Blogazine follow up

In the previous post, I talked about using embedded CSS to create more visually interesting blog posts. I have since discovered a further disadvantage. The CSS code ends up in your RSS feed and may cause unpredictable results for anyone using the feed.

My flavors.me page uses an RSS feed from this blog. The previous post is displayed with the CSS as a nasty chunk of text at the top of the post.

Magazine design comes to the web

B logazines are the latest craze in online publishing. They are blogs that take design cues from the funkier print magazines.

The best examples come from user interface (UI) designers who are demonstrating that the web doesn't have to come in neat boxes and screeds of text. Some of these are stunning -- they really get one thinking about the possibilities of the web.

But here's why you don't want anything to do with blogazines:

Consistency

There are all sorts of other reasons to avoid them, including the huge amount of time in css coding each post will take, but consistency is the biggy.

The designer of a print magazine has more latitude to bend the rules. No matter how bizarre the layout of an individual article, the reader always knows roughly where they are in the universe: somewhere between the covers of the magazine they just picked up.

On the web, all it takes is a single click to find yourself in Horse and Hound or the National Geographic Readers are less confident about where they are in the virtual world. The fact that one of your web pages looks a lot like another is actually very reassuring. It tells the reader they are still somewhere within your site.

I have been impressed with the work of Dustin Curtis But the reaction of everyone I have shown his site to (so far) has been:

What?

Great when I explain what it is about; not so good as a functional website.

But Dustin and other UI designers show us that blogs don't have to be boring. The limiting factor is not imagination. Most blog designs are boring because they are easy. The UI guys are creating a custom style sheet for each blog post (or generating reams of inline styles) and that is hard work.

What print magazine designers do is create a grid that is flexible. Most don't, in practice, create an entirely new design for each article (for the same reasons: consistency and time). But the underlying structure of the page layout makes it easier for them to create stunning visuals while maintaining a familiarity from one spread to the next.

The web offers similar possibilities. Design is based on cascading style sheets (css). You can have a single css file for your whole site or you can create one for each page. But there is another option with potential.

You browser doesn't care if you put your design into one css file or split it between several. Cleverly created, you could have a site-wide design that kept key elements fixed and consistent but allowed flexibility in other elements. You could then have simpler css files for each page to generate the variety you need to keep your site interesting.

It is going to taking some working out, but this blogazine idea has really got me

thinking

Note:
Time to write post: 12 minutes.
Time to code css: 4 hours 20 (I may be exaggerating)

Why typos matter

Standards in writing have never been more important because users are judging your credibility

Every web user knows that fake and malicious sites exist and many have strategies (conscious or not) for deciding how much they should trust what they read. Even reputable sites get it wrong -- users know this too.

Reputation, brand, design, physical interface are all important. But on the web, anyone can publish a professional-looking web site for free. Logos can be copied, sophisticated templates downloaded for free. A site may look reputable but it could be something else.

Guardian illustrates credibility problem with one letter extra

Imagine a malicious 12-year-old on his computer. How long would it take him to fake the Guardian's website? A few hours, probably, until he had something that looked and behaved as the Guardian site. But how long until it read like the Guardian? Maybe never. It is much harder to fake a professional writing style.

The thing that is hardest to fake is the content: both the quantity and the quality. Users know this and often it is the quality of writing they use to judge the credibility of a publication. If they spot a typo or poor grammar, then they trust the rest of site that little bit less.

Subbing for Twitter's 140 chars

The secret of a good Tweet is to cram as much information as will fit in your 140 character allowance.

This requires good old-fashioned sub-editing skills and some editorial judgement. In the example below, I was determined to keep the amusing quote which meant I had to be ruthless. You decide: did I go too far? (This is the actual process I went through: it may not be the most efficient way of getting there.)

253 chars (cut and paste original)
Swedish newspapers threaten to boycott Britney concert over photo restrictions. "The next step would be to tell critics they can't write anything critical." Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/10/swedish-newspapers-threat_n_229582.html

190 chars (trim link URL)
Swedish newspapers threaten to boycott Britney concert over photo restrictions. "The next step would be to tell critics they can't write anything critical." Huffington Post http://tr.im/rN8T

172 chars (sub down text)
Swedish papers threaten to boycott Britney concert over photo restrictions. "Next they will be telling critics they can't write anything critical." HuffPo http://tr.im/rN8T

160 chars (lose "threaten to" - changes meaning but within acceptable limits?)
Swedish papers boycott Britney concert over photo restrictions. "Next they will be telling critics they can't write anything critical." HuffPo http://tr.im/rN8T

145 chars (close)
Swedish papers boycott Britney concert over photo restrictions. "Next they'll say critics can't write anything critical" HuffPo http://tr.im/rN8T

138 chars (final)
Swedish papers boycott Britney concert over photo rules. "Next they'll say critics can't write anything critical" HuffPo http://tr.im/rN8T

Web news: 10 things on the BBC

Analysing a typical BBC News story reveals some important lessons for web writers. Many of us are so familiar with the BBC format that we don't realise how clever it is.

1. Limiting heads to 33 characters means they work for readers, for search engines, for news feeds. Everyone working online should do this, but it's hard work.
2. A single sentence intro in bold works on its own in a feed but also leads into the main story.
3. A pic or video adds visual interest. Often these show people which helps to humanise the story. Pics and videos carry a caption: important in enticing a visual audience to start reading.
4. An early quote, often by paragraph 4, makes the writing livelier but also adds credibility and authority to the story. The first quote usually justifies the head and the intro.
5. A balancing quote offering the opposing view or an alternative insight is also important in adding credibility to the story. Giving voice to several views may broaden their audience too.
6. Covering the story in as many different ways as possible also broadens the audience. Video may not be ideal for a reader who is in a hurry, but it will make the story real for those who browse.
7. Expert analysis helps readers understand the significance of the story. The personality of the analyst adds a human touch. It also adds a link to the blog section of the site.
8. More visual interest as readers scroll down. A second pic also has a catchy caption.
   
9. Encouraging readers to respond to the story helps them to become involved. News becomes more like a conversation than a broadcast.
10. Giving that itching mouse finger lots of things to click keeps readers within the site and adds value to the story.

The original story can be seen on the BBC news site.

When readers become users

Understanding web users and their day-to-day behaviour has never been more important


The New York Times has stopped calling its readers readers and started calling its users users, Advertising Age reports.

It reflects the venerable US paper's realisation that no longer do we passively take what we are given. The web has changed all that. Now we expect to interact. To click, to vote, to comment. To drive with our reading (sorry -- using) habits stories up or down the most popular ranking. To add our own pictures and stories to the melange.

This week I found myself, on the recommendation of a friend, using two web stories:

• The Interview with Alaa al Aswany from the Observer
• Show or Tell from the New Yorker

The first was 2200 words, the second 5600. No in-line links, no commenting, no video footage. There were admittedly pictures and, in the case of the New Yorker, cartoons. But as an experience, frankly, it felt a lot like reading.

Web writers are beginning to realise that rules they used to apply do not always work. Or, perhaps, that others are succeeding without adhering to the same rules. How can this be? The two examples above show us that our stories can work without fitting into an arbitrary word count. It is not true that every story needs a direct headline and a news-style intro. We don't always fail if our work is insufficiently loaded with multimedia gadgets.

"As an experience, frankly, it felt a lot like reading"

In discussions about the future of journalism, two concepts have caught my eye:

• Hyper-interest
• Context

These seem to me to be the keys to rule-free web writing. Hyper interest (I didn't coin the phrase but I have lost the reference -- apologies to whoever did) is the same as interest but accounting for digital language inflation (geeks exaggerate). It is neologism meaning that no trick or gadget is ever going to beat something that genuinely catches our imagination.

I think the two articles cited above are genuinely interesting, but you may disagree. This is the problem with hyper-interest -- so much depends on the user. It means that before you write something interesting, you have to work out who it is going to be interesting to.

Context means that the same user will find different things interesting according to what is going on in their world. If they are sitting on the sofa on a Sunday morning surrounded by toast crumbs and cats, the New Yorker may be the very thing. If they are on their way to work on Monday and just want to know whether we have the same prime minister so they don't look stupid in the 9:30 meeting, then maybe the BBC's news feed 31 character headlines are what they want.

"If they are sitting on the sofa, surrounded by toast crumbs and cats, the New Yorker may be the very thing"

For writers, hyper-interest means you have to model your reader more carefully than ever before, so you know intuitively what will grab and keep their attention. Context means you have to go even further and model their behaviour patterns. This may mean providing information in a variety of formats so that users can choose the one that suits.

Reader modelling is old school but it is more important than ever. Ironically, some writers freeze on the idea that because anyone in the world (not really) can read their stuff, they have to write for everyone in the world. In practice, the web loves specialism. Writing that focuses on a small group of readers and gives them what they want is generally the most successful.

Firefox dominates

Firefox is the dominant browser amongst WriteThinking visitors and IE7 has finally overtaken IE6, the latest statistics show.

Twitter: pros and cons

The story so far . . .

For Twitter:
Headlines and dedlines
ReadWriteWeb
Online Journalism Blog


Against Twitter (I think):
Paul Dailing at Huffington Post
Brainz

Headlines: BBC praised by expert

Usability expert Jakob Nielsen has nominated the BBC news website's headlines as the best in the world. He points out that the BBC's heads are:

• Short (typically 5 or 6 words)
• Information rich
• Have key words first
• Work without context (in the adjacent XML feed, for example - compare with the NY Times headlines further down)
• Don't promise more than they can deliver

The Guardian comments that the BBC's style is in contrast with some newspapers who stick to a traditional headline style.

Although Nielsen is evaluating human reponse to the BBC's headlines, they also effective for search engine optimisation.

SEO for your audience

Aiming a precise readership is the secret of a good website. It is tempting to broaden your message with a view to driving traffic to your site. In fact, the opposite approach works better.

The US Department of Health and Human Services Usability Guidelines rank the following most important:

• Provide useful content
• Establish user requirements
• Understand and meet user expections

News approaches on the web

Failing U.S. carmaker General Motors says it will run out of cash this month unless the taxpayer comes up with $4billion (£2.68billion) immediately, reported The Mail on 3 December.

This 21 word intro presents a complex news story simply and clearly but also manages to include elements that will grab the reader's attention:

• Real people the reader will care about -- the taxpayer
• A big number -- $4billion
• An urgency -- immediately

Here is how the Washington Post started the same story on the same day:

General Motors, an icon of American manufacturing and the world's largest automaker, yesterday threw itself at the mercy of Congress, saying it needed $4 billion to avert a cash crisis by the end of the month and as much as $18 billion in federal loans over the next year.

This version has the big number and the urgency but lacks the human element. It also requires the reader to process a 49-word sentence with a diversion into a sub-clause almost immediately. There is so much information on the web and it is so easy to find, that readers tend to be impatient. This means that a 25-word sentence containing a single thought is plenty, even for an intellectual audience.

The WP writers know their intro is not grabbing attention so they have hyped it up:

• ...an icon of...
• ...threw itself at the mercy...

But sadly these cliches tend to deaden writing rather than enliven it. Talking of cliche, this is how the Times of India reported the story:

To tide over the turbulent times, the beleaguered auto makers are leaving no stone turned [sic] to secure financial aid from the US, with Chief Executives of General Motors and Ford even ready for an annual salary of one dollar.

Writing to be found

Google-friendly writing techniques ensure that as many people will see your stuff as possible (it helps for search engine optimisation [SEO]):

• Update your site as frequently as possible
• Think of the words that people will search on if they want to find your page
• Use those words
• Do not use elegant variation unless synonyms are also words people will search for
• Make sure key words are in prominent positions
• Scoops, opinion and major facts will encourage linking
• Independence, balance and authority also help
• Be generous to sources and they will be generous to you
• Include as much detail as you can at the deepest levels of your site

Google Trends is a useful way to see what people are actually searching for.
Webconfs has a useful keyword density checker.

Web site colours

Colour schemes in web design should be kept simple but that doesn't mean they have to be boring.

Pick a colour you like in Adobe Photoshop (or similar) and have a look its hue value (H). This is an angle around the colour wheel (red is at the top -- 0deg). If you keep the H value constant but vary the saturation (S) and brightness (B) you can create a range of colours that all work together.



A website can use five or six different colours and it will not look cluttered if they all have the same H value.

Photoshop translates the colour into the hexidecimal code used by web sites by the # symbol.

If you want a second colour, the exact complement often works well. This is the colour 180degs from the first one. Again you can create a palette by keeping that H value constant but varying S and B.

Other secondary colours that can work are at 60 and 120degs from the original (triads) or 150 or 210degs from the original (split complements).

Keep on blogging

Sometimes it's hard to update frequently and keep a blog vibrant. Remember you are not limited to a particular type of information. Think about using a mix of content types:

News
News analysis
Digest of relevant web finds
Links to relevant sites
Opinion
A review of archive material
Anniversaries or follow-up stories
Campaigns

Set up Google Alerts on relevant subjects and you get an email to remind you to blog.

Constructing a web site

• Audience: Define a phantom friend.


• Aim: Work out the purpose of the site from that person's perspective and using the language they would use.


• Scope: List all the things your phantom friend would want from a site with this purpose, again ensuring the language is theirs.


• Prioritise: put this list in the phantom friend's order of importance.


• Navigation: pick the top of the list (six maximum) and simplify to create your main navigation.


• Content: now work out what content you need to create so that the navigation goes somewhere meaningful.


• Remember to keep using their language not yours.


• Only when all this is done should you think about those fiddly little extras like, erm, design and coding.


• Oh, by the way. When you're doing the design, use their language, not yours.

Reader models

The best form of communication is between one person and another. And the better the two people know each other, the better they communication. Radio journalists have known this for years. They talk about the listener (singular) and when you hear the best of them, they sound like they are talking just to you. That's because they are talking to just one person and they think of that person as a friend.

The trick is to condense your audience into a single person. That person does not have to embody every aspect of every member of your actual audience. It turns out that vaguely typical is close enough. You do have to know them well though. You need to know them as a complete human being. Their tastes, their foibles.

There is a useful technique called the phantom friend. Construct an imaginary friend by answering a few simple questions. The answers can be driven by prejudice or intelligence or research. It doesn't much matter. It gets you thinking about the audience as a singular human being. Here are the questions:

• What is their name?


• What age are they?


• What is their job?


• What are their hobbies?


• Where to they live and with whom?


• What newspaper do they read?


• Where do they buy their groceries?


• What do they watch on TV?


• What car do they drive?


• What clothes do they wear?


• What do they spend their spare cash on?

The better you understand this person, the easier it is to make decisions about your web site, so be creative. Don't just say they live in London. Say they live in a converted Victorian terrace in Islington with a girlfriend they are trying to get around to dumping and a fluffy cat that makes them sneeze. It doesn't limit your audience to people with cat allergies, it just reminds you they are real people.

Differentiating your site

• Focus on reader
• Focus on benefits
• Provide things they cannot easily get elsewhere
• Focus on scoops (original material) rather than breakers (being first)
• Make it context sensitive
• Look at the key words across yourentire site — does this sound like a market leader?
• Use opinion and feedback to build relationship with reader
• Do everything well (almost no-one else does)

Attention span problem

Many people use the web to find information and they want it quickly. Actually the same is true in print. But the knowledge that Google will give you millions of pages with similar information means that web users often give you only a few seconds of their time.

Solving the attention span problem

• Make the language direct
• Make it clear what is going on
• Make it about the user
  
• Check that they benefit from what you are providing
  
• Make it obvious where they are in the virtual universe
  
• Avoid irritating them
• Make text easy to scan
• Give them something to play with

The credibility gap

It is so easy to publish on the web and so many people to it that there is a lot of dubious information out there. The result is that users trust what they read less and less.

Solving the credibility problem

• Well written
• Objective
• Independent
• Accurate
• True
• Facts and figures
• Balanced
• Authoritative sources
• High Google pagerank
• Be generous in using and crediting third party sources

Encouraging inbound links

Getting people to link to your site is a major element determining your position on a search engine results page. Here are my tips for persuading people to link to you:

• Make a good website in the first place
• Put the right words in the right places
• Update frequently
• Make what you have to say as interesting as possible
• Create a buzz or a focus
• Put stuff up that cannot be found anywhere else
• Make it detailed and specific
• Make it fun
• Make it free
• Make it controversial
• Be campaigning
• Put stuff up that other people cannot easily create for themselves

Reasons to update regularly part I

If you monitor what people are searching on it tends to come in surges driven by outside events. The day a celeb finds themselves sentenced to two years in jail is also a day that sees a lot of searching on their name.

There is an exponential decay. If you write about something relevant to your audience a week aften it has happened you will get a lesser response than if you write about it the same day.



BUT... search engines don't search the internet (shock news) they search a copy of it on their own servers. The frequency with which they update their cache for each web page depends on how often it changes. If you typically only update your site once a month, then responding to a new external event may be frustrating because you may have to wait severals days before the search engines re-cache your page.

So the more frequently you update the more search hits you will get.

Things to consider for regular updates:

• News
• Blogs
• News or blog digests
• Opinion on what is in the news
• Flagging new content elsewhere on the web

Right words in the right places

A big part of search engine optimisation (SEO) is making sure you use words people are likely to search for:

• Obvious and in plain language (dog rather than canine)
• Short (TV rather then television)
• Come up in natural conversation
• Don't jar if you use them repeatedly when talking about the subject
• Broad, all-encompassing terms
• Narrow, specific terms
• I realise the last two seem contradictory, but actually people search on both so you need to consider both
• Generic and product specific

The place where these words appear within your site determines their significance to a search engine. In order of importance:

1. URL (www.searchterm.com does better than www.somethingelse.com/searchterm)
2. Title bar (no-one searches on welcome or homepage)
3. Heads (particularly those coded with the h1 tag
4. Navigation (search engines use this to work out the context of your site)
5. The tops and lefts (of the whole page, each paragraph, even the URL)
6. Words associated with pictures (alt tags and words near picture such as captions)

Keyword stuffing is a technique where you work out what search terms you want your site to get a good ranking for and then making sure they appear in those important positions.

I think it is better to do it the other way around. Work out the best language to talk to your audience and that should produce a more natural site which also gets a high ranking. But you may also want to look at the key positions and check you are making the most of your site.

A good website

Before you create a website you should ask yourself what the goods one do. This is my list:

• You learn a lot quickly
• They are easy to use
• Offering something you cannot get elsewhere (taking advantage of the technology)
• Clear and obvious
• Succinct and immediate
• Well organised
• Visually appealling
• About the user (rather than about the site owner)

Indicators of a bad site include:

• Cluttered
• Confusing
• Long-winded
• Full of jargon
• Using lots of proper nouns