Do You Know Where Your Content Is?

The latest issue of .net magazine has an article which starts off with a claim that most people don't know what or where the content of their website currently is. I found this implausible at first glance.

Then I remembered some of the old domains I've worked with, and the treasure hunt involved in finding all the pages. The abandoned podcasts, the surprising mini sites unconnected with any other part of the site, the whorls and eddies of navigation added by different people at different times.

The multiple blogs, social media accounts, and other outposts of content created by people long gone from the company, or people still at the company who have forgotten what they started -- or at the very least, the passwords for the accounts they made.

The surprising inlets and peaks of contradictory information that lure travelers away from the homepage and keep them there, unable to find their way back. The ancient maps and press releases and other bits and bobs of related content, now out of date and lurking online to confuse people.

At the college where I teach, the most popular way to find information within the website is to go out to Google and start over.

So, if you have a large site, an old site, or a site that hasn't been taken care of for a while, you might want to explore it. Find what you've got, bring out the content that could be doing good for you and isn't, remove the things that shouldn't be online at all, freshen the whole thing up.

And then make a plan for the future, so it doesn't get into that condition again.

Brochure to Web Site?

Last month, I wrote a brochure for a company that makes a health care tool. This month, they've decided that they need a rewrite at the website.

I'm so glad that they didn't decide just to take the text I wrote for their brochure and tuck it into their website. I've seen people do that before, and it's a mistake.

Here's why:

• People read differently online from the way they read paper. When I pick up a brochure, I can see at a glance what it consists of. If I'm interested in your goods and services, I'll probably read it. Your brochure won't suddenly turn out to contain a video or an interactive tool or to be 200 pages long; I don't need to scope it out before I begin reading. So it makes sense for a brochure to begin with a good story or a telling metaphor. Your website, on the other hand, needs to answer my questions right away and let me know that I'm in the right place. 
• The context is different. Your brochure may come to me in the mail or you may put it into my hands when I visit your showroom, but there almost certainly won't be 5,436,723 other brochures there at the same time. Online, visitors are making a fast decision about whether to stay at your site or to go look at someone else's very similar offerings. A brochure can be a lot more leisurely, and it can be mroe sales-oriented, too. 
• Search engines are irrelevant to brochures. Your brochure gets into people's hands in a lot of different ways, but search engines aren't one of them. Your brochure doesn't need to be written so that robots can understand it. It can be literary, it can rely heavily on pictures, or it can be mysterious. Your website can't do any of those things if you want anyone to find it.

 This is why a company with a good marketing department -- or a marketing company -- may still need a web copywriter. At the very least, remember the moral of the story: don't use brochure copy on your website.

Does Google Really Love New Content?

Recently I was listening in on a debate on whether Google really loves new content or not. After all, we know that old domains have an advantage. We might even conclude that Google loves old content.

In the search engine results page above, where someone is looking for a particular lesson plan, my old educational blog is #2, right in the middle of a list of large, well-funded lesson plan sites.It has been there for years.

That site hasn't been updated regularly for a year. In fact, if you go to that page, you'll find a suggestion that you go check out the updated lesson plan at my new education site. The new site is updated daily, sometimes more than once.The new site is better in many ways than the old one. The new, updated version of much the same lesson plan has been there at the new site for a couple of months.

Google, in this case, recognizes the value of my snazzy new site, but likes the old content better.

The thing is, we're not using "new" in the same way in both cases.

Google does respond well to sites that are regularly updated and looked after. It also likes sites that have been around for a long time. Given equal quality content and equal relevance to a search string, Google will pick the one with higher PageRank and greater stability (like years, not months, of history). That seems more trustworthy to Google.

But given a choice between an abandoned, outdated site and one that is regularly updated, Google will choose the active one. Not because Google has a thing about new content, but because the algorithm very sensibly values active sites over abandoned ones. Fresh content is a sign of a current, cared-for site.

Increasing Response with Good Form Planning

The image above is the current response form at a website I'm working on. I sent suggestions for it along with my site content rewrite.

The client called to discuss it. He liked his form.

"You're asking for a lot of information from them," I pointed out, "without giving any of your own. Especially since you go to people's homes for your service, they'll feel better about telling you so much about themselves if they see your name and address. What if you met someone and they asked for your name and number but wouldn't share theirs?"

"When you put it like that..." the client said, agreeing to make some changes. He hadn't thought of it in those terms before, but really that's exactly how we ought to think of it.

We compressed the form a bit so there would be fewer questions to answer, and made just a few into required items so people could see that they had the option of filling out just a few forms. Where the form now has two boxes to click, one for a consultation and one for a newsletter, we changed the phrasing to be both more inviting and more informative.We made the opt-in and privacy announcement friendlier and less daunting.

There are two buttons on the original form at the bottom: "submit" and "reset." Many site owners don't realize that buttons like these can say anything. "Submit" and "reset" may remind modern users of filing their taxes. Saying, "Yes, please!" or "Subscribe" sounds more positive. The "reset" button is hardly needed at all nowadays for simple forms, since most users know how to change data in their forms. In this case, we went with "Send" and "Clear."

The result is a Contact page that is more likely to encourage users to send the form.

Menus or Navigation for Your Website

My colleague Shan Pesaru of Sharp Hue recently tweeted about menus and navigation: "Think 'navigation' -- specific ways of getting to a destination. 'Menus' allow people to get lost by their own choices."
People in the trade don't usually talk about menus (except in restaurants, natch), but actually lots of our clients do -- and maybe you do. The very idea of a menu brings to mind a lavish array of items to choose from... do you want to begin with caviar with creme fraiche, you can ask yourself, or perhaps the caviar blini... Let's look at the wine list while we're deciding...

Wrong mindset for web design. People don't sit back in a happy, considering frame of mind and read through all the delectable options on the homepage before choosing the most appealing among them. They don't enjoy sampling a variety of possibilities before settling in to savor the page that sounds most enticing. They really don't like clicking back and forth in search of something, as people might share bites of an appetizer at a restaurant.

Nope. Most people who go to your website want something. They want the answer to a question, a solution for a problem, or a specific piece of information. Maybe even a bit of entertainment and inspiration, but they still want to find it quickly.

In a meeting today, a client spoke bitterly of websites that don't take that into account. "Don't make me search for things!" she said. Her expression was that of someone who had taken a bite of caviar without realizing what she was getting herself into -- expecting berries, perhaps, rather than the delicate globes of fish eggs.

Give up the idea of menus for your website and think in terms of navigation. It could make all the difference.

(Re)Organizing Your Website Content

Last week, I did a content update for a local tech company. Mostly, it was a matter of reorganizing their information. This week, I'm working on a site for a local church. They had as many as eleven or twelve subheadings for each main navigation tab. This afternoon, we figured out how to get them down to four or five.  It was really just a matter of reorganizing the information.

In both cases, the content was fine, but it benefited from reorganization. Would your content be better if you shook it up a bit?

Here's how:

• Identify your main point. Sometimes you just have sort of a list of things that you -- or the committee -- would consider important. The tech company, for example, had a lot of technical detail about their data center. Their main point, however, was, "Our tech skill and knowledge gives you a competitive advantage." Does having a cooler data center make your pet shop or restaurant more competitive in your local market? Hardly. We'll move that information to a blog post, where it will draw people who want to know, and replaced the specs with the aspects of the company's tech resources that really will give their clients a competitive advantage.
• Identify your audience. The tech company needed to remember that other tech guys aren't their primary client base, so their snazzy machinery won't impress clients as much as their equally snazzy services, phrased in terms of the benefits to their clients. The church liked the idea of imagining people who might come to their website, so they could consider the user journey for each of the personas we developed. There are many approaches, but clarity about the audience -- what they need, how they'll find you, what kind of words they'll understand, what problems and opportunities brought them to yoru site -- clarity about these points is essential.
• Group what belongs together. Separate what doesn't. For the church, combining things like all the items for children allowed us to keep their navigation from being too complex to use. For the tech company, combining all their hardware support services let us separate out and emphasize their coaching and consulting services -- the most profitable part of the business. Identify all the items you have and see if there's a better way to group them. This can be especially important when you've had your site live for a while. As small changes are made over time, and as things change in business or in the world, your initial sorting may not work as well any more.

Take a fresh look at your website. Identify and list all the elements. Sort them out in the best way possible. Then look back at your website and see whether it would be good to make some changes.

The Problem with Introductions

Last week I wrote a homepage for one of the web firms I work for. It was lively and keyword rich, and I guess the client was happy with it, because they came back last week for some more pages. I went to the development site and found that they had installed the content for the homepage -- and also created a large header, into which they had dropped some introductory text.

You know the kind of thing I mean. There's some introductory text in the header of the new site pictured above. The example above gives the doctor's name and specialty, the name of his clinic, and the type of patient he sees.

The site I'm telling you about had something like, "There are many benefits to chiropractic care." It wasn't really a chiropractor's site, but it was that kind of sentence. The kind of sentence that people often think of when they write an introduction.

• "There are many..."
• "Have you ever wondered..."
• "If you need..."
• "One of the most..."

You can finish these sentences with snappy, lively text that matters. When writing an introduction, though, people hardly ever do. 

It may be a leftover from third grade, where most of us learned to write papers beginning with, "There are many reasons why..." It could be a feeling that it's not courteous to jump right in and start saying something interesting without easing into it. For some people, it just takes a while to get started with writing, so the first few sentences don't have much meaning in them.

Whatever the reason, introductions are often the weakest part of the amateur writer's material.

On a web page, this is a bad thing. The search engines pay most attention to the stuff you put at the top of the page, and human visitors may never see anything else. The first sentences of your page have to be engaging and keyword rich.

For the site I'm telling you about, there was no problem with just moving the first paragraph of the content up into the header. If that doesn't work for your page, write something fresh -- something with the equivalent of the doctor's name and specialty.

Small Changes That Will Transform Your Website

My company specializes in web content. We do copywriting, SEO, web strategy, online marketing, social media -- stuff like that. But sometimes when someone comes to us for content or SEO changes to their website, they need design changes. And sometimes the smartest thing is just to start over.

This issue arose at the Amazon affiliate forum. People often come to ask for advice about their websites, and in one case an honest individual said, "Hire a designer." I said that was good advice. With thousands of excellent websites online, I said, there's no reason for anyone to choose to shop at an ugly one.

It's possible that this was tactless of me.

Someone else came along and castigated me. This, she said, didn't constitute useful advice. If I could see something wrong with a person's website, I should give them some good advice, not tell them to hire a designer.

But, you know, sometimes there aren't any small changes that will fix the problem. Take the website Tom and I are working on right now. This is how it currently looks:

Now, there are specific changes a person could make. Getting the photos from the bottom of the page to where people can see them, switching to a more standard style of navigation, breaking up the text so the lines aren't so long... But the truth is, doing each of those things and yet keeping the basic design wouldn't result in an attractive website.

Since the code was also outdated and the content needed work, it makes sense for the client to start over. We sent a photographer to get attractive new pictures of the client's office, showing the care they put into their building and the up to date equipment they use, as well as the friendly, professional staff. We wrote new text that would help new patients find the company. We fixed the site to deliver forms as PDF downloads, a move that fits better with the office's workflow than their previous arrangement.

You can see the new site's mock up at the top of this post. The redesign will transform their website. The small changes? Nope.

If you're investing time and money -- even if it's money in the sense of the money you could have spent doing something else with the time you're putting in -- on a website, you should be honest with yourself about its overall quality. There are a lot of posts at this blog about small things that really will make a difference to your website, if the basic foundation of the site is good. I'll list some of them in a minute.

But first, before you put time into making those small changes, ask yourself -- and someone else if you can't tell -- whether your website is good enough now that small changes will do what you need to do in order to get your money's worth from your site. If you decide that it's pretty good overall and just needs some tweaking to perform the way you want it to, then have a look at these posts. One of them may be just what you need.

• Making Your Blog Look Good
• Small Changes Make a Difference for Search
• Above the Fold
• Maybe Your Website Doesn't Need a Redesign
• The Golden Ratio and Your Website
• Vocabulary and Your Website

Websites About Tough Subjects

Not all websites can be about pleasant things. Life isn't all about pleasant things, businesses don't all specialize in pleasant things, and there are times when you really can't just add a picture of a puppy and leave it at that.

Right now, I'm working on a website for a company that provides home health equipment. The truth is, people needing home health care may be feeling some stress, and even some distress. People don't rent hospital beds because they saw one in a sexy commercial, and bedside commodes aren't going to be the stuff of cool flash intros.

If your business provides caskets, or crime scene cleanups, or adult diapers, you have some special challenges in creating a lovely website.

• Avoid euphemisms. Our first thought in these cases is usually to go with euphemisms. Instead of "raised toilet seats" we consider saying things about "comfort." But no one is going to Google "comfort" when they need a raised toilet seat. go ahead and do your keyword research in the usual way, and call a spade a spade.
• Acknowledge the concerns. While you're being forthright, admit that there are things to worry about, and take the opportunity to be reassuring. We know that arranging for your parent to have a bedside commode is likely to come along with stress and worry; we can use sentences like these to stress the benefits of the service while acknowledging the difficulties customers may be facing:

"We know that this may be a challenging time for you and your family. You shouldn’t have to worry about the quality of your home health care equipment, or about being able to use it correctly." We then move neatly on to the high quality and excellent training our company offers.

• Let images do some of the work. We're gathering up images of happy older people kissing in their wheelchairs, people wearing portable oxygen systems while they play golf, and bright young people romping beatifically with crutches. Designer Tom Hapgood can choose happy colors to offset the sometimes somber nature of the products and services we're showing. None of this will confuse the search engines, which pay attention only to the words. Our alt text for these images will be "wheelchair" and "portable oxygen systems" and "crutches." The look is strictly for the human visitors.
• Be especially thoughtful about usability. When the users of your site are likely to be ill, upset, or distracted, it becomes particularly important to make the navigation easy and obvious. Accessibility also becomes even more essential.

Care is required for effective web content about tough subjects. Fortunately, if it's your business, working with tough subjects has given you some skills and compassion that will help you write the content, or convey the needed mood to your copywriter.

If Your Website's Customers Are Not Tech Savvy...

Everyone needs a website, it's true. Even if you know that your typical client isn't that comfortable on a computer.

But what should be different about your site if that's the case? I recently had an opportunity to observe a number of unskilled internet users. Here are some behaviors I noticed:

• They're not good at search. These folks typed searches into the address bar and URLs into the search bar. No problem; the major search engines can handle this. But skilled users will try  a search and, if it doesn't work, refine it. Unskilled users will give up. This means that you must show up well for the first thing your unskilled users think of.
• They read the page. Skilled users start scrolling and clicking very quickly. Unskilled users fold their hands in their laps and read your site as if it were a book. They're less likely to leave and go to another site right away -- but they're also less likely to click further into your site. Get your goods onto the home page.
• They're confused by fancy stuff. While unskilled users may be more impressed by flash intros and more receptive to things that happen automatically, they may not be able to figure out how to use your gallery, or how to get back to the main page after clicking something. I heard a lot of things like, "How do I get out of here?" If you have an unskilled audience, think twice about using mouseover or interactives.

So how can you tell whether you're likely to have technologically innocent customers? We don't want to stereotype, but consider this possibility if you have older customers. Also check Google Analytics for the browsers being used; people using older browsers are likely to be people who don't know how to get themselves a new one.

Writing for Pleasure

Most of the things I write here are about strategic communication: how can you increase search rankings and conversion rates, how to increase usability, how to make your blog more effective for your business, stuff like that.

And yet in my own work I'm not always writing carefully calculated paragraphs filled with essential keywords. Much of the time, sure, but I also write things that are intended to be useful and entertaining. This very blog is supposed to do that. My educational blog, too. The blogs I write for most of my clients. The articles and teaching materials I write for other clients. These things are mostly fun.

This morning, I'm writing about the music of the Gulf Coast and a motorcycle rally for women. I enjoy this very much. And when, later today, I revise copy for an employment agency's website, crafting sentences intended to hold as many keywords as possible while still making jobseekers feel that these guys are their best hope, I plan to enjoy that as well.

So I hope that when you have something witty and amusing to say about your company, you put it in your blog. I hope you feel free to make deep philosophical points in your corporate materials, if that's the kind of person you are. I hope you won't hesitate to wax lyrical in the copy for your About Us page.

Just make sure you get your keywords on the home page.

Seriously. Have a good, keyword-rich homepage. Make sure that your blog is strongly enough related to what your company does that the search engines can guess what you do.

Having done those essential things, you can then have as much fun as you want while you write the rest of it.

Too Many Links in Your Text? view 2

Yesterday, I wrote about the in-text outbound links  at your website. If you do affiliate marketing, then some of these are ads. In the example here, the links to various kinds of fake fish you can use for gyotaku in the classroom all take you to a place where you can buy said fish. This is handy, it seems to me, for someone who wants to try gyotaku out with the kids but doesn't care to bring actual fish into the school. These are, then, valid links according to the criteria we discussed yesterday.

Let's get technical about the links issue, though.

Text like this, which allows a reader to get more information about the subject they're reading by clicking and thus jumping to another site, is called "hypertext." As in "hypertext markup language," or HTML. HTML was initially intended to tell the computer where those hypertext links were supposed to go (which it still does, of course). It has gotten more powerful, but that was really the main point.

The idea was that people reading academic texts online (all that folks were imagining anyone would do online in those days) and encountering, say, the term "estivation," could click on the word and go immediately to an explanation of estivation. Then they could quickly return to their main text, without interrupting the flow of their reading significantly.

Wasn't that a great idea?

You do occasionally still see hypertext used in this way. However, it turned out that there were problems with it -- and not just that people's first thought was to link every third word to Wikipedia.

Studies done in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the infancy of hypertext, found that people randomly clicked around all over the place and didn't get much studying done at all. This shouldn't be astonishing. After all, these were people for whom hypertext was new. Small children just getting introduced to books are pretty random in their interactions with them, too. It takes time to learn how to use new technology. Still, the random behavior observed was just about the death knell for academic uses of hypertext. Or at least for the romantic ideas people started out with about such uses.

Later studies found that people reading hypertext learned and remembered less than those reading documents. Partly, this reflects a lower level of commitment to reading. If you bother to pick up a document, you're probably going to read it. There's nothing else you can do with it. Online, you can leave any time and go watch music videos. People are much more inclined to skim and scan online.

But it can also reflect the distracting nature of all those in-text links. Consider this when you're using those links.

• Keep the numbers reasonable. I don't have a number for "reasonable," because it depends on the content, the audience, and the design of the page. I wouldn't use more than one in a sentence, generally, or more than three in a paragraph. And if I have a paragraph with three of those links, it'll be a while before another one comes up. 
• Use design to help. You always should do this, of course. If you have a lot of links, make a bulleted list instead of crowding them all into an ordinary paragraph. I did that in the example below when I made a list of online gyotaku lesson plans. The link color is also compatible with the overall design of the page, rather than being the bright default blue.

• Test before you launch. This example comes from the FreshPlans educational blog. We know, from the language patterns of commenters among other things, that our audience is mostly in the 25-35 age group, so we tested this type of post with them before launching. Responses were excellent, and our subjects didn't find the links distracting. I'm guessing that an older audience might find the link color difficult to read because it's lower in contrast -- one of the things that helps keep the links from being too distracting to our readers. If you test your page with your target demographic and find that they indulge in random clicking or seem to get distracted and lose focus, then you should change what you're doing.

Once you launch, of course, you have your analytics, including both behavior on the site and response to the ads, to tell you how you're doing. 

Too Many Links in Your Text?

We've talked about outbound links. But we're generally talking about highly intentional links: the list of partners or resources, the well-placed link to another page on your site, the link to source a reference.

There's another type of outbound link that you see around. As we experiment with affiliate marketing, we're gaining more experience with these. The ad link.

I don't know about you, but when I see an article peppered with links, I assume it's not worth reading and leave immediately.

Just for you, though, I actually looked for one and clicked through to the links. Sure enough, they took me to ads for flat irons, master's degrees in unlikely subjects from shady places, and implausible patent medicines.

The article itself is fairly content-free, being simply a vehicle for the links, written by someone being paid scarcely enough to make it worth typing actual words, let alone putting any thought into it.

And yet here's a passage from my educational blog with just as many links. Am I being hypocritical here?

Not at all. Here are the differences:

• The links aren't random, but are actually things people might want more information about. In the first example, "how to" is linked, and "prevent," and "seal." In the second example, the linked terms are things like the titles of books and the names of individuals or sites offering relevant resources.
• The links are also predictable. I don't remember whether it was "how to," "prevent," or "seal" that went to an ad for flat irons, but a reader couldn't discern the goal of the link and decide to go based on her knowledge of the destination and decision to go there. In the second example, a reader might think, "What's a Pocket Chart?" and click on "Pocket Chart." If she does, she's going to go to a Pocket Chart. "Vicki Blackwell" takes the visitor to Vicki Blackwell's collection of links about the book being discussed in this sentence. No one is going to be lost or surprised.
• The links aren't all ads. Or, indeed, even mostly ads. Most of the links at this page go to free resources and sources of further information. A visitor doesn't end up feeling as though the page is a minefield of ads.

And I think that's the bottom line: if you have a useful page with valuable content and links people will also find useful, you're fine.  If you're not providing something to benefit your reader -- if the page is only about the ads -- then you're doing it wrong.

How Many Choices Should You Have at Your Website?

One of the things you'll notice immediately about the "Before" screens I show you here from time to time is that they tend to have a lot of choices for navigation -- sometimes dozens.

This "Before" version of the Ozark Natural Foods website had 14 choices down the side, several of them repeated across the top.

This current version of the Family Chiropractic Center website has crowds of them -- as a drop-down menu, which is a whole other problem. The "After" websites always have, as you can see in the Sky Ridge website at the top of the page, five to seven choices.

The new Ozark Natural Foods site, as you see, has five choices.

This reflects a basic fact about the human brain, supported by extensive research in cognitive psychology: we can only keep about seven things in our minds at one time. So we can conceptualize five or six choices and decide among them, but we can't do that with ten or twelve.

This is so well known and easily proven that you'd think clients would immediately agree to it, but this is not the case. The desire to put one more choice on the homepage often trumps common sense and common knowledge. Some people aren't all that impressed by cognitive psychology.

I have new evidence. Money Magazine just reported on a study involving samples of high-end jam. They offered people six choices at a sample kiosk. Then, another time, they offered 24.

People were more likely to stop and hang out at the kiosk with 24 jams. The feeling of having lots of choices appeals to people. But they didn't buy. When they had six choices, they were able to gather all their options in their minds at once and make a decision. Faced with 24, they wrestled with the whole Damson Plum vs. Gooseberry issue, but they couldn't make a decision easily, so most gave up and left.

At a website, we could give people a choice like this:

• Most Popular Fruits
• Tropical Fruits
• American Regional Specialties
• European Specialties
• Mixed Fruits

Then, once they had chosen European Specialties, let us say, they could have the further choice:

• Traditional French Jams
• Traditional English Jams
• Traditional Scandinavian Jams

Then they could hone in on that Gooseberry Jam happily.

We could, in fact, put Strawberry under the Most Popular jams, as well as under the Traditional English jams,  and add confiture de fraises under Traditional French jams, too, if we wanted to. The right number of choices leads to happy browsing and buying, while too many leads to frustration and clicking away.

Giving Up Control?

A client was telling me about his plans for a discussion board at his website. This is a site for a jewelry store, so he had though people could ask questions about jewelry and get expert answers.

That's a great idea.

"I don't know," he said. "I'm not sure we want people to be able to say negative things."

Would his customers have gone to "Ask Our Experts" and expressed their anger about... well, whatever it was he thought they might complain about? I have no way of knowing. But that wouldn't be a bad thing.

"If they're upset enough to write negative things on your website," I pointed out, "they could just as well go to Yelp and write those things. At least at your website you have some control."

It's true that letting people write things at your website means giving up some control. You can't control what they say, for example. But you can control some other things:

• Your response. Seeing something negative about your company can give people a bad impression of you. Seeing you engage the complainer kindly and fix the problem or discuss the issue in a rational and helpful way can give people a good impression of you.
• The format. You can design your discussion board so that people have to give their names and emails, rather than leaving anonymous rants. You can keep the comments to text, not graphics or videos. You can remove abusive comments.
• Your interactions. If you get email addresses from complainers, then you can email those people, either to "take it outside" or to offer private apologies and restitution.

Complaints are opportunities to improve your business. Having those complaints on your own website lets you keep some control of the ball. 

What's That Button For? Blockquotes

If you use a content management system (CMS) to post your blog or update your website,  there are probably buttons you're very familiar with -- and maybe also some things you haven't taken the time to figure out.

Today, let's get to know the block quote. This function is usually represented by a pair of large quotation marks. On Blogger, they're the third button from the right on your "Compose" screen. For WordPress, they're the fifth from the left -- toward the middle, actually -- of your "Visual" editor.

One of the keys to making your web content readable is breaking it up visually. The post above is written much like a printed page, with nothing but paragraph divisions to break it up.

The same text in the post below has used the blockquote button to call out the quotations in the text. The style of this site uses an indented line with a pale gray background. You (or your designer) can style your blockquotes any way you like. Usually, they'll be indented and perhaps have some text decoration like this.

We're not talking here about making something scannable for those first few seconds visitors spend on your homepage before deciding whether to stay or go. We're in the midst of a blog post here, and we can assume that people who've made it this far are probably committed to reading. Not as committed as they are when they've got a book in their hands, though. Reading from a computer screen is harder on the eyes, and often done in a less comfortable position than reading books.Clicking away to something else is easier, too. So the blockquotes, when they make sense for the content, can help your visitor read your text.

We'd use blockquotes only for lengthy quotations in a book: a paragraph or so. Here, it makes sense to use them for smaller sections because we're suggesting using them for a classroom activity -- and because we know that making some visual distinction helps our readers.It'll be easy for readers to go back and find these when they're ready to try out the recommended activity, too.

As with any of the decorative effects your CMS offers you, don't get carried away. A page full of blockquotes, or even just a couple of blockquotes when it doesn't fit the meaning of the passage, can be irritating. Use them when they make sense, though. It's much better than trying to get a similar effect with tabs or indentation.

Building Links with Reviews

Who do you trust more: a paid ad for a company or your friends and people like you? The vast majority of people trust unsolicited reviews more than paid ads. The internet lets us all get out there and speak our minds.  Reviews and review sites are therefore growing in importance.

If you have a product, there are plenty of places where you can review it. Amazon.com is among the most trusted businesses, and they're selling the stuff, so you should certainly make sure to have reviews there if you have products there. I get emails telling me that I'm a major business book reviewer there and asking me to review books. Frankly, I don't know where the senders get this idea, but if I had products at Amazon, I'd ask them for suggestions of people to ask for reviews. I'd also ask my linkbuilders to check out my products and review them.

Lunch.com is another user-content review site, and you can place links there, too. You can review absolutely anything at Lunch, including all types of goods and services. It should be on your linkbuilding list, for sure.

Yelp.com, Judy's List, and local directories are all places where you can review local businesses. I'm not that impressed with the accuracy of Yelp (they won't allow me to change my phone number from a number that is currently out of service to the one on my website, for example), but it is certainly the most popular of its kind. This type of site will allow you to place a link and to write reviews.

Once you've completed the open review sites, you can contact bloggers who review goods and services like yours, and ask them to have a look at your stuff and see whether they'd care to review it. Remember that bloggers are now required to tell if they've been paid to write a review, so offering payment shouldn't be your first choice. Persuading the reviewer that your stuff is worth reviewing would be the best bet.

Whether you place reviews on review sites or ask people to review your stuff, the more reviews you have, the better.

How can you get reviews?

• Ask your customers. When a customer tells you how great you are, ask her if she'll go say the same thing at Yelp. Ask your friends and family, too. Swap reviews with your strategic partners.
• Give out samples. When I review a place for a magazine article, I pay my own way and take it off my taxes. But I review a lot of books and software sent to me by the manufacturers. My reviews are honest, of course, but it works better for the manufacturer than waiting around and hoping I notice their stuff would.

So how do you make sure that your reviews do the job you want them to do?

• They should be well-written. Whether it's a conscious decision or not, we are more likely to read, believe, and respect well written opinions than poorly written ones. If there are lots of obviously unsolicited reviews, the numbers can overcome that tendency. If you're asking for reviews, though, you should choose people who are likely to write well.
• They must be sincere. I see want ads for writers to churn out quick reviews of things they've never experienced. This is wrong. It also doesn't fool people. 18 variations on "This is the best stuff I've ever tried!" will not move people the way one sincere, detailed review will. You may also find yourself blocked from sites or otherwise punished for cheating. And of course there's the whole honesty and decency aspect. 
• Details are good. I added the tesimonial, "You rock!" to my collection of testimonials because it made me smile, but I think we all know that people are more persuaded by the one that says I helped the business grow and the one that says my copy was brilliant and I completely understood their business and the one that says I took them from PageRank 0 to PageRank 3 in a matter of weeks. Get some specific information into those reviews.

If you ask people for their honest opinions, you will get some negative comments, too. However, this will make your positive reviews more convincing by showing that you're not writing them all yourself. And one person's negative can be another's positive -- that comment saying that your restaurant was raucous and noisy may draw exactly  the crowds you want.

Writing About Your Staff

The About Us page is under discussion in a couple of current projects. Specifically, how should the staff be listed and discussed?

Most business owners would agree that their team is an important part of the business, and a reason people come back to them. So the classic About Us page, with a group photo of the staff, or individual photos and brief bios, often makes sense.  At least, it makes sense that it has become a classic. But there are times when that approach isn't the perfect one:

• Your staff is fluid. Whether it's a high-turnover field or you crew up for jobs as they arise, you may not be able to make a core list of staff that will last long enough to put on a page. If you only update your About Us page once every year or two, you may prefer to write more generally about your team, rather than including individuals. In that case, it's important to make some general trust-building statements, such as, "All our staff are certified for lead management," or "Our team is made up of experts in their fields," or, "Our rigorous training process ensures that all our professionals meet the highest standards." Back it up if you have some evidence: certification, the details of your training process, or degrees can do the job.
• Your staff is different from the impression you want to make. I don't mind showing you my staff -- that's Josepha on the left and Rosamond on the right. If you've worked with me, you've probably spoken with them or at least had emails. We're still debating whether to add photos to our About Us page, though, because we know that we don't really fit people's mental image of IT guys -- and the IT guys on the team are a more fluid group. We don't want to discourage people from reading more about us just because they have a stereotype in mind. If your staff is smaller than you like people to think, or you don't want to trigger automatic objections to an overseas staff, or for any other reason you want to present a slightly different image, you can combine those general trust-building statements with stock images of workers.
• You want privacy. Maybe you're running an online business on the side, and you don't really want your employers to know. Maybe your team runs a lot of businesses, and you don't want your online empire to be completely transparent to all visitors. Maybe you have more than one business persona, and you don't want to mix them up. We've even had clients who simply felt that "people don't want to know about us." There are lots of reasons that a person might not want a lot of staff information on the About Us page. But the internet is all about trust, and being too shy and retiring at the About Us page can stir up suspicions. You can allay them by writing about your company as an entity: "Homefront has been providing in-home medical care for 17 years..." 

Those are some ways to finesse the staff information. But let's say you want to do the classic About Us page, complete with all the staff info. Here's how:

• Keep the staff bios even. It's fine to write more about the owner or the principal partners than about the office manager. In general, though, try to keep the paragraphs for all staff listed about the same length, and use the same visual format.
• Keep the information consistent. When eight of the staff members have degrees listed and the ninth doesn't, readers will assume that ninth has no degree. Including family info for some of the staff and not for others draws attention to that difference. If at all possible, make the data similar. Having a little form for the staff members to fill out can help with this. 
• Keep the paragraphs parallel. If you write one bio in third person, write them all that way. If one begins with the name of the staff person, they all should. If one is in past tense, they all should be. Some clients like to have each staff member write his or her own bio; if you want to do that, consider having someone clean them all up and make them sound more uniform.
• Keep the images comparable. Recently, we've had people send in images including some color and some black and white, some casual and some posed -- one person sent a wedding portrait. It's better not to have photos than to have a hodge-podge. Hire a photographer if you need one, or at least get everyone to stand in the same place for a snap. Group photos can be great, but they can make it more difficult to keep the page up to date, unless you have a large enough staff that it doesn't matter. 

Remember, the About Us page is for reassuring people that you're trustworthy and competent, so they can feel confident about hiring you or ordering things from you. Make sure that the way you present your staff works toward that goal.

Adjectives at Your Website

Are adjectives bad news for your website content?

Some clients want to lard their text with adjectives, assuring visitors that their goods and services are the best, the greatest, and especially the most unique. Others want to avoid adjectives entirely, as though there were a law against adjectives on the internet.

Who's right?

Neither, as is so often the case with extremes. Here are the questions to ask yourself when you start contemplating the use of adjectives in your web content:

• Are you bragging? On the web, in print, or in person, you're less convincing if you're exaggerating. Is your product actually unique? That means there isn't anything else like it, a rare event. Is it actually the best? Can you prove it? Use adjectives that actually describe your product or service in a meaningful way -- your shingles may not be unique (your customers probably don't even want unique shingles) but they may be slate, or durable, or guaranteed, or award-winning, and your customers would probably like to know that.
• Is anyone searching for those adjectives? I'm amazed by how many companies want to use the word "unique" as a keyword. Now imagine yourself searching for a new bike helmet or saxophone or allergy medication. You sit down at the computer, bring up your favorite search engine, and type in... Not "unique." In fact, just about the only time people search for "unique" is in the phrase "unique gift." Are you selling unique gifts? If not, give that word up. But do check -- lots of people look for "quality roofing," and expression in which "quality" functions as an adjective. And "romantic getaway" is popular, too. If an adjective is part of a bona fide keyword phrase for your business, you ought to use it.
• Do you have room? If your home page design only gives you 250 words to work with, you may not really have enough room for adjectives. Save them for an inner page where you have more space.

First Thoughts on Typography for Your Website

The subject of typography at your website is a large one, and I'm not trying to cover it. I'm assuming here that you're not doing the design work yourself, and that what you need is enough information to recognize whether you have a problem, to choose a designer who has the skills you need, or to keep the updates you do yourself from making your site look bad.

Let's start with a good example and a bad one. The example above, from the work of Jay Jaro, shows basic things to look for in good typography:

• The left margin is even, and it's large enough.
• The decoration at the margin is balanced; the proportions are pleasing.
• The right margin, while ragged, is not excessively or distractingly ragged.
• The spacing in between letters and words is smooth
• The spacing between lines is enough for easy reading.
• The spacing between graphic headings and text headings and the main text is well proportioned.
• The decorative headings are still search-friendly text.
• When there is an uneven line, it's intentional and part of the design (in this case, the titles use a fun font that looks hand-drawn, and the title curves like a tiger's tail when it says "Take the Tiger by the tail").
• The differences in colors and fonts are enough to be interesting but not enough to interfere with reading.
• The design is appealing and in keeping with the goal of the page.

The second example, from someone who will remain nameless, has not succeeded in meeting that standard. The right edge is way too ragged, and the words are very crowded (note the top left corner of the sample piece -- sometimes there are no spaces between words at all, and there's a line containing just one word.

The graphic headings cut the columns in half. The spacing between the graphic headings, the text headings, and the words are unbalanced. The use of color and line is uninspired. And the graphic headings are images, so we lose some search advantages, too.

If you see this sort of problem at your website, don't despair. It just means that you need a designer. Find someone whose work is more like the first example than like the second one, and ask him or her to take the text and redesign it.

But what if you use a content management system, and you add content yourself?

Here's another bad example. We're fixing up this website -- not a redesign, since the owner likes the look, but a fix of content and usability, with some updates to the code and the look. This is an example where we're seeing some problems in the part the client does himself.

He's chosen light text on a dark background, which is fine unless you think you might have some older customers or visitors with limited vision. He's also chosen justified margins. That means that the program automatically adjust the spacing to make the margins even -- but look at the size of the spaces between the words!

You can only pick justified margins if you're willing to fool around with your wording and font sizing and so on to make it look good. In general, you're better off just choosing left-justified, where the words line up on the left.

If you really want to use justified margins, do as Josepha has done and keep an eye on it -- if it doesn't look good when you put it on the page, go back and change your words to make it look nice.

Finally, resist the temptation to have lots of variety. This example has trouble with spacing and margins as well, but much of the daunting effect of the page is the result of the variety of colors, fonts, sizes, and borders. There's nothing wrong with a little bit of variety, but the rule of thumb should be only to use something different if you have a reason to do so.

In the example at the top of this post, the main text is in a simple, easy-to-read font, black on a light background color. The designer then used another color in the text headings: bold, in a darker shade of the background color. The decorative titles at the top of the page are completely different; they, and the whole color scheme of the page, are based on the major illustration. In the bad example just above, we have different colors all over the page with no apparent plan or intention. There is no illustration, and no color scheme.