It’s a great shot, but it’s overly literal, and, as Brad writes, he wanted to push past it to deliver a more artistic statement about Conmed:

Dave loved it ‘cuz it showed off their new production facilities and how they used new ideas to solve a manufacturing problem, but for me it was more of a ‘point picture’ and I knew there was more we could do to sell the idea of individual, hand-assembled production.

After hunting around the corporate headquarters, Brad found an elevator lobby with an eerie green glow. Check out the final image in the Business Week article.

Brad didn’t put his subjects in a studio or an exotic location – he just dislocated them ever so slightly from their usual surroundings. The resulting photograph situates them inside their place of work, but it highlights the company’s human capital and its identity. The subjects of the photograph are clearly in medical manufacturing, but by moving away from their workstations, he told the story of the people at the company. It’s a more unique, more persuasive, and more human story.

One of the best services we can provide to our clients is to tell their story back to them differently than they tell it to themselves, with pictures or with words. Looking in a mirror every day can familiarize you with the bridge of your nose, but a content manager should be smart and brave enough to tell clients something they don’t see. There’s a lot of pressure to give a client exactly what they want, but there’s longer-lasting value in changing something ever so slightly in order to show them what they didn’t know they had.

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.

Want to try a few others?

• Vienna, Austria: 2,186
• Wiener schnitzel, 156
• Mediterranean Sea, 20,020
• Gaza Strip, which sits astride it, 42. Huh? Try a newsier source like http://apimages.ap.org. Be prepared to pay more.

But some topics apparently fail to interest photographers, at least those who sell via iStock. We got 18 results for dude ranch and 19 results for ranch dressing. Oh, well.

One take-home message from this brief examination is that people have mastered the use of the digital camera. Another is that your aerial shot of a baked potato with sour cream and chives may be on some publications maven’s wish list. The perfect image for any given story is out there.

There’s another message, with possibly more powerful overtones. The most popular download (14,622) over the past three months portrays a child holding a dandelion. To us, this says “possibility” and “innocence,” both of which are in short supply these days.

We invite you to share your own stock-photo observations with us, whether quirky, profound, or pragmatic.

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.

Two sites with effective landing pages are Wikipedia and Amazon. The former site, a collaborative encyclopedia whose pages are often in the first few search results, doesn’t waste time when you land; it simply delivers the information sought. Entries’ consistent format provides central topical text surrounded by ancillary links and site navigation—but content is king. Amazon’s site allows purchasing on every book’s Web page, either by “Add to Shopping Cart” or by one-click ordering.

For an example of what not to do, Nielsen cites Christopher Norman Chocolates for using ineffective landing pages and internal splash screens hiding product assortments that may interest visitors. To avoid similar mistakes, examine Web pages you create as if you’re new to your site and on a mission. Ensure that what you see satisfies visitor needs and sells, educates, or entertains. Check how pages look using as many different browsers as possible, including the increasingly popular mobile devices.

Web Marketing Today gives specific—and extreme—advice on creating narrowly focused landing pages: “Any element of the landing page that distracts your visitor from taking the intended step must be ruthlessly eliminated.” Use your judgment. You don’t want visitors to feel buttonholed by a hard sell. But you must keep them focused on their (and your) business at hand.

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?

A little strategy is required. The greatest benefit of a case study or white paper Is having it circulated and discussed among decision makers. That means it needs to be mailed or downloaded and printed. Nobody wants to read it online.

Web managers often use “teaser” copy to persuade visitors to access long pieces. They identify the customer who is profiled (recognizable marquee names are best), state their pressing problem, and then present the elegant, economical, innovative, or otherwise superior solution. Finally, they supply an offer or link for full details.

Requiring a minimal registration process to access a full story generates a supply of prospects for marketing or sales follow-up. Registration also helps you understand and document your site visitor demographics, which is essential for advertising-supported sites.

For an example of a site that gets it right, look at the popular and comprehensive TechTarget (PDF). It is a network of technology information sites that offers enough valuable and instantly available content to make individual sites worth visiting. The site-family advantage allows one registration to open doors to dozens of Web sites. For example, SearchDataCenter.com offers abundant tips with simple clicks, but protects white papers and other valuable resources behind a registration screen that elicits information for follow-up.

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:

• represent the book’s contents. This means not just its subject matter, but its tone: see, for example, our earlier entry about a WBP award-winning cover designed by Dan Kohan.
• appeal to the book’s intended audience. This means, of course, knowing what a book’s core audience is, while at the same time allowing for potential expansion of that audience.
• be aesthetically appealing. Even readers who think they have no interest in the material should be drawn to the book.

These interrelated criteria are a fine place to start when designing or sizing up a book. But what do they entail on a more concrete level?

The 12.5 Percent Rule. Kulamer says the judges for the WBP Awards often apply the “12.5 Percent Rule”: scan the cover of a book and, in a PDF, reduce its size to 12.5%. If it looks like mush, the cover is probably not doing its job. This is especially important in the Amazon era, when many readers first encounter the cover in a miniature version on the Internet. The three different regions of text on the cover—title, subtitle, and author—should be discernible at a glance, and the images should enhance the text’s readability rather than interfere with it. Less, as is so often the case, is more.

Keep it readable. One way to make a book stand out from its competitors is to use a funky or obscure typeface. Unfortunately, such an approach tends to lessen a book’s visual impact rather than heighten it. Kulamer recommends using a clean, readable font, so that consumers can jump immediately from the letters on the page to the concept behind those letters. Probably best to stay away from Wingdings and its cousins.

Pay attention to the whole package. One often-neglected aspect of a book cover is its spine. This is what people see if they are browsing the shelves in a bookstore or library, and the impact it makes is important. Here, again, the emphasis should be on clarity and legibility. Kulamer also notes that the WBP Awards judges especially appreciated books that integrated their spines into the front and back covers, so that the design of the book when it’s spread open creates a unified effect. As for the back cover, Kulamer says a common pitfall is to use a thin, white sans serif font against a dark background. Instead, she recommends using a heavyweight sans serif against a lighter background.

For a book that puts all of these elements together, check out Great Growing At Home: The Essential Guide to Gardening Basics, by Allan A. Swenson, which won a WBP Award for Illustrated Cover or Jacket for a commercial publisher.

Note the simple design that manages to incorporate several different images, the earth-toned images against a wood-like background, the bold font, the emphasis on the word “HOME,” and the clean division between title, subtitle and author.

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.

He adds that success rates for people achieving what they set out to do online are now about 75%, compared to the 1999 figure of 60%. There’s more. In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go. In 2008, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there.

This makes it much harder to create sticky Web sites with gadgets and blinkies (and even content!) encouraging visitors to remain on site after they’ve done what they came to do.

It’s pointless to ignore or deny this real-world insight, and accommodating it will please your readers and help you accomplish your goals. (You do have explicit goals for your site, right?)

• Ensure that visitor actions match your site’s goals. These can include reading articles and viewing ads, buying something, registering, subscribing, requesting information, commenting, participating in a community, etc. You didn’t create your Web site for your own entertainment, so make sure—on an ongoing basis—that you’re getting your money’s worth in presenting it to the world.
• Watch for the “abandoned shopping cart” syndrome—that is, visitors vanishing after partially completing transactions. More than a few of these indicates problems with your Web site and obstacles to doing business with you. A common irritant, shipping charges hidden until late in a purchase, often results in a shrug and no completion. If your goal is having people read your content, notice and remedy site occupancy too short for meaningful communication.
• Solicit, encourage, read, and process visitor feedback. Readers and visitors justify your site’s existence, so it’s perilous to ignore their feelings and comments. Don’t hide your “Contact us” link; don’t drop comments into a black hole; and don’t send a form response. Responding quickly, personally, and positively will gratify your fans and can often turn a critic into an ally.

People evaluate Web sites in the blink of an eye—make sure they like what they see in that instant.

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.

Nielsen plotted time spent on each page against number of words on the page. He got a remarkably straight line. After they spent about 25 seconds orienting themselves to the page, its contents and navigation, the time that readers spent with 100 words was about 4.4 seconds. Adding a second 100 words to the page bought another 4.4 seconds of reading time, and so forth.

Can you absorb 100 words in 4.4 seconds? Not really. As a general rule, Nielsen figures, a literate person reads 250 words per minute. A 100-word chunk takes 24 seconds to read. The 4.4 second finding reveals that, for every 100 words you add to a Web page, you average visitor is reading 18 percent of your new content.

Should his findings motivate you to shorten all your copy? Nielsen himself doesn’t plan to. His articles run into the thousands of words. However, he points out, he targets a small, elite readership with a commitment to usability.

You may have different goals. If you want to reach a broad readership and persuade them to take action – buy something, give money, call their Congressman – you might take another look at your Website. Do you really need all those words?

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.

For example, the final design uses an old scorecard (Cubs 3, Reds 2) as a background element that suggests both baseball and data.

Dan quotes Lori Woehrle, the CASE Director of Book Publishing, who thinks the cover strikes “just the right balance of fun and sobriety, which matches the tone of the text exactly.”

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.

I am a longtime user of Picasa, the photo organizer from Google. It’s user-friendly and allows me to upload and edit photos with ease. The software is easy to install and use, and the editing features enable everything from minor tweaks, to complete photo makeovers through color enhancement. There are also options to create collages and timelines and post images to a blog.

More important for many users, Picasa software lets you create Web albums on a page of your own, for either password-protected or public viewing. The Picasa uploader is straightforward and fast.

In case you wondered why I need an online storage vault, check out the photos from my misadventures around the world.

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.

We became enthusiastic about wikis after Leslie O’Flahavan gave a presentation about them (PPT) to the Capital PC Users Group (CPCUG).

Since then, we’ve put up three wikis for client projects. Each uses progressively more of the wiki’s capabilities, which are impressive. In the process, we encountered a few road blocks that all novice wiki developers likely face. We expect that the process will get smoother as the technology evolves, but in the meantime, here are a few things to keep in mind:

• Documentation resides in various places. As is often the case with open source software, documentation is spotty. We use TikiWiki, and the “wiki help” function, once you’re in editing mode, offers the basics—how to rename the homepage and how to center text, for example—but beware, wikis have elements of a black hole. Entire pages seem to disappear temporarily, only to pop up again hours later. You can also go to tikiwiki.org, but the explanations there aren’t always clear. We wish we had bought Wikis for Dummies sooner.
• A little more knowledge can be a dangerous thing. One rule to live by: the more you know about wikis, the greater your risk may be of misplacing information.
• Many hands don’t always make lighter work. A wiki allows information to be modified and augmented by a variety of users. Unless you have a high tolerance for chaos, you’re probably better off designating one or two moderators with access to the editing password.
• Passwords are initially an obstacle. So that everybody in the world can’t snoop around your project wiki, create a screening password. But be sure those working on your project know what it is (!) Then, to edit files, create an additional “admin” password for those administering the pages.
• If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. None of the clients whose projects gave rise to wikis were grateful or even pleased at first. We shouldn’t have been surprised. A wiki isn’t fancy graphically. Adding content can be complicated. Probably most important, using a wiki requires more effort than using e-mail until you get the hang of it. We like our wikis, but we have a powerful incentive to invest in collaborative tools. If we rely solely on e-mail and overlook one, a client’s publication might suffer. Being organized matters a lot to us.

Creating a wiki can be fun. But the most gratifying moment comes when the project that once consisted of enormous files and innumerable e-mails is now all neatly laid out, a click away.