Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.”
—Rachel Lovinger
—Highlighted by Ian Betteridge in The Elements of Content Strategy by Erin Kissane
Content strategy is to copywriting as information architecture is to design.”
Web content strategists are made, not born.
A great image by Richard Ingram I came across while reading an equally great post by Smashing Magazine
(Source: jsavary)
styledeficit bits and bobs: 'Write like you talk'
This never really rung true with me. Not really. But this is a much better explanation:
“To my writing classes I used later to open by saying that anybody who could talk could also write. Having cheered them up with this easy-to-grasp ladder, I then replaced it with a huge and loathsome…
“Nobody surfs the web anymore”
Steve Rosenbaum, at Confab 2011:
“Nobody surfs the web anymore. The waves are too damn big.”
He’s right. And the thing is that we’ve mostly created the waves ourselves with the deliberate intention of stopping surfing.
People don’t surf the web. They go to a few regular sites. They gather feeds together using RSS. They ping straight off to links gathered via social media (and then jump straight back to Facebook again). But they don’t surf, hopping from link to link, site to site, in the way that we used to.
Why is that?
First, because of the intoxicating power that search engines deliver to get instant answers. Type in a question – bang. Instant result!
But secondly, and I think more importantly, because the people who build sites have adopted a view of users that looks more like a railroad than a highway. We think that we can – and should – put the users on tracks to the holy destination of conversion, and anything that lets them drift away from that ultimate destination is to be avoided like the plague. They might wander off a little – but only so far as we’ll let them, before we start putting in roadblocks and placing big fat signposts down to get them back on the road.
We’ve made the waves too high to surf. We’ve trained users, like performing monkeys, to press a button and get a reward. And that’s a little sad.
You can see it in our persona work. Look at the average persona template. There’s a nice dinky bit of narrative, and then we’re straight into the goals. The user must have goals. Why else would they be online, right? Why else might they be on our site?
We talk about user journeys, but those user journeys are like train travel – the driver, us, is in control. They user is just buying a ticket (and, in most cases, isn’t even aware of it). We talk about funnels, shovelling in people at the top and getting conversions at the bottom. Grist to the mill.
As content people, with years of experience in creating stuff that people want to read, watch, and engage with, we need to be wary of talk like this. We need to remember that users – people – are human beings and not performing animals that you can prod and poke and reward into doing what you want. That personas don’t become so dictatorial that the “goals” in them (always an abstraction, and too often aligned directly to the company’s goals) don’t limit real people who come to our sites. We need to remember that sometimes, people need to surf, to feel a part of things and not just fodder for the conversion mill.
And we need to remember that the best companies, the best brands, have enough confidence in what they do that they allow a little space for their customers to be themselves. Some space to surf.
Create a Cheap Server Using the Regular Snow Leopard Install
Many Mac users were wowed by Apple’s Mac mini server package when it was announced, but at $1,000, it’s still a bit too pricey for even the average person to justify shelling out the cash for a home server. Fear not true believers, we’re going to show you how to turn that old Intel Mac you’ve got lying around into a server that can duplicate many of Snow Leopard Server’s features without shelling out another penny.
Difficulty Level
Hard
What You Need
> Intel Mac
> OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (We recommend the Snow Leopard Family Pack)
> MAMP (Free)
> OpenFire (Free)
> XCode
> QuickTime Broadcaster (Free)
> Router that supports Port Forwarding (We used the Airport Extreme)
(Source: fieldytech)
I’ve used a few different 7-inch Android tablets and although I envied the pocketable size, they never asserted themselves as general-purpose computers. They could run some ambitious Android apps, but every additional function bore a scarlet suffix. You could create and edit documents … sorta. You could process a folder of email … within reason. That sort of thing.
Honestly. It’s a small exaggeration to say that I could board a flight to China tomorrow, be in Shenzhen by the next morning, plunk down about 1800 Yuan for a working Tegra 2-based 10.1-inch Android slate, draw my own logo on it with a white Sharpie on the flight home, and then after a quick 15-minute press conference at the airport Ramada I’d be just as credible a force in Android 3.0 tablets as most of the companies who showed off hardware at CES this year.
"Don't forget..." - a set on Flickr
A genius set of images of surprising street art. One for the designers amongst you.
Question: What’s wrong with this picture?
Answer: The content has become massively less important in the hierarchy of the page than everything else. The important bit – the content – has been pushed so far down the page that I have to scroll down to read even just the first paragraph.
This is why I use stuff like Reader on Safari: I’d like the content back, please.
iReader
One of the finest features of Safari 5 is Reader, which allows you to get to a simple, uncluttered view of any web page just by clicking a button. It’s the instant answer to the overkill of page furniture that lots of sites seem to want to put us through (and I’m looking at you The Guardian).
Only one problem: At the moment, Chrome is my browser of choice. I like Safari, but I find Chrome just a little bit nippier at opening and rendering pages.
Enter iReader, an extension for Chrome which completely rips off replicates Reader, even managing to do the trick which puts together multiple pages into a single view. It’s slick, works nicely, and does the job. Recommended.
