Crap camera no excuse for bad indoor photos

Oh the joy of content strategy for smaller web sites! One minute I’m immersed in The Maldives’ most magnificent resorts, the next in a portal for plumbers in Portsmouth.

This work is certainly diverse. For example, I’ve just written a guide for a letting agent to help them to take better photographs of their properties. The catch was that their photographers are not professionals, but inexperienced office staff, using basic digital cameras.

Here are some highlights derived from the guide. If you ever shoot interiors – even if only at Christmas with a tree and your Aunty Mildreth in the foreground – these tips will help you raise your game. So put away the costly kit, grab a pocket-sized point-and-shoot, and get clicking.

1. Be trigger happy

The joy of digital. Take thousands of pictures from every conceivable angle, as you can just pick the best ones later and delete the rest. If this is for a property web site make sure that you cover the basics: people expect to see a shot of every room, otherwise they wonder what you’re hiding. Add to that some of the extra features, like a period fireplace or an atractive front door, and you will be starting to satisfy the consumer’s desire for lots and lots and lots and lots of pictures.

2. Avoid ugly

You know what’s ugly? You’re ugly – when reflected in a mirror or window. Clutter and mess is ugly, as are room corners in the middle of the frame. Mould, cracks, and cheap copies of paintings are ugly. Big sofa arms in your face are ugly and ceilings are ugly if you show too much of them.

Also, fine composition is not just removing ugly things but putting a bit of thought into composing the shot. Choose a creative angle, arrange the furniture how you want it, showed lived-in but not messy. If the room is empty stick a prop in, such as a chair, for a sense of scale.

3. Go wide – or not

Using wide angles to capture more of an interior is only partially effective. When Adam Kimmel directed the prison cell photography in Capote he used a wide angle lens. To make the cell look smaller. Seeing three walls of a tiny room emphasises how cramped it is.

In other words, wide angle doesn’t make a room appear bigger – it simply shows more. And you should only show people more if the more is worth seeing. By all means show just how long the elegant lounge is. But the meagre box room?

4. Turn on the lights

One of the biggest challenges in interior photography is the exposure. The light coming in through the window throws the camera off balance, so that the bit of the room that you want to see ends up in darkness. On a good camera this can be solved technically – but not on our budget point-and-shoot with a rubbish flash.

So here’s the tip: turn on the lights.

Reduce incoming light by drawing the curtains, or shooting at dusk. Boost the light inside by flicking every light switch you can, and even bringing some extra lamps for the dark corners. The result will not only be better exposed, but far more warm and inviting.

5. Flash the plastic

There are some things money can’t buy, like knowing how to use a proper flash on a decent camera. For everything else there’s mastercard. If you do need to use your horrible little built-in headlight (or can’t work out how to switch it off), whip your card out and angle it against the flash so that the light goes upwards towards the ceiling. The scene will still be illuminated, but less harshly, and from above. Ezra Stoller eat your heart out.

6. Get on your knees

Taking every photo at eye level is like spending a cruise looking out of one porthole. Stand on a chair or a table, lie on the floor, crouch in the corner or peer through a gap – it’s amazing the difference an altered angle makes. In particular, get down low. Rooms often look more inviting at the reclining-in-lounger level.

Don’t forget to keep the camera level though. Tilting it will distort the straight lines, and people will think the house has got subsidence. Actually, they’ll just think you can’t take photos.

7. Copy good ideas

Have a look at other sites with photography that stands out. What have they done? See if you can recreate the effect. Imitation, flattery, all that. Just start experimenting and it won’t be long for your interior photos are a cut above the rest.

Time to squish the double space

Have you ever shared a room at night with a mosquito?

Tiny things can ruin what should be a straightforward experience. Don’t deal with the mosquito, and you’re in for a bad night’s sleep at best. Leave a spelling mistake on your web site because it seems insignificant to you – and it’s your customers who will be complaining and not coming back.

Writing great copy involves not only choosing the right words, but also caring how those words appear. Font choice and size, line length, punctuation, paragraph length – all these are part of the readers’ experience of your message.

Many of these decisions are subjective. How much space to leave between sentences, for example: surely it is up to the author to decide what is most fitting?

Yes, and no.

Where a writer decides that the once-popular double space (so-called English spacing) looks best, then fair enough. But my contention is that most of that time the decision is not based on looks – but because someone once told the typist that this is correct.

And nobody wants to get it wrong.

Let me alleviate the pressure on the double space defenders and point out that, on the web, double spacing makes no sense at all.

Double spaces originate from physical type

In ye olde worlde of typewriters the typefaces were monospaced – that is, characters were exactly the same width as each other (even the m and the i). Every letter, symbol, and even the spaces were the same width. This gave a regimented appearance to the text, in which a space between two sentences could get lost among the identical spaces between words.

Enter the double space – just to make sure no one missed the start of a new sentence.

However, on the web, monospaced fonts are rare. We write in what are called proportionally spaced fonts, where each letter takes up an appropriate amount of space. Add to that the short paragraphs that we write in, and the other design elements that make our typing much easier to read, and there really is no need for double spacing at all.

In other words, on the web, there is no double space rule to break. Unless you are a graphic designer working with a monotype font, there is no need to hark back to the days of the typewriter and get all uppity about the gaps.

A single space looks and reads better

Now we know that there is no rule to break, the main consideration is more subjective: what looks and reads the best?

Of course, it is a matter of opinion, and here is mine: I think double spacing looks wrong. When I am editing, I correct it. It creates little holes all over the copy, and disrupts the flow of sentences that are already adequately spaced.

By all means comment below and defend the English spacing. But I want to know how it looks and reads on a web page, not what your typing tutor said in 1971.

By the way, there is a sin far more heinous than double spacing. It’s called inconsistent spacing, where some sentences are divided by a single space, and some by a double space, on the same page.

That’s like having a whole scourge of mosquitoes in the room.

Won’t somebody think of the children?

Web developer wanted for the dream team

I am excited to announce that the team I work for in Cambridge, Endis Solutions, is hiring either a Web Developer or a .NET/SQL Developer. You can download the job descriptions and application details here:

Web Developer

.NET/SQL Developer

Apart from the obvious advantages of sharing an office with me, and the sheer amount of cake that passes through the building, I would just like to point out that we might be the smallest web sites and applications company to contain all of the following: Graphic Designer, Content Strategist, Business Consultant, Project Manager, as well as Developers.

We’re the whole package. Not a couple of designers cobbling the back end together and hoping that the clients come up with the content. Or a bedroom developer trying to solve marketing problems with bug fixes.

But a team interested and skilled in the whole process of helping small businesses get bigger through the web.

Right now, if we could code faster, we’d help even more.

Interested?

5 ways to prevent the portfolio problem

This was meant to be a portfolio post on rebranding Endis, the sister company of the web business I work for. As well as specific sales and support web sites, Endis wanted an umbrella site for their UK brand. Simple, direct branding, with links off to the other sites (if you get geo-coded off to the US site, that was nothing to do with me. Just talking UK here).

But when I visited the site to take a screenshot and remind myself of what the project involved, I found that it has been redesigned already. Mostly just tweaking, but it has affected some of the content that was originally there.

I don’t mind one bean if people want to change their sites after they’ve paid me for content work. They own the sites. My work is done.

Except it does give me one small problem: it ruins my portfolio.

In creative industries, especially ones that people haven’t heard much about (content strategy, anyone?), potential customers want to see the difference made for previous clients. But I’m reluctant to point them to web sites that I have worked on for fear of what they have become.

Even the smallest changes…

At this point let me say that the changes to the Endis web site were minor. My tagline is still there, as are the punchy copyshots for features and selling points. The testimonials from the questionnaire are still being used, and most of the copy on the site is still mine.

But even the smallest changes have a big impact, especially on the coherence of the content as a whole.

A new strap has appeared, ‘The Home of Insight’, on every page except the home page, which is somewhat failed logic. More to the point, Endis being more than Insight (their leading product) was one of the key messages of the site to begin with.

A large new logo has been added in the left column which makes the page layout lopsided.

Then there are the headings. I love leading a menu bar item page with a statement instead of the menu heading again. For example, click on ‘Who We Are’ and the page heading read ‘We love giving ordinary people the tools to thrive on the web’ instead of saying ‘Who We Are’ again. On a small site like Endis, there’s no danger of getting lost in the navigation, and the preeminence given to headings mainlines the message straight into the reader’s mind. It also exhibits a confidence in cutting to the chase.

In the redesign, these headings have been relegated to large straps beneath more conventional page title headings. Not only does this start to get silly – a menu item followed by a heading under which there’s a big strap and then a large first paragraph before you get to normal text – but the new headings are not even the same as one the menu bar. Click on ‘Who We Are’ and the page heading is ‘About Us’. ‘Technologies’ is called ‘Everything you need’. ‘Contact Us’ goes to ‘Get in touch’.

Worst of all, the ‘Clients’ page is headed ‘Clients worldwide’ followed by the same strap (formerly heading) from the Who We Are page: ‘We love giving people the tools…’. It doesn’t look good, even if there’s still some snappy copy kicking about.

The problem with portfolios

And therein lies the problem. We do great work for clients and their sites look smart for all of a few days before they tweak a few things, or the user-generated content starts appearing, or they change something about the design, and suddenly we’re not so proud any more and the dog is relishing its dinner.

Even when nothing changes, sometimes our contribution sits in with other elements that don’t look so hot. I’ve worked on a few sites which, though pleased with my own contribution, I’ll never add to my portfolio because of the state of the rest of the web site.

Let me restate: the Endis site is good, and you can still see lots of my influence on the content. I just happened to pick on it to illustrate the problem with portfolios. I’d love to know what you do to overcome the difficulty. Here are five of my thoughts:

1. Show an unlinked screenshot of when the site was looking good
2. Explain what you did for each client rather than just pointing at the site
3. Include a disclaimer for portfolio entries (like this post)
4. Offer another way to experience your work – in my case, the free sample
5. Do as much as possible to support good content after release (such as style guides and training)

What else would you do? How do you beat the problem of portfolios? How can you show off your work without other people getting their grubby little hands on it?

Show, don’t tell – better user experience from environmental content

Share Insight is the new support site for the Endis Insight platform. Because it is not a sales site, and the majority of content is generated by members (in forums) and staff (articles, guides, release notes, video), it contained little static content when I was asked to look at it.

This kind of content could be called supporting copy, creating the supporting frame for the interactions which take place upon the web site. Another term I like (and just coined I think) is environmental copy: the content which sets the environment for users to interact.

Setting the right environment for a web site where existing customers come for support demands a clear user experience and easy access to the help that they need.

On Share Insight this included items on the menu needing to be clearer and more compelling. ‘Getting started’ should have been ‘Get started’ to suggest action; ‘Documentation’ and ‘Release notes’ are developer terms – wouldn’t users prefer ‘Solutions’ and ‘New releases’? ‘FAQs’ had to go, if only because a lot of people don’t know what it stands for. ‘Help Topics’ might be longer but at least people know what it means.

I also pushed for a clearer information architecture (the Insight platform is well designed to chop and change content groups around, so it wasn’t too late to change the order).

Although scant to begin with, a lot of the environmental copy was redundant. It’s tempting to explain ‘on this page you can…’ but the golden rule is  always let the features speak for themselves. Show, don’t tell. If people can’t tell immediately that they’re looking at a forum and know how to read and post on it straight away … then it’s time to lay out the forum differently and rename the buttons. Otherwise the site will be crowded with noisy explanations and it will become too much like hard work to do anything on it.

Finally there were one or two legitimate paragraphs that needed tweaking, such as the front page tag line and strap. A sweet twist was to get the strap line to explain the site at the same time as inviting users to explore the site through the search box. It’s vital that users know what a web site is for and what to do next within seconds of first finding it.

Microsoft copy: Nietzschean emptiness with a Freudian slip

By now you’ve probably seen the monumentally embarrassing Windows 7 party video from Microsoft. Hopefully, you’ve also caught the censored version that imbues an entirely different meaning to ‘make sure you have the right devices to hand’.

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.

Content strategy: as boring as it sounds?

The almost constant complaint from Content Strategists is that content is undervalued.

Many clients don’t seem to realise that once they have got something to offer, the first thing is to find a way to say it (how about on a web site, for example?). Instead, they want new web sites first and then they try and work out what the content of those sites should be.

Horse, behind cart.

To add to the frustration, clients often want to fill their new vessels with magical content. Magical content is content that appears in the last few minutes of the project, when everything else has already been done. No one writes it or designs it. It just appears, overnight, in the place the lorem ipsum used to be. It fits the rest of the site like a hand in a glove, contains no grammatical or navigational errors, and conveys perfectly the message that the client wants to get across (it also propels the web site to the top of Google, just like that).

In short, with all the magical content around, we Content Strategists are almost out of a job. Except for one thing.

Magical content doesn’t exist.

Although some clients still wait for it like eager children waiting for Santa Claus, hoping that in the morning the magic of Christmas will be manifest in bulging stockings by the tree, the truth is that there is no quick fix for content.

It doesn’t just appear. In fact, as my boss says, watch out when someone asks for ‘just’. It usually means that the person is trivialising something very important. People ask him for ‘just a button that does ‘x’’. I get asked for ‘just a few pages of copy’ that turn out to be the whole content of the whole web site which happens to be the whole platform for a product or service. That is not just a few pages of copy. That is the entirety of your marketing strategy and delivery.

‘Just’ nothing.

So how can we get content more highly valued?

On the one hand, we can help content to be appreciated by shattering the illusion that magical content exists. By teaching clients right from the beginning that what they are offering and how they are going to offer it are the most important aspects of a web site. The rest will follow. By organising projects from the content outwards and enjoying their success together.

On the other hand, it might be (just a teeny bit) our own fault.

After all, we call it content.

Could we be more bland? Is there a more neutral, banal word in the English language, than content?

Content is the stuff that is held inside a container. It is defined by what holds it. The content of a bag. The contents of her stomach. It is generic, undefined, and boring. No wonder people don’t value it. No wonder they want a web site first and want it filled up second (or third, or tenth). We call it the most uninspiring and insipid thing we can think of.

And we’re supposed to be good with words.

Obviously we need catch-all terms to put on our business cards and to justify our roles to our clients, but ‘Content’ Strategist? We might as well be Stuff Handlers or Filling Generators.

If you want to devalue your Developer call her a code-monkey. Take your Designer down a peg or two by calling him ‘Crayons’ (we do). Is ‘content’ just as much of an insult?

It’s hard to come up with a compelling single noun that describes multiple, eclectic processes. And I’m overjoyed that Content Strategy as a term is getting increased recognition, thanks in part to the great work of Jeffrey MacIntyre and Kristina Halvorson, who has literally written the book on it. I also love the ‘Strategy’ part – it’s quite sexy (or is that just me?).

But I ‘just’ wanted to ask the question: would it help customers to value content more if we called it something else? Any ideas?

Gabriel Smy is a writer working on the web. His passion is making things clear. He is a Content Strategist for a small but perfectly formed web company in Cambridge, UK. As well as SmyWord, he runs the poetry blog Verbatim and writes about his first novel at Tongues of Men. Of course, you should follow him on twitter here.

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