entitled "Don’t treat your website like a commodity" and focuses on how we approach the market. It warns against trying to artificially create a need for your site. Instead he suggests shaping your site around user requirements.

The second is entitled "Is your website like a leaky bucket?" and is in many ways a continuation of the previous post. In this one he warns against the mentality of continually driving new users to your site and instead encourages us to focus on retaining the users we already have.

With these kinds of quality post coming from Andy again, now is the time to add him to your RSS reader (if you have not already).

A win for the generalist

I am very much a jack of all trades and master of none. Others have accused me of ‘having enough knowledge to be dangerous’.

In the world of web design, specialists are the order of the day. As a result I am beginning to feel obsolete. However, perhaps that is a false perception.

If like me you are a generalist, then you may draw comfort from ‘Bringing Holistic Awareness to Your Design‘, a post on Boxes and Arrows. In the article they explain that if you want to build websites that score high in user satisfaction, you need a team with a good general understanding. In particular they wrote…

The more each team member understood the business goals, the user needs, and the capabilities and limitations of the IT environment "a holistic view" the more successful the project. In contrast, the more each team member was "siloed" into knowing just their piece of the whole, the less successful the project.

Now, the article does not apply that specialists are wrong. It merely points out that in order to build a successful website you need to see the bigger picture.

It goes on to identify 5 ways that you can ensure your team keeps this broad perspective. They are…

All team members conduct at least some user research
Team members participate in work and task flow workshops
Team members share and discuss information as a team
Team members prioritize information as a team
Team members design together in collaborative workshops

This is certainly something we have begun to take on board at Headscape and we would encourage you to do the same.

Interview: Relly Annett-Baker on Copywriting for the Web

Paul: OK, so joining me today is Relly Annett-Baker who is a copywriter over at poppycopy.co.uk. Hello Relly, how are you?

Relly: Hello, how are you?

Paul: So here we are, on the phone, after a false start.

Relly: I know, it’s good for an internet-based podcasting that we end up using the phone, but there you go. It’s reliable, I like it.

Paul: Yes, all that digital technology, it’s nothing but trouble. Good old analogue.

Relly: Yes, analogue beats everything.

Paul: OK, so we’ve got Relly on the show today to really talk us through some of the kind of fundamentals of copywriting, and copywriting specifically for the web and how we go about doing that. So, Relly, I guess the best thing to do is start with the absolute fundamentals here, and we’ll start by asking you what do you think makes good copy, how do you define good copy?

Relly: Erm, good copy starts with good writing, which sounds, you know, really obvious, but erm, really, unless your spelling and your grammar and your sense is not there, you’re not going to write good copy. So, that’s, you know, the start of it, so if you’re going to write copy, make sure you can write prose well, to begin with. Erm, beyond that, it’s then about… The difference between copy and normal writing is that you’re selling something, essentially, whether it’s a service or, er, an actual product, or, erm, even, you know, just an entire, just an idea. Erm, so, it’s about benefits, rather than specifications. A specification is, you know, what you put into your brochure when someone wants to know whether a dishwasher is going to fit in their kitchen. But, the benefits is much more about the time they’re going to save and be able to spend with their family, using your fantastic, very quick, very efficient dishwasher. Erm, and the other thing that good copy should do, above everything else, is entice a reader to investigate. Especially on the web, your copy has to earn it’s place; it has to earn an extra second of eyeballing, because people just scan on, we get so much information thrown at us, especially on the web, that your copy need to be clear enough that it can be easily understood and also enticing enough that someone wants to stick with you and find out more, rather than flick on to the next thing they can look at.

Paul: Umm. I mean, you talked there about "especially on the web", what do see as being the, kind of, primary differences between writing for the web and any other medium?

Relly: I guess the biggest difference is that print mediums are fixed, that’s why we have different editions of books or magazines that come out, whereas the web is fluid, so, the difference between wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and there are pros and cons for both of those mediums, erm, that they use, but mainly that you can alter things as you go, nothing’s ever sort of set down as "right, that’s what we said and we can never go back and change it". So, erm, the other thing is the web is used primarily for people that skim-read a lot of information and use it to gather information before they decide to go on and request a brochure or find out more about what it is that you’re offering. It’s usually the first point of contact for people looking up, so it needs to make a good first impression, erm, and as such it also needs to communicate what your company is like, what sort of, you know, erm, formalities you have, erm, how big you are, how small you are, and how you like to operate and convey that, er, which print very rarely needs to do, it’s often, by then, erm, when a print brochure comes into someone’s hands, they’re already aware of your brand and they’ve got a better idea of who you are.

Paul: Mmm, I mean, there’s the kind of one issue that often comes up with the differences between the print, er, printed medium and the web, is that, you know, that because people scan, copy on the web should be kept short. I mean, is that something that you would agree with? I know that I’ve seen, you know, some articles written on A List Apart written before, that say "no it’s not about the length of the copy, it’s about how engaging it is". So, I’m quite interested in your opinion on that.

Relly: Yeah, I would very much agree, that it’s much more about, erm, engagement rather than length. Often with print, you get told you have, you know, space for 250 words and that’s how long your copy has to be. With the web, your copy can be as long as it needs to be, but that’s not necessarily as long as you’d like it to be. But as long as you can keep people engaged and keep them with an interest to keep on reading, get more information about you, and then, er, essentially they can read 5000 words about you, but if they don’t press the button at the bottom that says "get in contact" or "ring us" or "do something", then that’s kind of all for naught. What you want is to, erm, your copy to be long enough to persuade someone that they want to take the next step and get in contact with you and make a, you know, make that step towards doing business with you.

Paul: Mmm, I mean you talk, you’ve talked a lot about engagement already, how do you go about engaging people as you write copy? What kind of tricks and techniques are there, or is it probably a lot more complicated than that?

Relly: (laughs) Erm, I wouldn’t say it was the sort of thing where there’s, erm, there’s one way to do it; there are different, different, erm, styles and it really depends on your audience. Erm, often when we think of copy we think directly of advertising, and when we think of advertising we think of billboards. Billboards have, literally, two seconds to engage you and fix a message in your head. So, they have to have a certain amount of shock-value, and that’s usually accompanied by a large image that ties that together. The web is a very different beast in that respect, in that you’re making a one-on-one relationship; you don’t have to talk to everyone in the street, you can concentrate on who you think your best customer is. You do research about you customers and your users, and then you write for them, and you write in a way that’s going to, erm, keep them reading. Erm, so it comes down to a lot of research about who you’re writing for.

Paul: Mmm, that’s really interesting, you talk about writing for a specific person or, er, a specific group of people, because, it sounds then like you guys suffer from the same problem that designers would suffer from, when a client turns around and says ‘our target audience is the general public’, and they won’t narrow it down any. So, er, is it fair to say that you’ve got the same need to prioritize audiences that a designer would have?

Relly: Absolutely, you cannot write something that is going to engage everyone all the time, you have to know who your audience is. Erm, and that often involves doing, you know, research that, erm, the clients themselves don’t necessarily take on as part of the need for copy, but, erm, often the product tells you what sort of copy you need to write. If you’re, erm, writing about a teddy-bear shop, it’s quite obvious that you’re not generally writing for a, sort of, you know, middle-aged, managerial businessman; you’re writing for either, erm, older women who collect them, or younger children and therefore you’re writing for parents. But when you get into services, it gets a bit more complicated and so you have to do more research about the people who make contact currently on the website, if there is an existing website, or, you know, what business they’re going for and who actually makes them, makes that next step, you know, and who predominantly makes up their sales; those are the people you should be writing for. I often say to, erm, to people who are writing, who are starting to write their own copy, to have a style guide and to practice that – try writing a letter to your best customer; obviously, you don’t have to send it, but, you know, as if you were going to address them, face to face, what would you talk about and how would you introduce your product, and what specifically would they be interested in about it. And once you’ve practised writing about your products in that manner, it feels difficult ‘coz it feels like you’re cutting off 50% of your potential audience, but if you can target on, you know, the 10% that make up your actual, erm, sellable audience, then your erm, your returns will be much higher.

Paul: Mmm, very interesting. I like the idea of getting people to practice by writing a letter. I can imagine that works very well. Let’s talk about, umm, some of the common mistakes when it comes to copywriting, ‘coz let’s face it, you know, the majority of websites aren’t, er, produced and written by, you know, er, trained copy-writers, or even (Relly laughs)… they’re either written by, erm, the designer when he gets completely fed up with waiting for content from the client, or it’s written by the website owner. Umm, in either case, you know, they’re not obviously as experienced as you, so I’m interested in some of the really bad mistakes you see coming up again and again.

Relly: Erm, the obvious one is when people take their brochure copy and just move that straight across to their website and say: "that’ll do, that’s perfect, that’s exactly what we want."

Paul: OK, we we always say that, why is that wrong?

Relly: Why is it wrong? Because, erm, your brochure should really be for when people have made contact with you and have an interest in your product. So then you can, you can work on selling them, you can, you can work on, er, getting past any of the objections that they might have, through a longer length of copy when they’re ready to address those issues, when they’ve already seen the positives. So, erm, your website should be… As an example, if you take, erm, say a hotel that’s, erm, setting itself up for events, or weddings, what a bride wants to see when she goes to the website is she obviously wants to see pictures of a lovely wedding, but she wants to know how the day is going to work for her, and why it’s going to be her, you know, perfect day. A bit further along the line, she wants to know how much glass hire is and how much it costs, you know, to have rooms in the hotel and she can be really direct in those. But, initially that first bit of copy needs to be one simple paragraph explaining why your hotel is absolutely perfect for her wedding day, as far as she’s concerned, the biggest day on the planet, and you have to make her feel she’s the most important person. Once she’s, once she feels like she wants to make the contact and book, the brochure can explain in far more detail what the liability insurance is, what the room size is; she needs to have a rough idea of these things, but they don’t need to be laid out for her, then and there.

Paul: Mmm, are there any other mistakes that you see quite a lot?

Relly: Yeah, people don’t revise or keep on top of their copy; so they kind of treat it like it’s been printed, and that’s it, they can’t ever go back and change it, or they feel they can only change it if they also change the design.

Paul: Yeah.

Relly: We’re starting to get past that a little now, erm, companies are getting a bit more used to the idea of blogs, and so they can keep updated in that respect. Erm, other mistakes people often end up writing for their client or their boss, rather than the actual audience, which goes back to, you know, what we were saying before, which is, you know, that’s a difficult one, everyone faces that where, you know, their boss says: "I think it should be like this", and if you know better, that’s, you know, that’s you having to then lay out why I think this works better because. Erm, but don’t, you know, be afraid to make the point that you are writing for the audience, the people that are going to buy and here are their needs and here are their requests, and this is how the copy has addressed that.

Paul: Umm.

Relly: And, I guess the other thing is that, erm, people (laughs), people who, er, don’t write very often, they fall into two categories, erm, especially with designers, this is so true, that designers either did art at school, because they wanted to get out of essay writing (Paul laughs) and therefore they haven’t written anything for a long time, and so they’re a bit rusty and they kind of need to maybe practice a bit before they lay something out and, you know, maybe hand it onto someone else and say: ‘does this make sense to you? Can you, can you read this out of context and understand, you know, where I’m going with it?’ Erm, I often talk about, erm, people using, er, text readers for the same thing; you know, I know they’re used in website design to check, erm, accessibility, that someone, you know is, er, able to have the text read to them and understand what’s going on they should be able to navigate around the website. It goes perfectly well for copy as well, copy is very much part of your navigation: it’s the information you’re imparting to that person. So that’s always a good way that, you know, if someone, if someone can read or be read the copy out of context and they get, you know, 70%, 80% of the idea of what’s going on, then you’re on a, you know, good track that way. Often you find that people, the other thing that happens is that people start writing and they get so excited about the fact that they’re writing, the prose just flows from them, like they were actually Lord Tennyson reincarnate (Paul laughs) and they come to the end and they’ve built up to a massive, dramatic conclusion (Paul laughs) about why their product is the best thing since sliced bread and actually that dramatic conclusion generally needs to be the opening statement, because it’s what catches hold of people and gets them to read onwards.

Paul: I mean is, I’m fascinated by this whole area of kind of trying to create a tone in your copy, er, because I’m not a copywriter, I write quite a lot, but in the sense of blog posts and things like that and so, whenever I’m writing, I’m writing in my own voice, if that makes sense. But, obviously when you’re writing for another site, when you’re trying to reach a very specific audience, when you’re writing within that tone of the website, that’s a very different kettle of fish and I’m interested in how you do that, how you go about setting a tone; how you go about sticking to a tone, you know, how do you do it? (laughs)

Relly: Ah, the creation of a style guide is very, that’s probably most important here. There are two things that I recommend when, umm, coming up with the, sort of the voice, the tone for a site, is to think about the persona of who that person is that’s writing, that’s especially true if you have multiple people who are writing as the same person, erm, often you find this now with companies that have begun to use Twitter streams and so on to communicate stuff and they they need to remain the same person, the, erm, NASA rockets do that very well, Discovery and the rest of them, they they’re able to communicate very well, both scientific facts and just, you know, prosaic information about the fact they’re bored of sitting on landing pads, launching pads and things like that and it’s quite nice because it’s able to communicate a human voice to something that essentially is a very complicated machine, erm, and the way that they’ve done that is to think: "well, if I, you know, it I was going to be a person talking about these experiences, what would I say?" and sometimes, you know, the most complicated, fascinating machine on earth, saying the most mundane things communicates more about their team that it could do than take a very long, scientific specification of what they were doing. So, it’s again going back to understanding your audience. NASA have understood that their audience on Twitter, they’re not space buffs, they’re people who are gererally interested, because most human beings are interested when a rocket goes up to space, it’s, you know, it’s an amazing thing, it doesn’t matter if you’re 6 years old, or 36 years old, it still seems, you know, astounding, that it happens. So, they’ve gone back and they’ve thought about, you know, how can we communicate to people every day and they treat the rockets as if they’re just people hanging around doing their jobs. just like everyone else uses Twitter. So, the first step is to understand your audience, and it takes a certain amount of, erm, it is quite cool to say but dissection, it is cutting out the people that you don’t want to talk to; people often know who their customers aren’t, even if they can’t quite focus on who their customers are and who their customers are becomes clearer with more and more research. Erm, a lot of what a copywriter does as research, right at the beginning, crosses over with information architecture, it’s a lot of looking at, erm, how best can we communicate these points and who really needs to know them and in what order? So you kind of, you go back and you assess, so this company is, erm, is selling er… they might be selling, we used dishwashers and washing machines earlier, so who’s the primary researcher and purchaser? It’s probably going to be, erm, it’s split probably 50-50 between female and male, as for the initial research, but they’re probably going to be above the age of 24, averagely; they’re probably going to own their own home and they might well have children and that gives you the sort of insight to the sort of family life that they have and what they, therefore, want to get out of that product. Erm, so then it’s erm, then it’s a case of looking at, I often go back then to erm, manufacturers, look how manufacturers’ websites work, how they describe their own products; what sort of visual advertising they’ve used to communicate these things and how that can be translated into words, what benefit are they selling with the visuals, often if I’ve been supplied visuals for the website, they can tie in together quite well. And then I create a persona, the person that is writing, you know, being the person who is writing for the website. So sometimes I’m a middle-aged man, sometimes I’m a teenage girl, sometimes, you know, I’m a cool, skating dude, it really, you know, it really depends on what, erm, angle I’m going for

Paul: Sure.

Relly: With the copy. I keep a swipe file, which is basically things that I take from magazines, from newspapers, from other advertising literature, from books, from articles, that I think has been written really well and I take it away and I say, I kind of take it apart and say: "what about that headline functions so well?" and "what about, what is it about this piece that talks so well to the audience that it’s that it’s going for?" that, erm, that’s especially good if, even if you’re not the target audience and you’re still engaged enough to read it; that’s, you know, often quite fascinating. One of my favourite places to, erm, take, er, hints and tips from, of all places, is the Daily Mail and the Sun (Paul laughs), believe it or not, because they are so good at putting across an emotive idea in very few words, there is nothing like a Sun headline for giving you a kick in the pants, for feeling, you know, and often you read it and you find yourself, erm, agreeing with the statement, out of hand, before you pull yourself back and go: "now hang on, no, hang on this is the Sun, I’m going to read this story first before I make up my own mind." (Paul chuckles) But, you know, they’re very good at doing that, and, erm, I mean it’s not ideal for everyone’s website, obviously, but to have the ability to do that, to take just a few words and make an emotive statement is really useful in copy, because what you want people to do, more than anything else, is feel that they must do something about getting hold of your product, they must find out more, they must buy it then and there, they must, you know, whatever is appropriate, you know, you’re not going to find many people who are going to one-click buy a conservatory so that’s not necessarily, you know, going to work so well, but you might well be able to get them to arrange to have someone to come round and measure for a conservatory and that’s the next step to getting them to do what you want them to do. Copy is all about behavioural management, essentially.

Paul: Yeah. I mean, it’s got a lot in common with design, you know. As I hear you talk, there’s so much overlap. I mean, but what’s so fascinating is that, you know, a client will spend a fortune on design and they will spend a lot of time and effort and forever express an opinion over look and feel and design, yet they don’t seem to want to invest money in writing good copy and they’ll say things like, you know: "content is king", yet they, there is this perception, I don’t know, is it a perception that they can do it themselves? Why isn’t it? Why is it so hard?

Relly: I don’t know. We, we poor copywriters, we are the Cinderella’s stepsisters of the web design world. Er, it’s especially true in web design, more than anywhere else that I’ve seen, erm, probably because the medium is that much newer, that, and it sprung out of interactivity, as opposed to, erm, books are about staid reading and advertising sprung from that; television and radio sit somewhere in the middle, but essentially it’s a written script, sometimes with pictures added. The web is a different medium altogether, it’s much more about doing, interacting and as more and more social media stuff springs up, you know, that’s more and more true and don’t get me started on the amount of companies that have got terrible facebook pages and so on. Erm, but again, it is that belief that it can be done by yourself; that’s not necessarily, you know, not true, you know, people can write their own copy, in the same way I can design a website – it might look like a dog’s dinner when I’m done, but I can do it. It depends, I can, I can start off, to turn it around, I know enough, I have enough of a little, you know, little amount of dangerous knowledge, to be able to put a blog up, design my own blog header in Photoshop and upload it and be able to update my blog day to day, but that doesn’t mean to say that I’m necessarily ready to design a site for a, you know, big multinational company that wants to sell direct from its website to multiple places around the world. The same goes with, erm, with copywriters. I think partly the reason that we get so little investment put in at the beginning of projects is that, erm, we’ve come to see creating a website as a visual thing, clients very often ask about how a site looks and they don’t care so much about how it works underneath, providing it works, which is the equivalent of asking a baker to bake an amazing cake and you get it delivered and it’s four tiers and it looks fantastic and it’s got these, you know, subtly crafted sugar-craft dancers on top and flowers trailing all around it and you cut it in half and it’s sawdust. And, you know, the copy very much does come under the sawdust category, we kind of get a bit left behind because everyone can write a bit and it doesn’t take that much, erm, knowledge to at least lay out something that makes sense, erm, I think it does kind of get neglected; erm, I often sort of say to people that, you know, that the copy is as much part of the navigation and the function of the site as anything you do with the menu buttons or whatever else, erm, and what we really need to do is to have designers… there are some designers who have the attitude that whatever happens after sign-off is no longer their concern, so the amount of sales that happen, whatever else, that’s not their problem, they’ve done their bit, they’ve designed a site, it works and it goes out. Whereas, really what we, what you’re then doing is designing for your client, erm, a very pretty picture-book of all their products, but that’s not necessarily a sales tool, so we need to look now much more at, erm, at websites as sales tools for companies and to people, you know.

Paul: So, I mean, where’s the line here, mind, because, umm, you know, I can imagine website owners sitting listening to this now going: "well, I mean she seems to be suggesting that we get a copywriter to write absolutely everything on our site", umm, but, you know, when you get into the realms of, you know, corporate blogs and things like that, I mean it’s going to cost a fortune, is it not, to get a copywriter involved at every stage. Where should a copywriter be involved, where shouldn’t they be involved, how do they fit in to the process?

Relly: Right, that’s a really good question. I don’t believe for one minute that you need to have, unless you have a site that need constant updating, you don’t need to have a content editor on-site all the time; in the same way that you don’t need to have a website designer on-site all the time, unless your website is constantly evolving. If you have a web team and your content changes a lot, then you might well want to think about getting a content editor in.

Paul: OK.

Relly: If you run an online shop and you change a few products a week, and you might introduce a few new products, er, via an email marketing, whatever, you might want to consider how much of that you want to give to a copywriter. If you’re updating a company blog and you’re sending, occasionally send out, erm, emails to old clients and invitations to new clients, you probably don’t need to get a copywriter, unless you feel it’s a better use of your time, and I think that it is the division a lot of the time, is that if you’re, if something really needs to sell, if it needs to make an impact, erm, I guess you wouldn’t find an advertising agency going ahead and taking on a billboard campaign, without getting a copywriter in, or their own in-house copywriter; it’s not going to be the managing director going: "well, we’ve got the artist to do this fantastic picture and we’ve bought all the advertising space, we’ve got a whole campaign rolled out, so I’d better think what we’re going to put on the, er, on the advert then." It just doesn’t work like that and that’s exactly, that should be exactly the same with your website. If you’re looking to launch a new campaign, if you’re selling something specifically, if it’s going to make a big difference to the way your company’s going to go, you want to get professionals in, and in this case it would probably be a copywriter would be the professional that you require. Erm, you know, you probably wouldn’t want to go and fiddle with your own plumbing, unless you have a very deep interest in DIY. It’s the same thing. Erm, but on the flipside of that, is that it’s, copywriting isn’t some arcane art that people can’t learn, in the same way that most people started learning web-design by sitting down in front of a computer, you know, bashing something out in Frontpage and going: "well, that kind of works", and then four years later cringing at what they’ve done. I think it’s very much the same for me, when I started writing copy and content, I was a radio producer and I have been responsible for some the worst chart hits in history (Paul laughs), you know, ascending to the chart because of the copy that I wrote, you know, to persuade people to buy the singles, you know, the competitions that we came up with, you know; it was my job, it paid my bills, buy I can’t say, you know, getting the cheeky girls to number 1 is my proudest achievement.

Paul: Oh dear.

Relly: And I was at least partly responsible for that (Paul laughs). I have to take my part in history on that one. Erm, you know, again it’s that thing, you know, anyone can go back and do it if they want to learn, you know, how to write copy. Just be aware that your first few attempts probably want someone to look through, but don’t be disheartened if you get to the end of it and think: "that’s not really what I wanted." You can always go halfway with a copywriter; I run workshops where I go into companies, talk to them about what their needs are, help them come up with a style guide, so they can say: ‘we’re going to write, it’s going from really simple stuff, like we’re going to have abbreviations and we’re not going to us the Oxford comma (Paul laughs), if that’s of any interest to any of you punctuation geeks out there, erm, right through to these are the sorts of people we’re addressing, these are there interests so we’re going to work these into this piece of copy, and, you know, I can then work with your staff members who will continue to write and then you’ve got, you know, a trained battalion of copywriters in-house ready to write things for you, on your behalf. And that’s often, you know, I often say to people that it’s not impossible to write copy, it just takes time to do it. As with anything else, it takes time to code a website well, properly and so that you can make a job out of it, it’s exactly the same with copywriting, but nothing stops you from building those skills up as you go.

Paul: That’s brilliant. That’s absolutely brilliant. It’s really good to hear a copywriter’s perspective on all of this stuff, because I don’t feel there’s enough really said about that part of the website and it’s been great to have you in on the show, Relly, and I really appreciate you taking the time.

Relly: Thank you very much.

Paul: So, thank you very much.

Relly: Thank you.

Thanks goes to Simon Douglas for transcribing this interview.

Listeners feedback:

Being a more efficient designer

Adam from Wales has written in with an interesting question:

Adam: With the economy tanking and client’s squeezing budget, can you give us any tips about being more efficient so we can turn around projects quicker.

It is a good question and one that got me thinking about creativity and its relationship with productivity. I also thought a lot about myself and how I work. All of this eventually led to…

10 Tips for Efficient Design

Fuel conference

Posted in Talks on July 14, 2008 by Paul Boag

I was fortunate enough to speak at the first ever Fuel conference on the subjects of design and content. If you were there or are just curious, this page will allow you to access my slides.

My talk was entitled ‘Websites that work‘ and covered the following…

Your website is the always-on, public face of your company. It’s also the gateway through which you interact with customers. This session will explain why copywriting and design are critical, and give you practical hints and tips into how you can instantly improve your website

You can either download a PDF of my slides (17.7mb) or watch here thanks to Slideshare.

A relaunch requires new content

Ongoing editorial resource

Editorial oversight

Other solutions

Understanding your organisations personality

Don’t pretend to be somebody you are not

Overcoming your corporate inferiority complex

Be transparent and open

Stop worrying about the competition

Recognise that your organisation is made up of people

First impressions count

Don’t allow your copy to make you schizophrenic

Conclusions

1. Marketing

Understanding SEO

Advising on Social Media

2. Copywriting

3. Contextual awareness

The impact of environment

The impact of the device

4. Strategy

5. Psychology

How do I learn all this stuff?

Is this unreasonable?

Audit

Plan

Creation

Taking care of business

Let me be clear…

The unfortunate reality

How I deal with it

Copy Checks

Check your spelling.

Check your tone of voice.

Check your details.

Check through any ‘hidden’ copy on site.

Make sure you are not going live with any test copy on your site.

SEO

Check your keywords.

Check your titles.

Check your URL structure

Check you have a sitemap.

Standards and Validation

Site Functions

Does everything work?

Check your search facility

Check all browser variations

Don’t forget to set up a print style for your site.

Security

Protect any sensitive pages

Performance

Legal

Copyright

Terms and Conditions

Privacy Policies

Company Registered Information

Add icons and error pages

Add your favicon.

Create 404 pages.

Further reading

Having trouble listening to 199?

Housekeeping

News

SVG is back?

The best products sell themselves

The principle of proximity in web design

Google is changing and it will affect your website

Feature: Website owners need more than web designers

Colin James Firth: Content is King

An unhealthy obsession with aesthetics

Are you weakening the message?

What can a copywriter teach you?

Copy can be frustrating

What you can do to improve your content

News

iPhone developers are stupid

Ways to tell a good story

Frequently asked questions that are not so frequent (or questions)

Learning from Video Games

Interview: Gerry McGovern on User Tasks