I’m very excited that I’ve been invited to write about content strategy for the Econsultancy blog. Econsultancy is one of the world’s biggest digital marketing communities, with over 100,000 members.
I’ll be posting at Econsultancy around once a month. My first post is about content audits.
Also worth mentioning: our colleague Damion Brown is presenting a variety of Econsultancy’s training courses in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth. These courses have a fantastic reputation and Damion is, needless to say, a brilliant trainer, so get on board!
We all agree (hopefully) that websites should be intuitive. But what do we actually mean?
For most public-facing websites, the meaning of “intuitive” is pretty simple – in theory, if not in practice. For example, if you’re building an online shop, you want to create a site structure, navigation scheme and labelling system that will help your potential customers find the products and information they’re looking for with as little guesswork as possible. (It’s Steve Krug’s “Don’t Make Me Think” principle.)
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There’s a whole heap of buzz around Google+ since it launched back in July, with astronomical usage adoption rates. Meanwhile, Google has been adding more and more features and increasing the level of connection between the social network and other Google properties.
But here’s a tricky question that’s cropping up a lot: if I’m a business, how can I develop my presence on Google+ when businesses are specifically prohibited from using the network?
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So you’ve launched your new website. It looks great and everything seems to work. Your developers tell you it’s been thoroughly tested on every current browser, in every operating system, on every device from phones to iPads to good old fashioned computers. You crack the champagne and look forward to a well-earned break.
The next day, you get an email. “Your website isn’t working”.
The good news is that people are actually looking at your website! The bad news is that for at least one of them, something has gone wrong: your home page doesn’t display the way it’s meant to, your fancy embedded video won’t start, or worst of all, your shopping cart won’t let them check out.
So what’s going on? If your website’s been tested, shouldn’t it just work?
Unfortunately, it’s not quite that simple. To understand why, we have to think about what a website really is. Read more
Lately, every time I’ve visited an ATM, I’ve come away a little bit annoyed. This has made me think about what we do when we make websites, and about not saying “yes” to a new feature unless we really know our users want it.
Getting money out of an ATM must be one of the most meticulously designed user experiences in the world. ATMs have been around – at least in prototype form – since the early 1960s, so designers and engineers have had plenty of time to refine how they interact with customers.
Most of the time, they’ve got it down to a fine art. Getting cash from an ATM has become such a streamlined experience that we hardly need to think about each step as it happens.
But sometimes, someone decides to throw a spanner in the works. Read more
