On the one hand, I’m guessing few of us are enamoured by the language of estate agents. Although clichés can be useful for getting a standard set of information across to a loyal audience, the problem with estate agents’ lingo is that there are simpler, more honest ways to say the same thing, if it needs saying at all.

So should we be rejoicing that one estate agent, in an effort to desist from trundling out the same-old phrases, sent their staff on a poetry course? Instead of ‘direct sea views’ we are told ‘without feeling lonely, the room has an echo.’ Or try this:

Crossing the threshold
Passing into history
Near seafront and shops
Cobbles and tarmac meet

Historic Hove and the new come together in a mews house, light, comfortable and homely … and with parking.

As a lover of the way poetry shuffles about in ordinary words and situations, I think this is fun. As someone with an eye on marketing I see that the stunt has generated widespread publicity for the company. But will it sell more houses?

Solving the wrong problem

Estate agent owner Paul Bonett said he was fed up with the ‘meaningless jargon that potential buyers could see through in an instant. Boring old clichés like immaculate condition, delightful, compact and bijoux are hindering, not helping sales.’

So he wants property descriptions that we can’t see through?

At Endis Solutions we have worked with a few property agents now, as well as hunting for properties ourselves. We’re beginning to get a feel for what people want from an estate agent’s web site. And it’s not poetry.

Most people looking for properties online are trawling through hundreds of descriptions, trying to filter out the irrelevant ones as quickly as possible, flicking through what’s left to see if any of them meet their requirements and desires. It is not particularly fun and they do not have all day to do it.

Anything that slows down the process – animated picture galleries, long download times, unclear or protracted navigation, confusing text – is a pain in the neck the first time, never mind the fiftieth. And then for people to have to decipher a poetic riddle that does not actually tell them what the house is like – what a terrible idea.

Home-hunters do not dislike ‘compact’ because it is boring. They dislike it because it’s disingenuous. And no, they would not rather read draws the evenings into charming cosiness – they would prefer an agent to come out and say: it’s small. And ‘bijoux’? What’s that supposed to mean? ‘Delightful’? Isn’t that up to the customer to decide?

The problem is not that we’re bored with estate agents’ clichés, it is that they are unhelpful and unnecessary at a time when, rather boringly, we just want the facts, and fast.

No one reads the description anyway

Or at least they shouldn’t have to. If our clients are to be believed, people go straight for either the photo gallery or the floorplan to find out what a house is like. The best thing you can do on the property description page as an estate agent is make your gallery large, prominent and full of decent photographs that are easy and quick to scroll through, with a big, clearly labelled, detailed floorplan next to it. Here’s a good example.

Apart from the square footage for city dwellers, that’s pretty much everything we need to know. At a glance. It’s a classic case of show don’t tell.

It’s great to hear about estate agents getting creative in the way they present properties. My tip: give visual information, quickly. If you have to write anything after that, bare facts will do just fine.

Or am I just a killjoy? What do you find helpful when looking for properties online?

The Whitfield Group are a genuine, local success story. The only thing they didn’t have in place was a useful presence on the web so they approached us at Endis Solutions asking for a simple site to advertise their services and empty properties.

The challenges from the content side:

• Appealing to different markets, professional and student
• Helping Whitfield to raise their game with photos and copy for the property descriptions
• Finding a unique sales message in a very crowded market
• SEO, in an even more crowded market

To appeal distinctly to their two main types of tenant, we gave them a site each: Whitfield Residential and Whitfield Students. We wrote the student site in a chatty tone, replete with puns. The message is: no agents means fewer fees, plus it’s perfect for Anglia Ruskin University.

Whitfield Students web site

The Residential site does not joke around but we kept the collar loose. The selling point is simplicity. For a long time I had ‘the uncomplicated way to rent’ as the strapline, but had to concede, based in part on cognitive fluency, that simple was simpler than uncomplicated.

We also put an umbrella page up at their old address to build on the search engine ranking. This has worked well: on UK Google searching for ‘Whitfield’ returns over 9 million results. Our man is number one.

Googling ‘Whitfield’ returns over 9 million results. Our man is number one.

As for helping their staff to create compelling property pages, I wrote them a style guide for descriptions as well as a guide to taking photos with their specific (and somewhat lower end) model cameras. Remember the blog post? A bonus was giving a photo of my own – a quick snap during my son’s nursery’s annual float down the River Cam – to our designer, who turned it into an image for the front page. Whitfield have since adopted it for their wider branding.

We are hopefully about to do another raft of work for Whitfield, adding some advanced features to the sites. But in this first stage it was a pleasure to focus on creating something simple, well executed and with a clear message.

Uncomplicated, even.

My River Cam photo, coming soon to some lettings signage near you

This isn’t about how smart my child is (although he can complete a Cat-in-a-Hat jigsaw in under 5 minutes reverse-side up and calculate the exact opposite of everything we ask him to do instantaneously, before implementing it without flaw).

No, the point is that in iPlayer the BBC have designed a web site so easy to use that a 2-year-old can master it.

After turning the computer on he clicks the browser icon and iPlayer opens as the homepage. From there, he clicks on an image that he recognises – perhaps Charlie, Lola or Mister Tumble – or on one that looks like it’s for kids.

Admittedly, the homepage is set to the Children’s page. But I’ve seen him get there from the front page too, by clicking on ‘Last Played’ or one of the many pictures in ‘Highlights’ or ‘Most Popular’.

Once one kids’ programme is open, he skips through a chain of large thumbnails displayed below in ‘More’ and ‘Recommendations’ until it brings up something appealing. Then he clicks the play and full screen icons, and kicks back with a little bowl of whatever he found at toddler height in the cupboard (dry noodles, honey, an unripe plum, that sort of thing).

How easy is that?

Elements of toddler-friendly design

iPlayer is doing something right that children as young as two are able to operate it. This is not news. But that someone so young should be comfortable navigating a web site made me wonder what design elements enabled his success. Here are some of my suspicions:

1) Navigation is image-based

My son can’t read a word. Not a single word. He gets the content he wants by clicking on the pictures. An adult might take shortcuts by reading the text – find the right episode straight away or employ the search box – but a preliterate child can get to the same place in time purely by clicking on pictures.

2) Images have good affordance

It is not just that the menus are images, but that the pictures are instantly recognisable (a character he has seen before) or representative (something that looks like it is for children). This provides the simple experience of seeing what you want and clicking on it to get it, otherwise known as show don’t tell.

3) Many points of entry into content and many routes between

Searching iPlayer my son rarely gets stuck. There are always more images to click on in some type of menu, scrolling gallery, or after-play recommendation. He can enter the content many ways and because they are all connected together can hop between programmes easily.

4) Identifiable and simple buttons for universal actions

iPlayer has buttons big and conventional enough for a 2-year-old to click on; for selecting, sideways scrolling, playing, pausing, and enlarging to full screen.

5) Key content above the fold, and all in one window

He doesn’t scroll down yet which shows that all this navigation is accomplished in the top part of the page.

6) One-screen experience

It helps that iPlayer works without popups or multiple windows. Otherwise he can accidentally click on the wrong window and get confused, poor chap.

Just because a web site is well designed for a non-reading 2-year-old doesn’t mean that it is well designed for anyone else. But this example proves that even with complex navigation and copious content a site can be simple to get around.

And the hardest part of the process, apart from tackling the plum? – Trying to do all of that clicking on only one side of a clunky, domed, single sprung piece of white plastic. My two-year-old might be a whizz on iPlayer, but he’s no fan of Mighty Mouse.

It’s a clever campaign because it gives the impression of a largesse that can afford to be abused (let’s apply just for the tablet!). In reality, Red Gate are in complete control of how many Apple vouchers get given away, carefully screening applicants pre-interview. The iPad is just a ruse to get the best candidates into the building, where they witness the company first hand, and perhaps end up with the dilemma of an attractive job offer in their mitts …

Sandwiches spread

What impresses me more than the offer itself is how they have spread the word around. One Monday they bought Cambridge lunch by issuing an online voucher redeemable at eateries in the heart of business areas around the city. This carried the same feel of careless generosity as the iPad offer, with unlimited vouchers. And it was smart – there is only so much people can eat in one day, and the costs small compared to traditional advertising.

More importantly, the buzz that it created was palpable.

Whether people were grateful, suspicious, keen to game the system or just hungry, Red Gate’s target market (good developers already in jobs in Cambridge) ended up talking about the offer and the company. The idea spread virally. I got two free lunches and an ice-cream just from watching Twitter.

The news spread to the very centre of the community who needed to hear it.

And the news was not just information. It was an experience: in a free lunch, people were sampling something of the company’s culture of benefits, freedom and fun, right where they worked.

Nice job.

I love the way Red Gate do things. Last month I trained a load of Red Gate staff in how to write great blog posts, and more recently met their adroit Content Strategist Roger Hart (hurrah – there are now two of us in Cambridge). What strikes me about the company is that their values are carried by all of their members, even the new folk. That clever marketing was not just a strategic ruse: it was an extension of who they are and how they do things.

Here’s what you might have missed

Endis Solutions are recruiting developers too. We’re a much smaller company than Red Gate and can’t afford to buy you an iPad (besides, what do you need two for?). But that’s the crucial difference.

You can go and enjoy the culture of a larger organisation or you can get stuck in to creating the culture in a small one.

There are currently six of us at Endis Solutions. We build web sites for SMEs. We’re looking for a developer who has some flair and vision to come and make the company awesome.

Our culture so far involves finding genuinely good clients and building them genuinely useful web sites. We provide so much more than a site template, because we want our clients to succeed. We custom-build. We give business advice. We learn. We create stunning content and design. This means close collaboration between design, development and content, which you can do in a small company.

We’re smart – but it has to lead to something useful.

There are other things (like coffee, Spinal Tap and lunch at the Red Lion) but I hope you get the picture. We’re fun, we do good work, and we’re looking for a developer to come and be brilliant with us.

To create a big future like Red Gate’s – and beyond.

So here’s our bet: when you interview for the web developer role, we’ll offer you a job. If you’re good enough. No gimmicks, just a great role in a great company.

After all, you can’t eat an iPad.

ASP.NET Web Developer Job Description

Well, The Mirror are at it again, with the same unfortunate author. Carol Ann Duffy’s poem about UK flights grounded because of the Icelandic volcano appears on their site with all the same mistakes as her first one, only this time missing a word to boot.* (Believe it or not, an even more horrific version appears elsewhere on the same site).

This time, however, the Times are at it too.

The Times Online layout of the poem, which is called ‘Silver Lining’, is nowhere near as bad as The Mirror. The text is not broken up, and putting the whole poem in bold with the title in bold capitals helps it to stand out a little in the column.

Yet it hardly jumps out, does it?

So much more could be done to enhance the presentation on the page, for example through indentation, font size, colour or type, or with additional graphical elements – especially as it is having to compete with two noisy side columns for the readers’ attention. Worse still, the ‘RELATED LINKS’ text box pushes the first half of the poem over to the right, playing havoc with the line breaks.

Noise and interruption

Online newspaper layouts are not suited for verse because there is far too much clamour on the page, and poetry requires close attention. Where their article templates might work for longer, undifferentiated blocks of prose, poems end up being broken up by inserted elements such as adverts and link boxes.

But surely the Times Online could have formatted the poem specifically instead of just publishing it in a default standard article template (albeit in bold)? Why not go one further and develop a dedicated poetry template, where the related links still feature without realigning the verse, or at least make a standard template more accommodating to forms other than paragraphs of text?

This is not just about poetry. The moral is that if you have more sensitive content, don’t just whack it into a standard article template that will chew it up.  Design a specific template for that content, or a layout that will work for everything you want to publish.

Or at least craft it a little bit.

*The word and is missing from the last line.

Here’s what happened. Carol Ann Duffy is a talented British poet. She wrote a topical and smart little verse about David Beckham being ruled out of the World Cup because of an Achilles’ injury. The Mirror, one of the UK’s tabloid newspapers, published it exclusively on its web site last week.

And that’s where it went Goldenballs up:

Can you even see where it begins and ends at first glance? The problems with this layout are:

1. The title is not distinct enough. It is the same font size as the rest of the copy, and the italics make it look less, rather than more important than other elements.
2. The body font for the poem is not distinctive either.
3. The layout does not frame the verse in any way, with white space or indentation for example.
4. There’s a BLOODY GREAT BIG ANIMATED ADVERT right in the middle of it, breaking up a line.
5. There is a typo in the line afterward, ‘aspecial’, as well as a missing line break, still uncorrected 6 days after publication.

If you want people to value your content, present it in a fitting way

With poetry, these transgressions are magnified, because poetry is language arranged in such a way that it invites you to take a closer look: to enjoy, to be moved, to think. The frame is vital – from the title, the line and verse breaks through to the layout and choice of fonts and paper if the poem is published in print.

Shouldn’t as much care be taken online?

I’m not talking about fancy ornamentation. Just enough care to honour the material, draw attention to it and even enhance its meaning, because most poetry is written for the eye as well as the ear.

Would you be happy with a professional painting stuck on the gallery wall with no mount or frame? Or a meal at a decent restaurant slapped in a sloppy pile on paper plates?

Bad presentation says that you don’t value your content. And if you don’t value it then your customers certainly won’t.

Poetry suffers on the web

Although no other poetry site is as brazen as the stanza-splitting advert-loving Mirror, I am yet to find one that does poetry justice. Many of them put small font sizes in dense array for an overall dull effect. The Poetry Society are one example, who also use a low contrast font (being a lighter grey) that reminds me of financial small print.

Perhaps the Mirror needs a poetry style guide (because that’s going to happen). Perhaps it’s okay if they present their own copy as worthless, but for goodness’ sake when they’ve got the poet laureate submitting an exclusive verse they could display it in such a way to make readers take it seriously – or even read it in the first place.

The best example I’ve seen for laying out poetry online is Verbatim Poetry. I would say that, because I did it. It’s not perfect, but even as a fun little hobby on the side it puts whoever was paid to publish the David Beckham poem in The Mirror to shame.

How poems are laid out on Verbatim Poetry

What do you reckon?

And you’ve probably worked out, shortly after asking the question, ‘how could a global corporation with billions of dollars and swathes of talent at its disposal come up with something so crass?’ that it is meant to be deliberately bad so that it will spread virally around the Internet. No publicity is bad publicity and all that.

And here we are talking about Microsoft.

I’m wondering whether the same is true of Microsoft’s marketing materials for Windows 7. Are they deliberately terrible to ensure that people talk about how bad they are, thus spreading the word? After all, you can always blame your marketing guys for badly describing a product, while enjoying the attention that your product is gaining.

Or are they just crap?

I’m wondering this in particular because I caught sight of some Microsoft Partner Network blurb that arrived in the office this week. The copy is so bad it’s depressing. In fact it’s hard to know where to start. For the sake of my mental health (and yours), and for the sake of restricting this post to something less than debut-fantasy-novel length, I will describe only two of the items on just one of the pieces of promotional material. Believe me, there is a lot, lot more.

Words so meaningless they would make Nietzsche proud

My customers depend on me to work with them to transform the way they do business with the solutions we provide, and to ensure the supporting technology is in place

This heads an A4 flyer for Windows 7 as a pull-out quotation next to a picture of a smiling woman. Not to worry that the woman is clearly a model, that the context is ambiguous owing to the lack of quotation marks or that there is no name, detail or other attribution given under the quotation…

Never mind about the grammatical errors of ‘My customers … we provide’ – ‘the way that they do business’ and ‘the solutions that we provide’…

Just look at what utter guff it is.

My customers depend on me

This goes without saying. If they didn’t depend on you, they wouldn’t be your customers.

to work with them

Again, that’s what happens when you have customers.

to transform the way they do business

Transform in what way? Crashing all their computer systems would transform the way that they do business. So would setting fire to their office. It’s meaningless without any qualification. As is ‘do business.’

with the solutions we provide

Again, this is utterly meaningless without any context. And there is something about ‘providing a solution’ that doesn’t work. A solution is a means of solving a problem. But what problem? You can’t provide a solution if you don’t know what the problem is. You can’t just go around ‘providing solutions’. If you are solving a particular problem, then you are not a solution provider but a problem solver. Solutions Provider sounds like a self-proclaimed Messiah wandering around the desert wondering why no one will follow the path to enlightenment that he is offering.

to ensure the supporting technology is in place

Technology is a broad thing. ‘Supporting’ is redundant – you’re hardly going to use technology that doesn’t support what you are doing. ‘Ensure’ is a rather self satisfied verb (what’s wrong with ‘put’?). And ‘in place’ is redundant too.

Betrayed by the subconscious?

So, take out all the redundancies and meaningless phrases and you’re left with:

Solve some problems for people with technology.

– which is pretty much what they say in the tagline:

Windows 7 Enables a Better Solution

The tagline doesn’t mean much either:

‘Enables’ is redundant. You wouldn’t say ‘the pub enables you to have a drink’. ‘Solution’ to what? What is being solved? What’s the problem? And ‘Better’ than what?

Oh that’s right. I remember now. It took a little while to drill down through the layers of generic, banal nothingness to finally find a meaning in Microsoft’s copy, but we’ve got one in the end. It might only be implied, in fact it might be Freudian slip, but at least there is something of substance when you look hard enough.

They should have written:

Windows 7 – Better than Vista

Which I suspect is as close as we’re going to get to an apology.

It is hard to think that Microsoft’s copy is intentionally bad so that critics will spread it, given that the role of copy in flyers is to make things clearer to customers. Perhaps they were trying to paint with wide enough brush strokes to address everyone, but in doing so have not said anything to anybody. Apart from that little slip about it being better than Vista, which I sincerely hope that it is.