First up - as a blogger, I'm often amazed at how little people comment on my blog. Last week, I found a sure-fire way to get people to comment - write a provocative headline.
Is social media is a fad? Don't count it out. Brenda D makes an excellent point that, as always, you should choose a message delivery method that appeals to your audience. Social media is just one more tool in your toolbox.
On the subject of comments - I found this interesting post on why people don't comment on blogs.
Gerry McGovern recently wrote a very funny post about how to write a great web link. One would think that this is a post about writing - but it's actually a post about links that do what the user expects. Not surprisingly, (whack the side of your head here) is the expectation of a visitor that a using customer service or contact link will actually result in a contact.
McGovern writes that in the case of one Web site, 50% of all contact requests went unanswered. He continues with some suggested new contact links:
"If your organization is unwilling to get back to people who contact you, here are some alternative ways you could name your link:
Contact Us (only joking)
Contact us if you can
Just try and contact us
Don’t contact us; we’ll contact you"
Do you need to rewrite your contact links?
And finally, Jeanette Warnert has passed along a link to an eXtension presentation on Search Engine Optimization.
If you've ever wondered the difference between a visit and a hit, how spiders and bots work, if you need to worry about metatags and keywords, or want to improve your site's ranking in search results, this is a presentation worth watching.I wanted to pass along a couple of recent posts by Gerry McGovern and Jakob Nielsen about Web features and usability.
This week's post from McGovern relates a story about how adding features can make online tasks more difficult to complete. Looking past the "Who's on First" nature of the "Pound" vs. Euro question at the heart of the story - it's valuable insight into the importance of thinking out changes with the user in mind.
And Nielsen has some interesting information on testing vs. guessing when it comes to usability.
Both food for thought.
By now we've all heard the mantra that visitors to Web sites don't read, they scan. This drives the need to keep your copy concise, the Carewords research, and the 10-second rule.
New research from Jakob Nielsen shows an even greater need to make sure your content gets to the point.
Nielsen's new usability studies show that on-line reading is characterized by an F-pattern. That is, people will read most of the first line of copy, but the portion of successive lines read will be increasingly shorter.
In fact, Nielsen's research indicates that only the first 11 characters of a word string are needed for most users to understand content.
When is this most apparent? When content is already abbreviated:
- Links and headings
- Search returns
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Product listings
- Lists of archived materials such as newsletters and media releases
For more information about the usability study - including examples of best and worst links, you can visit Nielsen's Alertbox.
I'm often asked to explain the difference between Carewords and a search term or keyword. I have to admit that my explanations are often met with polite if confused stares.
But to the rescue this week is Gerry McGovern, the creator of Carewords himself, with a clear, succinct post about the difference and why both are important.
In brief, "The words we use when we search are not always the words we like to read when we arrive at a website." Gerry points to recent research conducted by Online Language Pathways that shows that the "language of intent" during the search function varies from the language desired in the search results. Users employ a more "mechanical dialect" when performing searches.
According to the USDA's 2007 Farm Computer Usage and Ownership Report, 61% of California farms had computer access but only 54% owned their own computers; and just 42% were using computers for farm business.
Of the 61% of California farmers who had computer access, 36% were using dial-up service.
While California fares slightly better than the national average, the challenge of using bandwidth intensive content and features in Web sites used by clients using dial-up services remains very real.
So how do you integrate bandwidth intensive elements into your site and still have a site that is dial-up friendly?
I posed this question to ace Communication Services web designer Alex Zangeneh-Azam. Alex suggests putting video links on an interior page, two or three pages into your site, rather than embedding them into your home page or on a program header page. He also suggests setting the link to open in a new window, the way this page out of the RREA site functions:
The new window that opens also contains text that loads quickly, so that visitors with slower connection speeds have something that engages them while the video loads.
By having the video open in a new window, visitors can immediately decide if they want to wait for the content to load or close the window. And you haven't lost them, because your originating site is still open.
Another tip, depending on the design of the site, is to let visitors know the size of the video, and an estimate on how long it will take to load and buffer. This is a corollary to the "large PDF file warnings" that I suggested a few postings ago.
Keep in mind that service availability changes - and penetration of high speed services in new areas is expanding faster than the USDA can conduct a survey. But if you're living and working in a remote area without high speed service at home - it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that your clients are in a similar situation.
- Recommended Links
- Nonprofit Marketing: Getting Attention
- Gerry McGovern - New Thinking
- ANR Blogs