“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.”

If department store merchant John Wanamaker were alive today, he would find no shortage of firms wanting to sell him answers. The field of Web metrics (also called Web analytics) is exploding, as data analysts get better at sifting through data on site visits and telling Web content managers what they all should want to know:

• When people come to your site, what do they do?
• How do they feel about your organization and its Web site?
• How do you stack up against your competitors?
• What results from all these visits?

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As metropolitan dailies shrink and commercial websites struggle to entice advertisers, one news medium is enjoying unprecedented success: free weeklies.

Bulging with local ads, they cost practically nothing to produce or distribute. They may provide little intellectual stimulation, but major news media and Web investors find them intensely interesting. How, they wonder, can we do what they do?

“Local is where the Web is,” concluded the organizers of the latest invitation-only Web Managers Roundtable, Julie Perlmutter and Gary Arlen. “Local,” they say, “is vital to success in today’s digital environment.”

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We commonly read that the sum of human knowledge increases massively every year. No matter how it’s measured—by count of words, memes, Web sites discovered by Google, or piles of unread books in my office—a problem lurks within these numbers.

While new discoveries, inventions, assertions, and prognostications lead the human parade into the future, the rear guard suffers from chaos as previous knowledge becomes scattered, randomized, and irretrievably lost.

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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.

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When they err, newspapers run corrections. (Sometimes, that is, for some errors). Book publishers insert errata sheets in textbooks and correct egregious errors in subsequent editions.

But the Web, still in its adolescence, has no agreed-upon standard for corrections. There’s controversy over whether to quietly make necessary changes or to update and indicate what’s been done, and whether to preserve original text. For content such as Web site privacy policies and usage terms/conditions, there can be REAL fireworks about how changes should be posted, integrated, and publicized.

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Posted in Framing content in print and on the Web, Management of a publications enterprise, Writing and Editing 1 Comment »

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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I spend months at a time traveling the world. I have backpacked Europe, Northern and Southern Africa, across Asia on a trek from Beijing to Cairo, and most recently around South America’s Southern Cone up to Peru.

As a result of my travels, I get speaking engagements on my wanderings, and such venues have included area high schools.

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Posted in Audience research and strategic planning, Framing content in print and on the Web No Comments »

Magnificent Publications is often asked to create publications that present data clearly and effectively. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be discussing some of the classic guidelines on the subject from a leading authority on data presentation, Edward Tufte.

“Parallelism is a stylistic arrangement in which similar syntactic patterns repeat, thus allowing reader or listener to rely on the grammatical repetition to echo the logical similarity of the thought and thus improving the clarity and efficiency of the passage.” So says the Columbia Guide to Standard American English.

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Karen Sheff, MS, a data manager and biostatistician with the Indian Health Service, gave a talk at a recent IHS conference. Her specific topic was measuring diabetes and obesity, but the principles apply whenever you use data to tell a story. The first post about her talk appeared yesterday.

Here are some tips for effective graphic design in the presentation of data (adapted from Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten, by Stephen Few and The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, by Edward Tufte).

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Karen Sheff, MS, a data manager and biostatistician with the Indian Health Service, spoke at a recent IHS conference. Her specific topic was measuring diabetes and obesity, but the principles apply whenever you use data to tell a story.

There are many ways to communicate the messages revealed by data. Three types of data presentation are most common. The simplest and often most effective type is the written word. A brief sentence or a few bullet points suffice when not many numbers need to be communicated. An effective PowerPoint slide might say, “There was a 68 percent increase in diagnosed diabetes in American Indian and Alaska Native youth from 1994 to 2004.”

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