You are your web site

I want to give you money.

Imagine it. I want to give you money – by signing up to become a paying member on your web site. So I find your site and look for the quickest, easiest way to get to the sign up page.

But I can’t find it. Sometimes you’re talking about signing up, other times about registering. There are two links: one for becoming a member and the other one for joining. If they are different, I’m not sure which one I need. When I find a page called ‘How to sign up as a member’ it tells me both ‘Click the Apply for Membership tab’ and ‘Click here to proceed’.

Well, which one is it?

I take a risk, click one, and fill in the application form (even though the button says ‘register’, not apply). Then comes the most baffling part of the whole process. Your web site tells me:

You are already a member.

I am not already a member. I have never signed up or given you any money for membership before.

But just to make sure, I go back to your question ‘is your organisation already registered?’ and search for my company’s name. Nothing happens. You tell me neither that I am nor that I am not.

Am I going mad? Perhaps I am already a member? Perhaps your sales rep got me drunk one night and I signed up on the spot and Timothy Taylor erased the memory?

So I try to log in to find out. I get an error page.

Do I still want to give you money?

After the awful experience: a serious point about your brand

The point of this true story (I haven’t the heart to name the company here) is that I nearly posted on Twitter: ‘I am trying to give money to x. They make it very difficult.’ I realised that might seem a little unfair, and posted instead:

Can you spot the  crucial difference? The first equates the web site with the company. They make it difficult to give money. The second gives them the benefit of the doubt. It’s just their web site that is at fault.

But guess which way your average consumer will describe it?

They make it hard to subscribe. They see your web site – as you.

To your customers, you and your web site are one and the same

As a prominent interface between your company and the public, your site represents your company to people so completely that it is you. It is who you are.

If that is true – how do you feel about what is on it? Does it really describe what you are like? Is the experience visitors have on it congruent with what you’d like them to think about you? Do your claims stand up?

Having given up on trying to register on the web site above, I checked out their About Us page. Amid talk of ‘technology-enabled enterprise’ and ‘raising Cambridge’s game’, was the claim that they achieved their commitments using ‘technology’.

Yeah, right. Forgive me for laughing.

If you claim one thing but the experience on your web site suggests another, people don’t think, ‘I’m sure they take a lot more care in the other areas of their business’. They think: liars.

If visitors to your site find broken tools and errors, they don’t assume, ‘never mind, technology gets the better of everyone occasionally.’ They assume: these people are rubbish.

If there is a spelling mistake on your web site, customers don’t say, ‘oh look, an error slipped through the spell check on this page’. They say: this company is stupid.

And maybe they’re right. After all, wouldn’t an honest, competent and smart company take care to have a web site that proved it?

To most consumers, your web site is the same thing as your company.

Is there anything you would like to change?

How to blog consistently (note to self)

Happy new year everyone.

I have one goal for SmyWord this year: to blog more consistently.

Last year was great – launching SmyWord, having a couple of big content cheeses drop by in the comments, receiving positive feedback from customers. But if I could change one thing, I wish that I had upheld my promise to post a new article once a week.

Increasingly businesses I do content work for want blogs on their web sites. A real, honest blog by someone who loves their work is a wondrous thing (especially if they’re not meta-careerists). And one of the fundamental pieces of advice I give them – one of the make-or-break keys to successful blogging – is to blog consistently.

Why? Because people are more likely to subscribe to, stick with, and read blogs that have a predictable delivery of content. Whether it’s an inspirational thought once a day (like Seth Godin), or a double in-depth post by different authors twice a month ( as on A List Apart), consistency shows reliability to potential followers and convinces them that you are worth following. People want to know what they will be getting.

So 2010 has me looking in the mirror and quoting ‘physician, heal thyself’.

Tips for consistent blogging

There is lots of good advice about for how to post consistently, including:

• Learn where your inspiration comes from and go there
• Read other consistent blogs to learn how they do it
• Make a regular plan and stick to it
• Split your ideas up into several posts – don’t give away too much at once
• Save good ideas for later (build up a buffer)
• Write useful material for you audience – not what floats your boat personally
• Reinterpret older material for new contexts
• Throw in a few lighter posts for variety and ease

But I know that my biggest obstacle is not creating ideas, because I’ve got loads of them. I shouldn’t admit this but right now I’ve got 41 articles for SmyWord on my laptop which are at least half-written. If I just finished those off I’d have nearly a year’s supply of posts.

But it’s not the ideas that are the problem – it’s perfectionism. I want my posts to reflect my education at Trinity College, Cambridge. I want my boss to think they’re great. I want to imbue them with the finest literary qualities of which I am capable. I want them to be above the criticism of other bloggers. I want my Mum to like them (fat chance).

Perfectionism is the biggest enemy to my goal

So here’s how I’m going to write in 2010: imperfectly. I’m going to value reasonable writing that gets published over theoretically astounding writing that does not. I’m going to be Enid Blyton not Gustave Flaubert. I will develop a thicker skin if criticised and acknowledge my mistakes. And I’m not going to show any of it to my mother.

Let’s tackle what stops us blogging consistently head on.

*Clicks publish*

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

I recently completed some work 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).

Endis are a fantastic company with pedigree in web site development. Their unique, versatile platform works for both small and large organisations; commercial and charitable, as an off-the-shelf CMS and for fully customised sites.

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 challenge: it affects 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 when content is changed by a client – or is dynamic in nature – it can be hard to showcase the work that was originally done.

Even the smallest changes…

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

It’s deeper than the choice of one word over another: it’s because taglines and headings and labels are manifestations of an overall content strategy. They are the visible fruit on a tree whose overall growth includes the marketing message, tone of voice, company brand, user experience, SEO and business objectives.

You can’t just stick apples on a pear tree.

The problem with portfolios

And therein lies the problem. Once clients have tweaked a few things, or the user-generated content starts appearing, or they change something about the design, it becomes harder to showcase the strategy behind the content.

Even when nothing changes, sometimes our contribution sits in with other elements that don’t look so hot. There are some other sites that I’ll never add to my portfolio because of the state of the rest of the web site.

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
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 altering 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.

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.

Topics

• Case Studies
• Content Strategy
• Human Writing
• Meta
• Portfolio
• Services
• Style/Grammar
• Writing the Web

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