Photographer Brad Trent tells the story of shooting a medical manufacturing facility for a spread in Business Week at his Damn Ugly Photography blog. Going in, he knew he had to get a picture of the assembly line, but to his eye it was a pretty standard shot that didn’t do a lot to make the particular company stand out as the worthy subject of a magazine profile.
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Our friends at junta42.com do more than match us up with prospective clients. In their recent webinar, they taught us a new parlor game with a useful business message.
To play, go to iStock, one of many online sources for royalty-free stock images, and type “bacon” into the search bar. Guess how many images you’ll pull up. Answer: 2,500.
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August 14, 2008
Anyone creating Web sites should have long ago abandoned the idea that a home page is the only way visitors enter a site.
In this age of search engines, any page can give a visitor the all-important first impression and also do the work of selling, educating or entertaining.
Many sites, if they monitor traffic at all, simply count visitors and map clicks, without matching page design to website goals. Web design guru Jakob Nielsen cautions against the business cost of bad design and illustrates how inadvertent obstacles waste visitors’ time, discouraging or preventing them from accomplishing what they came to do.
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August 9, 2008
Most Web sites brag about products, services, or programs. Better sites offer proof in the form of success stories or case studies. They may also toss in analytical white papers. These real-world resources give site visitors a reason for feeling confident in whatever is being sold.
But, as Jakob Nielsen points out in “Writing Style for Print vs. Web,” Web users and print readers behave differently. Web users want content they can act upon, immediately. What does that mean for a Web content developer who wants visitors to read a narrative documenting the organization’s success?
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Designing effective book covers, to the frustration of publishers everywhere, is more an art than a science. Fortunately, a few loose guidelines apply.
Betsy Kulamer, Vice President of Washington Book Publishers, reports that WBP used the following criteria for selecting the winners of the WBP 2008 Book Design and Effectiveness Awards. To see images of the winners, go to WBP’s website.
An effective cover should: Read the rest of this entry »
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May 29, 2008
It’s not your imagination. The world is moving faster and people are less patient.
I switched from dial-up Internet access to a broadband connection only four years ago, and I’ve already forgotten what it was like to wait for Web pages to load. Now, when pages don’t load instantly, I’m irritated and tempted to move on to something else. And when Web sites lack obvious links to whatever I’m seeking (product details, prices, media contacts, phone number, company mission, etc.) my patience evaporates instantly.
Jakob Nielsen—a hero to many in the Web community for advocating sensible, economical, and results-oriented practices—recently noted that Web users are “getting more ruthless” in their browsing habits. He describes people being brutally goal oriented, wanting to reach sites quickly, accomplish goals, and move on.
Posted in Design, Framing content in print and on the Web, Industry trends No Comments »
Web content managers: Do you wonder whether it makes sense to manicure your splash pages? Choose every word with care? Well, the jury is in.
It makes enormous sense.
Web design consultants have long advocated brevity. Many words make for glazed-over eyes and short visits. But now a scientifically reliable study “Not Quite the Average: An Empirical Study of Web Use,” demonstrates the limits of readers’ tolerance for verbiage. And is it low.
With the authors’ permission, the noted Web usability consultant Jakob Nielsen analyzed over 45,000 page views of 25 users who were above average in intelligence. No shortage of attention span in this group.
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Good illustrations sometimes work because they depict not the exact subject being discussed but a related concept that readers are likely to find more familiar. For example, Dan Kohan of Sensical Design writes in his newsletter about a book cover he recently designed for CASE, the Council for Advancement and Support of Education. The topic: data mining for academic fundraising.
The book treats its subject seriously, with many graphs and text tables, but the baseball analogy let Sensical Design “have a bit of fun with the cover,” Dan says.
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As photo editors know, one secret to quality is quantity. Tell the photographer to take a lot of pictures so you improve the odds of getting exactly the shot you want.
Professional photographers have long used FTP sites to upload dozens of images for editors to look at. Photo enthusiasts usually sent their editors e-mails with enormous files attached. Now, thankfully, there are commercial photo FTP sites that can put an end to all that aggravation.
Flickr, Snapfish, and Picasa, among others, all let photographers upload, manage, and share their images online. Most are free for the first gigabyte or so.
Posted in Design, Technologies for publications and Web content No Comments »
April 20, 2008
If you want to store and organize a large quantity of information for multiple users, like the components of a draft policy guide, a great low-cost way is to set up a wiki. You’ve already used one if you’ve ever accessed Wikipedia.
People will tell you that you can download free open source software and have a wonderful collaborative tool ready to use in no time. That’s all true, except the part about time.
Posted in Design, Technologies for publications and Web content 2 Comments »
