This is a link (“”MailChimp and Media Queries | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog“”) I’ve deemed interesting, inspiring or useful for others.

Bookmarked on February 03, 2012 at 02:21PM using Delicious and published to this blog with the fantastic ifttt.com.

Visit the bookmarked site: MailChimp and Media Queries | MailChimp Email Marketing Blog

This is a link (“”An introduction to Web Intents – an interview with Glenn Jones“”) I’ve deemed interesting, inspiring or useful for others.

Bookmarked on January 28, 2012 at 09:24PM using Delicious and published to this blog with the fantastic ifttt.com.

@harrybr: If you work in UX and you don’t know much about Web Intents yet, then read this interview with @glennjones: http://t.co/HsDQhc8Q

Visit the bookmarked site: An introduction to Web Intents – an interview with Glenn Jones

This is a link (“”Photogram.co“”) I’ve deemed interesting, inspiring or useful for others.

Bookmarked on January 24, 2012 at 09:53PM using Delicious and published to this blog with the fantastic ifttt.com.

Great extension of instagram’s (pretty poor) web interface. Great design too by bdrck.me

Visit the bookmarked site: Photogram.co

This is a link I’ve deemed interesting, inspiring or useful for others.

Bookmarked on Delicious and posted using www.ifttt.com.

Visit the bookmarked site

A short while back, I pitched for a project that I ultimately lost. After putting together a comprehensive proposal and fielding numerous questions (which I have no problem with), I was given the unfortunate news that I didn’t win the business. This much is normal and as with anything in life you win some and lose some. No problem there.

However, as I do with any pitch that I lose, I asked the (lost) client if they could share any particular reasons why I lost. The answer wasn’t what I expected (i.e. ‘it was so close, just between you and the other guy’ or similar). Instead, the answer was that the other agency I was pitted against decided – at the last minute it seems – to charge the project at more than half of the original amount (which was on par with what I had quoted). That’s 50% off the sticker price, folks.

What’s more, I learned that this same agency had gone ahead and created initial visual design ‘mock ups’ earlier in the proposal phase. They had performed some sort of reverse spec work voodoo. They worked on designing for a website they knew very little about, presumably making wholesale assumptions about the site’s intended users and/or statistics supporting certain design decisions, and passed it off to the potential client as a ‘this is what your site will look like, isn’t it pretty’. All very odd.

Now, this post isn’t sour grapes, at all. But it is concerning. I realise that within this growing industry we have no codification or a defined set of ‘do’s and don’t's’ for winning new web design work, but I do take umbrage with the practices employed by the agency I eventually lost out to. Their methods, values and morals seem to be completely out of whack with anything I’m used to.

At this rate, what’s to stop any agency/freelancer/studio from always undercutting their competition by gratuitously lopping off 50% or more from their original charge? What type of message does that send to potential clients about the value of the service they’re about to receive, and ultimately the value of the industry as a whole when pricing can be so fluid and gutless? Similarly, what’s to stop any agency or freelancer from spending their time creating ill-informed mock ups to sway potential clients who might be enticed by the nice colours and pretty pictures without considering the bigger picture?

I realise this might all be a common occurrence, and it might have happened to more web designers than I’m aware of. But it’s a problem, and it needs to go away sooner than later.

What are your thoughts?

You have to gather information, consult experts, write thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of words, source images and get people to contribute. It’s hardly surprising that so many organisations delay their own content creation until it becomes a critical issue – and the website is ready to launch! But creating your content can be easy.

Here’s how:

Review what you’ve already got

Take stock.

Have you already got a website full of stuff? If you do, review it.

Do a quick content audit, listing the pages of your website in a spreadsheet and giving each page a score for accuracy and completeness.

You’ll quickly get a clear picture of what needs to be done.

Consider what you need

Stop thinking about words and pages for a moment, and ask yourself: what do our users need?

Also:

• What do our website’s visitors want from us?
• What are they looking for?
• What questions do our visitors have?
• What actions do they want to take, and how can our content support those actions?
• How can we reduce customer service calls?
• How can we encourage people to leave their details with us?
• How can we encourage people to call us?

These questions will help you decide what content your website should have, and what form it should take.

For example, you might decide that the best way to explain your software to visitors is with a screencast, or that blog posts from your experts might reassure curious visitors. A free white paper might encourage sign-ups, and the offer of a free consultation might encourage enquiries by phone.

Don’t just think about the messages your organisation wants to broadcast; think about the information your visitors need and the tasks they want to complete.

Make notes

Scribble. Choosing the perfect words for your home page is a challenge to leave for another day. For now, just make notes.

Sketch it out. Write a few bullet points that cover the key things that each page must communicate. Write scrappy. You just need to get the information down – the barebones content.

Don’t worry about style, grammar or any other little details.

Contain your collaborators

Too many web projects get delayed because Janet from sales doesn’t have the time (or the inclination) to piece together some content. So don’t rely on Janet, or anyone else.

If you absolutely must rely on others (the more people you rely on, the more likely you are to fail) then contain them. Give people deadlines. And threats. Send emails with ominous subject lines (“Your content is needed by 8 June, or else you’re chopped”) and explain that if they don’t contribute, the website goes live without their content. And any late arrivals will have to join a long, slow-moving queue.

If threats don’t work, try coaxing people into action. Approach them from behind and badger them for stuff until they relent. Camp out next to their desk and interview them for the information you need. Make it easy for them. And never surrender!

Get help

Disclaimer: this is where I tell you that you need my services.

If the tricky task of creating content is grinding you down – or you just don’t have the time – then call on a professional. Copywriters aren’t just pens for hire; they’re also great at gathering information and directing the content project. So while you may still need to contribute information, the hard slog of creating content is out of your hands.

This was a guest post written by Leif Kendall, a freelance copywriter and content strategist, author of Brilliant Freelancer, founder of WriteClub and Drivvel.

Lead image courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/thetrial/1241596127/

The presentation, entitled ‘The demise of the desktop: Digital marketing and the mobile web‘ is now hosted on Slideshare, as well as embedded below.

Here’s the write up for the presentation:

“In today’s digital economy, international students are finding and interacting with your information in a multitude of ways… and perhaps most importantly via a wide array of devices. Evolving from the desktop to the mobile and/or tablet device represents a fundamental shift in how users are interacting with your websites and digital marketing campaigns.

Jon Aizlewood runs a boutique digital marketing & design studio in Brighton, serving clients from around the world with a specialised set of skills including design & build, marketing strategy & consultation. Armed with almost 10 years’ of web marketing experience, Jon’s last full-time position was at Study Group, where he managed the multichannel & multilingual e-marketing programmes for all brands – including Embassy CES -across 3 operating divisions, 13 languages and 140 countries. Visit Jon’s website for more details: http://carbongraffiti.com”

And here’s the slide deck:

Why is this big news? Because the new Boston Globe isn’t an ordinary newspaper website. For the first time, Responsive Web Design has finally got a poster child to call its own.

Responsive web design has come a long way in just 1.3 years. Back at the end of May 2010, Ethan Marcotte famously (at least to us web designers) published his seminal article on A List Apart, aptly titled ‘Responsive Web Design‘. The article introduced a new paradigm to web design – a revolutionary but not destructive or disruptive one – stating that websites should be inherently flexible to their constraints. This thinking wasn’t necessarily new, but it was so well considered and logical in both its theory and methodology that I and many others stood up and noticed. Since then, many of us have adopted it as the new norm when creating websites for clients.

However, as with any new and groundbreaking idea, it was always a working concept. Since its inception, RWD always needed a big backer. A name big enough that people beyond our small community/industry would notice and think ‘well, that’s a good idea’. A website big enough that when people viewed their other favourite websites on their multiple devices, they would notice that the Globe’s experience just ‘fit’. No pinching, no zooming, no squinting required. They could view the Globe site on their iPad, their iPhone, their Android, Android tablet, or – if they so desired – on their 13 year old Apple Newton, and for each device, the viewing/reading/browsing/subscribing experience responded and adapted to the device – not the other way around.

The point is, responsive web design, however practical and logical it is from a service provider’s perspective, needed a live and in-the-wild example to prove its real worth. The new poster child that is the Boston Globe represents in plain view just how useful, applicable and cost-effective a well-made & responsively designed website can be.

A tour of the new BostonGlobe.com from jeff moriarty on Vimeo.

I’m lucky enough to have clients who have understood the application and benefits of using responsive web design in their projects from the onset. And, judging by the fantastic output of http://mediaqueri.es, many others do too. However, the majority of companies and businesses out there are likely to need a little bit more persuading as to why designing with this approach is the best way forward. Thankfully, our jobs have just been made all the easier thanks to Ethan and that A-Team who designed and built the new http://bostonglobe.com

Here’s an argument for creating content first – or at least thinking about content first.

What is a website anyway?

Websites exist to deliver content. Websites are the things we create when we have something to say, and something to show. We create websites because we have content to display and share.

We design websites because we want content to look great, to give users a pleasing experience and to create a good impression of our treasured brands.

Designing for the content

Typically, professional web designers design websites, while the client provides the content. After all, it is the client’s content. So the designer designs, and the client gets busy working on the content. Except they don’t; they get busy with business, and forget about the content.

Meanwhile the designer designs a website based on old content, or no content at all. The designer can only assume:

• What the new content will say
• How much content there will be
• What shape the content will take (long lists, tables, bullet points, multimedia?)
• Where the content will lead people (will the copy include instructions or calls to action?)
• The focus of the content (will a key point be hammered home?)
• The tone of the content (what voice will the website have?)
• How images will fit around the copy
• If video or audio content will feature

Designing a website without content is like designing a house without knowing who will live in it.

The benefits of designing around content

Designing with content means…

• Your website feels like a planned creation – with every element pulling in the same direction.
• The design and content speak the same language.
• The design responds to and enhances the content, featuring break-out elements (such as testimonials or definitions) in the best possible way.
• The design perfectly contains the content, and is clearly designed to contain that content.
• You don’t waste money on design materials or collateral which, because of a belated content decision, become obsolete before your site launches.

In the next post we’ll consider easy ways to create your content. Because for many organisations, content production is time-consuming, complicated, and a little bit scary. But it needn’t be.

This was a guest post written by Leif Kendall, a freelance copywriter and content strategist, and author of Brilliant Freelancer.

But, I’ll admit it. Over the years my view on SEO has become increasingly negative and pessimistic. This conference helped solidify that view.

When I create sites, I’d like to think I cater to good, basic ‘on-site’ SEO best practices. I make sure the code and structure is well-made and semantically coded. I use header tags appropriately, I use descriptive names for divs – or more recently with the HTML5 spec – sections, articles , headers and footers. I do the basics to set a good foundation for clients to build on. But after that, unless I’m working with a great copywriter, much of the hard work to getting a good search ranking is very much down to the client. And their content. And I make that very clear.

Content is king

Content is and always will be king. I’m not naive enough to think that Google aren’t in it for something, but ultimately they’re trying to bring relevant search results to the masses as they drive their advertising cash cow. For the end user, like my mum or your dad, the ability to find something on the massive www is simple, quick and easy.

So back at the BrightonSEO conference, the first talk was about Google’s recent algorithmic update, codenamed ‘Panda’. Based on the tweets, this was a highly anticipated presentation, seeing as Panda clearly affects the work that the SEOs in this room do for themselves or for their clients.

During the presentation, the speaker gave a telling anecdote:

Some of our clients’ sites have Our main site has still not recovered from Panda, 4 months later.

I’ll get back to that in a second. First, some tidbits from the speaker of things to do in light of the recent Panda update:

• don’t duplicate content
• improve your site’s design to cater to your user
• write better content
• block weak content

Am I taking crazy pills? Isn’t all of the above just common sense to cater to the user > customer > conversion process? The utter nerve Google have that they updated their worldwide search algorithm – used by millions every second of every day – to ‘weed out’ all of the crap content out there on the web! Who the hell do they think they are?

As for that quote above… doesn’t the fact the speaker’s clients site(s) were still affected by Panda directly implicate them as an agency that doesn’t provide the necessary best practices, guidelines and quality content that Google and other search engines want to see?

As outlined in the comments below, the speaker worked in-house exclusively. As a result, any opinion on any client sites has been redacted.

In subsequent talks throughout the morning, an underlying theme was content. Both good and bad.

Shocking

The second speaker was utterly shocking. Speaking about creating a private blog network, he bluntly, openly recommended SEOs trick Google and the SE’s by spreading their sites over multiple IP addresses. Mix up the name servers (!). When creating sites, make them at least look ‘real’ by purchasing pro WP themes, and even go so far as installing Google Analytics, Adsense and make ‘real’ about us/contact pages. And, if they couldn’t be bothered to create multiple GA accounts, meh, just steal the code from bigger sites like the Daily Mail. Then, for content, just go to oDesk or similar and pay for any content, regardless of quality. ‘It’ll be fairly dubious, but…’. Yes, my jaw was on the floor.

The juxtaposition between these two opening talks couldn’t have been more clear. Google’s Panda update wants better, more relevant content. So do I. It has and will affect sites that don’t get in line by providing better content and better customer experience. The private blog network guy completely contradicted that, speaking about content farming, gaming Google and complete black hat practices.

One more time

Content is king. It ought to be, seeing as that’s what we do when on the web. We consume content pure and simple, and as users we want easy ways to discover and digest content. The best sites out there are designed to package content first. It’s a bonus if they’re easy on the eye. So when we and Google, MSN, etc experience bullshit fake WP blogs using the Daily Mail’s Analytics code, it affects not only my mum and your dad, but the web as a whole.

I’m understanding SEO less and less. As my clients will attest, I never recommend SEO. I recommend using common sense. Write good stuff. Sell good stuff. Get a site well built and designed. Enjoy it. Search engine ranking comes only after that.