Web owners

Writing for the Web - What You Need to Know

owner — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:28:52 +0000

Do you have a Web site, but wonder how well it is conveying your key messages? Or are you thinking about writing for your Web site? Here are 10 tips to help you do it right:

Less is more. When it comes to reading on the Web, people are impatient. Usability studies show that people scan the text rather than reading word-for word. They must quickly find what they want, or they won’t stay.
Put the most important information first. The first paragraph on every page should contain the conclusion so site visitors can know immediately what the page is about and decide whether they want to read further.
Emphasize key information. Use headings, bulleted lists, numbered lists, and limited amounts of bolding and color to draw the reader’s eye to key information, and use them frequently.
Use active voice. In active voice, the relationship between the subject and the verb is clear: “I made mistakes when I cancelled the product line.” In passive voice, the do-er of the action is less clear: “Mistakes were made when the product line was cancelled.” Active voice is clear, has more zip, and is more concise.
Use clear, plain language. The Web is international, but even if you think your visitors are native speakers, always use shorter words and avoid slang where possible. Complex words are even harder to read and understand online. For example, use “Joe completed the task on time” not “Joe completed the task in a timely manner”.
Use consistent terminology. To avoid confusion, visitors need writing that is consistent. For example, if visitors need to create an account, avoid writing “user account” and “user login” to mean the same thing.
Limit paragraphs to two or three lines. Each paragraph should convey a single idea, so the site visitor can easily scan it and not worry about missing important information.
Make links descriptive. A link that says “Click here” is useless. The visitor must stop, back up, and at least read the prior sentence. The link should describe its purpose. For example, “Subscribe to our newsletter” is better than “To subscribe to our newsletter, click here”.
Use digits for numbers. Visitors often scan for facts, such as product weight or size, and numerals are easier to spot. Plus, they are more compact, so use numerals for all numbers, even those below 10.
Clearly label buttons. Buttons should express what happens when they are pressed, and use words that visitors understand. Clarity is especially important when visitors are making purchases on an e-commerce site. For example, to take visitors to a page that verifies their order, use a button that says “Verify my Order” not “Order Now”.

10 tips for Web site success

owner — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 23:27:21 +0000

This article offers ten tips that you can use to make your Web site more effective. As an Internet user, you may find these design tips intuitive. But when it comes to your own site, you may fail to recognize design problems that seem so obvious when you view other sites. Use these design guidelines to overcome your blind spots and objectively evaluate your site.

1: It’s not about you.1

If you remember nothing else from this article, remember this: you need to stop thinking that visitors to your site care about the things you think are important.

People often pass quickly through dozens of sites. Rarely do they stop to consider the owner’s needs and goals for those sites.

People use Google to search because it consistently provides the best search results. If you created a new search engine, people might visit it to see if they would get better results. They would be unlikely to use the search engine because you needed a high visitor count to satisfy your venture capitalists.

2: Design each page to solve the visitor’s problem.1

This is the corollary to Tip 1. It’s not about you, it’s about your visitor. You may own the Web site, but if you want visitors, you had better design it for them.

Go through your site now. Look at every page and ask yourself, "What problems does this page solve for my target audience?" Get rid of anything that fails to provide some value to the visitor.

3: Understand what your visitors want.

I’ve seen various ways of grouping the reasons why people visit Web sites, but this is my favorite. People visit a site to get:

Information
Products
Entertainment

Understand why people come to your site. If they come for information, then don’t act like an entertainment company by starting each visit with a long Flash intro.

4: Write in terms of benefits to the visitor.

When you use Tip 2 to clean up your site, you may be able to save some content by rewriting it to address your targeted visitor. For example:

Bad: We are the largest pickle jar vendor in the state.

Good: We can deliver 30,000 pickle jars in 24 hours to any location in the state.

5: If you want the visitor to do something, make it easy.

It’s almost embarrassing to write this tip—it seems so obvious.

Do you have something you want people to do when they visit your Web site—something really important to the success of the site? Then don’t make them:

Hunt for the task in small print
Install and configure additional software.
Reveal personal information not relevant to the task
Wander through a maze of pages to reach your goal
Create yet another log on
Read a twenty-step procedure

To guard against this error, review each page on your site and decide which tasks you want your visitors to perform. Document the steps needed to accomplish these tasks. Then try to reduce the number of steps—the shorter the list, the greater the odds of achieving your goals.

6: One main action per page

As an addition to Tip 5, you’ll also improve the odds of getting people to take a specific action if you avoid distracting them with other tasks. When possible, focus each page on a single task.

The home page can be a problem since it sometimes serves multiple masters. Consider narrowing its goal to providing crystal-clear navigation.

7: People don’t read, they scan.

When you started reading this page, it’s likely that you first scanned the title and then the headings. If you found something new or interesting, you might then have read the accompanying text. If your scan revealed a lot of useful information, you may have gone back to read or skim the items you skipped on your first pass.

This is typical Web-reading behavior. As a Web site owner, you need to take this reading style into account when writing your content. Be sure to highlight key points and keep content short. It’s not easy, but it’s well worth the effort.

8: Avoid distracting the visitor with motion.

If you have ever been in a restaurant or bar where a television is playing, you know how difficult it is to keep your eyes off of it, even when you don’t want to watch. This "orienting response", first described by Ivan Pavlov in 1927, is an instinctive reaction to any sudden or novel visual or auditory stimulus.2

If our eyes are drawn to a motion on a Web page, then they are not scanning content. If the motion exists for a short time, visitors will delay reading your content until it stops. If the motion persists, each major movement will draw their eye away from the content.

Flash animations seem to be a fad these days3. Companies that should know better seem to feel that animation is a requirement, particularly on their home page—this includes a lot of Web design companies. Often, the animation has zero benefit for the visitor (remember Tip 1).

Animation isn’t necessarily bad—in certain situations (YouTube anyone?), it is essential. Here are my recommendations for its proper use:

Avoid motion on pages that have important content.
Animate only one item at a time.
Let the user initiate the animation.

I wouldn’t mind all those silly Flash presentations if I could turn them on only when I wanted to. Actually, I use the Flashblock extension in Firefox, so I do have a choice.

By the way, of all the useless animations, the Flash intro page wins top honors (again, see Tip 1). An article on what people hate most about Web sites said that the “skip intro” button is the most used button on the Internet4.

9: Avoid automatically playing sound.

Everything said about animations applies more strongly to sound. We've probably all had one embarrassing moment at work when a Web site unexpectedly started blaring music, immediately bringing you unwanted attention.

The key to good use of audio is simple: always let the user enable it.

10: You can sometimes break the rules.

Not that it’s a good idea, but you can have a successful site and still get away with breaking the rules. All you need is a product or service that no one else offers and is in high demand...say, first class tickets from New York to London for $10. Or the formula for turning lead into gold using only common household chemicals and tools.

The majority of us will never be in this position. We have plenty of competition and on the Web, the competition is just a click away.

References

Subscribing to news feeds

owner — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 02:57:53 +0000

You'll see this symbol on our site and many others: . It indicates the presence of an news feed that you can subscribe to. If that means nothing to you, don't worry. In this article I'll explain what a news feed is and why you may benefit from using it.

Background

You are probably familiar with blogs, which are used to report on personal or news events. Imagine that you had a blog and every day or two, you added a new entry. Your postings are not on any regular schedule. For your fans to keep up-to-date, they need to check your site on a regular basis to see if anything new has appeared.

Now imagine that you are the blog reader. How likely is it that you would make the effort to repeatedly visit every blog site that might interest you? Someone figured out that there had to be a better way to read blogs and the news feed was born.

With a news feed, each new blog article gets added to a special file. As a reader, you use a special type of software called a news reader to read these files. When you add the file's location to your reader, you are said to be subscribing to the news feed. Each time you start your news reader, it checks each of your subscriptions and looks for articles you haven't read. It presents these to you—you can read the ones that interest you and discard the rest.

In years past, people accomplished this with e-mail newsletters (actually, they still do—many people like to stick with what they know). Each new article or set of articles would be e-mailed to each subscriber. You would read them with your regular e-mail program, and save or delete the messages as appropriate.

If e-mail works, why use a news reader? There are several advantages:

You can subscribe and unsubscribe at any time and the effect is immediate.
You do not need to give out your e-mail address or tell anyone about your subscriptions.
You can read articles on your schedule, not on whatever schedule the author uses to send e-mails.
A good news reader will make it easy to go through the articles you receive and find the ones you are interested in.

Another view

There is another way to think about news feeds that highlights the connection to news.

Imagine that a news reader is software that lets you design your own newspaper. You place world news on page one and local news on page two. You add a business section, an entertainment section and so on. The content for each section of your paper comes from the various news feeds you select. Just as you read the newspaper each morning, you can bring up your news reader once a day to see the articles that have been added.

The advantage of this model is that it makes you think about creating a useful source of information as opposed to a random selection of feeds you encounter.

Articles

What does an article in a news feed contain?

A headline
The date and time the article was published
The author
Either the full content of the article or a "teaser" with a link to the full article

The reason some articles are incomplete is to entice you to the Web site. Most authors like to know how many readers they have, which articles get the most attention, etc. It is difficult to get this information if you can read the complete article through your news reader. It is also difficult to expose you to other Web site content or to advertising, which funds some blogs.

Types of news feeds

So far, I have avoided describing the different types of news feeds. I'll mention some of the common types available in case you encounter their names. For most people, this is a problem for the news reader, not for them.

RSS is a popular type of news feed. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Several different versions are available, but good news readers handle all of them.

The other common format is called Atom, which provides some improvements over RSS. Again, it's best to leave to the details to the news readers, but if you have a choice of both formats, you may get better results with the latter.

Reading news feeds

Choosing the right news reader makes all the difference. Many are free and I recommend you try out different ones to see which works best for you. New ones are always appearing.

The news reader I use is called GreatNews. I like it for two reasons:

It makes it easy to quickly skim over hundreds of articles
It's display captures a bit of the "newspaper" experience

Some other popular news readers I have heard about are Bloglines and NewsGator. Have something you like better? Send me a note and tell me why.

A quick guide to GreatNews

Here's what a typical GreatNews window looks like. In this example, I am displaying just the content pane. There are several different styles you can use. This one is called the "newspaper" style:

For an alternative view, I've made all three GreatNews panes visible. The side pane shows your subscriptions, organized within folders. The top pane shows just headlines—you can use it for quickly skimming through a lot of articles.

The main question I had when I started using news feeds was: how do I subscribe to a feed? What exactly do I do with the symbol I see on so many sites.

To subscribe to a feed from Firefox, use the Options menu and select the Feeds tab. Select GreatNews as the feed reader. From then on, if you click on a feed icon, GreatNews will automatically start and add the new feed to its list.

In IE7, it's just a little harder. Bring up GreatNews and click on the Add News Feed icon on the tool bar. Copy the URL of the page displaying the feed icon into the Feed URL field of the dialog GreatNews displays and select Next. GreatNews will examine the page and locate the feed(s) it contains. In other words, while some news readers need to be told exactly where to find the feed, GreatNews just needs to know the Web page which the feed symbol; it will the exact location of the feed on its own.

Try it, you'll like it

People who use news readers would find it hard to live without one. But many people are reluctant to use news feeds—they imagine it as something mysterious, difficult to learn and use and of doubtful value. I hope this article has helped clarify the benefits of news feeds and enticed you to create your personal newspaper.

Using FTP

owner — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 20:18:20 +0000

This article will teach Web site owners with Microsoft Windows how to use FTP to transfer files to and from their Web site. It is intended as a tutorial for people who have never used FTP. You should be comfortable using an Explorer window to move or copy a file from one folder to another before attempting this tutorial.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. A protocol is a language that computers use to perform a particular task. Files can be transferred from one computer to another in various ways, but File Transfer Protocol, as the name implies, is particularly well suited to this task.

Installing an FTP client

Since FTP is only a protocol, we need to find a program that implements that protocol. More precisely, we want an FTP client which can then communicate with any FTP server. You can think of the client as the equivalent of your Web browser and the server as the equivalent of a Web site.

The program I'm going to recommend is called FTP Surfer. It is free, courtesy of Whisper Technology Limited. You can download it from their site. Despite its age, it works well and is extremely easy to use. If you find something even easier, please let me know.

Click on the download link and select a place to store the downloaded file. When the download completes, locate the file and double-click on it to begin the installation. Click Next to reach the license agreement. Accept the terms and click Next again. Choose to let it install in the default location by clicking Next and the program will be installed. Click Finish to exit the installation program.

Since we want to transfer files to and from our Web site, we will need the address of the FTP server associated with our site, as well as a few other pieces of information. You will usually need to talk to your Webmaster or hosting provider to get the information you need.

The following data should be sufficient:

The name of the FTP server.
The username and password of the FTP account.
The path to the top of the Web site.

For instance, if our Web site were called www.sample.com and hosted by ICDSoft.com, the answers would be:

ftp.sample.com
The same username and password used to access the account's control panel.
/www/www

Configuring FTP Surfer

With this information, we're ready to start running FTP surfer. Bring up the Start menu, select Programs, then FTP Surfer and FTP Surfer again to start the program. The first thing we'll do is create a profile for our Web site.

In the menu bar, select File, then New and Site Profile. The Profiles dialog will appear. We will enter our data in the tabs on the right. Here is what the dialog will look like when it's filled out for our sample site:

A few notes:

The Name and Description can be anything you want.
The Server type should be set to Auto-detect.
The User profile should be User defined.
To enter the path, select the Explore from field and then the User defined item from the drop down. Now type in the path given by your Webmaster or hosting provider. If the path is "/", you can also select Login folder.

The remaining tabs can be left at their default values. Press OK to complete the profile creation. Your FTP surfer window should now look like this:

You should leave most of FTP Surfer's settings at their default value. But you should check these values by clicking on the Tools menu and then on Options:

In theContent tab, uncheck Hide files starting with a period. This allows you to see all files on your Web site.
In the Connections tab, make sure Always use PASV mode is checked. Most of today's FTP servers seem to work better with the client in "passive" mode. You may want to check with your Webmaster to verify whether passive mode is recommended for your FTP server.

Adding a profile and configuring FTP Surfer is something you only have to do once. From then on, you start the program and can immediately begin transferring files.

Transferring files

What makes FTP Surfer easy-to-use is that it operates much like an Explorer window. Click on the profile name in the Explorer tab on the left-side of the window and FTP Surfer will automatically connect to your Web site and present a file display similar to this:

To upload a file (you go up from a client to a server), open a normal Explorer window containing the file you want to transfer. Drag the file from the Explorer window into the FTP Surfer window. The file will be copied to your Web site (your local copy will not be deleted).

To download a file, drag it from the FTP Surfer window to an Explorer window.

If you are more comfortable using Copy and Paste to copy a file from one location to another, you can also use Copy and Paste to upload or download files with FTP Surfer.

Final words

With great power comes great responsibility. Make sure you understand where to place any files you transfer. Consult with your Webmaster if you have any questions.

Don't delete any file on the FTP site that you are not familiar with—files deleted through FTP Surfer are permanently deleted. They are not placed in the Recycle Bin.

If you have a small Web site and a fast connection, a good safety trick is to copy the entire Web site to a temporary location on your PC before you make any changes. If anything goes wrong, you can copy the files back to restore your site.