Small businesses need content strategy like a camel in the night

Our group started the ascent of Mount Sinai at midnight. Climbing through the blackness, safe from the burning heat of the day, we expected to reach the summit by dawn. Dark shapes loomed suddenly either side of the path: our torches picked out local Bedouin, offering camels to carry us up the mountain.

‘How much?’

‘Ten dollar.’

We all declined. We were just starting off. We were full of energy and keen to climb through the night. Why waste money when we could just walk?

The local men followed us, never far away, stepping into the torchlight every few minutes to ask ‘camel?’ For the first hour this seemed like an insult. The second hour was tougher, and at the half way stage some of the party had to rest for a little while. Then, towards the end of the ascent, with the dim pinnacle in sight, the path grew steeper and one woman began to struggle. Forward jumped a figure:

‘Camel?’

‘Yes! I need a camel!’ she panted. ‘How much?’

‘Fifty dollar’ said the Bedouin, no hesitation.

And she paid it.

There are some services that you don’t know you need, and by the time you do, the price is much, much higher.

With professional content help, it’s not that the price is artificially inflated (cunning move by those Egyptians, don’t you think?). If you don’t have advice and guidance on your content right at the beginning, your web project is likely to get so messy, and delayed, and diluted, that rectifying the result will cost you far more than the help would have done in the first place.

And, unlike the woman on Mount Sinai, my experience of people with small businesses and tight web site budgets is that they can’t afford to buy themselves out of the mess near the end. They settle instead for a half-hearted, chaotic, unfinished or imbalanced web site.

They never make it to the top.

Conversations at the foot of the mountain

I’m too honest to pull the camel trick on you. My climbing companion wished that the traders had been candid with her at the start. If she had realised she was likely to need the assistance later on, she could have hired the beast at the foot of the mountain, for a reasonable price, and simply jumped on when she needed it most.

So I’ll be straight with you. I won’t hide the reasons that you will wish you had a content strategy from the beginning. Over the next two weeks I’m going to publish two blog posts covering the 8 most common problems that content strategy solves for small businesses.

As I’m being honest, here is the list. I know that some of them will make you cringe but please don’t go into denial. I’ve seen these played out again and again. Hopefully they will help you to realise that you do need help with your web content, and that it pays to get it from the start.

1. Your content is not good enough
2. Your existing print content does not work on the web
3. It takes time to produce good content
4. There are bits of web content that you have never heard of
5. When you finally realise what you want on your web site, it will be too late to change
6. Your site might look great when you launch but will deteriorate soon after
7. Blogging is tough to keep up
8. You can’t offend your boss

You’ll pay one way or another – either at the beginning so that help is at hand, or at the end, over the odds, breathless, and in pretty bad shape.

Camel?

Red Gate’s free iPad and an offer you probably missed

If you’re a developer in Cambridge you’ve probably heard about Red Gate’s crazy offer: a free iPad if you interview for one of their Engineer roles, whether you get the job or not. Of course it’s not crazy at all compared to recruitment agency fees.

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

Poet laureate mangled in the Times

Last month I wrote about how The Mirror messed up a new poem from the poet laureate by laying it out badly on their web site. The main point is less that poetry should be handled carefully (which it should), and more that we should be sensitive to when content requires tailored presentation, rather than shoving it in generic article templates that ruin it by, say, putting a large animated advert in the middle of it.

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.

SmyWord is on holiday

Sprezzatura (making complexity appear simple)

The Cambridge University Accommodation Service provide a remarkable service: they find lodgings for thousands of University people; or find tenants for the University, colleges and private landlords, depending how you look at it. The remarkable bit is that their friendly, personalised service is free – even to landlords most of the listings are without charge.

Possible on one web site?

To make this happen through a web site is difficult, because there are so many parties involved. Students, scholars and staff are looking for accommodation, but sometimes departments look on their behalf. The University wants to fill its houses and rooms, as do individual Colleges, but only sometimes, and sporadically. Private landlords also want tenants, and hotels and B&Bs would like to advertise in case anyone needs a short-term stopover…

And the staff need to co-ordinate all this behind the scenes.

When we first made a web site for Cambridge University’s Accommodation Service, our hands were tied. There were strict branding and structure guidelines because the site is a subsection of the overall University web site.

When they wanted a redesign – or more accurately a realignment – we found many of those restrictions had loosened. Design was only one part. They wanted to make the information-heavy site clearer and easier to use, as well as adding new features.

The content challenges

• Keeping a depth of information without drowning people in it
• Creating a friendly, helpful but respectable and proper tone (befitting the institution)
• Naming different parties consistently
• Communicating clearly to a multi-cultural audience, some with English as a second language
• Making online registration and other processes as unambiguous as possible to minimise contact with the office
• Selling a service (to several parties) without being sales-like
• Ensuring that user-written content would not dilute the tone and clarity of the site

I tackled much of this through a detailed audit of their content and processes. Once naming and tone decisions had been made, they were ruthlessly applied to content old and new.

We structured the site much more clearly so that each party had a clear route in from the front page – from understanding the purpose of the site, to finding out more, through registration, to eventually having their own logged in homepage, customised to hide any content not directly relevant to them.

Some information was cut, some ordered into ‘Help topics’, and only the most essential and urgent made visible at the top of the hierarchy.

Although there was no sales-sounding pitch, the benefits of the service were shown more clearly to each party, and the staff given the ability to prove their value to the University through analytics and surveys. I wrote style guides to keep new content in line with the new layout and design.

The Accommodation Service project was rewarding because it was a chance to get stuck into real content challenges while having to work closely with the designer and developer.

And it seems to have worked.

The real reason your last web site was a car crash

Who was responsible for your horrific old web site again?

You know, the one crowded with far too much information, most of it out of date, and navigation like a drunk describing the way to the kebab shop.

The one where one line is emphasised in italics, the next one in bold, before the floodgates open and red and blue type competes with underlining, CAPITALS, and multiple exclamation marks!!!!!!!

BECAUSE EVERY LINE YOU WRITE IS IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO BE SHOUTED!!!

The one where the headings style is inconsistent and there are more font variations across the pages than across the Anglican church.

The one where you’re spelling and grammer, is wronger.

And sometimes just fragments of

The one where you started a blog but couldn’t keep it up, or perhaps just put company news or press releases in there to keep it ticking over.

The one with the bad photos that have been stretched to fit a space or are a file type that most browsers don’t read any more.

The one with the revolting colours.

The one where more and more features and icons and menu bar items get squashed onto the front page so that it’s hard to know where to start and quite frankly nobody has any clue what you were trying to say in the fireplace.

That’s the one

Who was responsible for it again?

Your last web team?

Then you have my sympathy. How unlucky to have got stuck with the only web team on earth whose vision for a web site is like something that Damien Hirst would produce given 8 cans of fluorescent paint, some live chickens and a meat cleaver.

It must have been all their fault.

However, in the tiniest of possibilities that you, the owner and guardian of the site, might just, perhaps, have had a miniscule mite of influence over the content and how it ended up looking …

Then we need to talk before you get a new site.

It doesn’t matter how much smarter the new car is, if you don’t learn how to drive and you leave your junk inside it’s going to end up a dirty wreck and stop working.

Just like the old one.

The biggest threat to clear, compelling and useful web sites is not rogue designers or web teams. It is clients who won’t learn how to look after their content.

Agreed?

Presenting poems and other valuable content

Don’t worry, you don’t have to like poetry. You don’t even have to know who or what Carol Ann Duffy or a poet laureate is. This is about valuing content in the way that you present it on your web site so that your readers will value it too.

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.

What do you reckon?

Gabriel Smy is a writer working on the web. His passion is making things clear. He is a Content Strategist for Fluent, 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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