The Red Bridge

Can’t we just get any writer to do our web page or social media? Well, no. Let me explain…

Paul Ford – writer and NPR’s All things considered contributor – has an interesting take on things. In his fascinating – and now well-known – blog post The Web is a Customer Service Medium, he argues that each communications medium answers a question.

For example, “How do I distract myself without leaving the house?” Answer – TV or, “What’s going on locally and in the world, at length?” Answer – newspaper.

The fundamental question of the web is: “why wasn’t I consulted?”

Ford says humans,

… need to be consulted, engaged, to exercise their knowledge (and thus power), and no other medium that came before has been able to tap into that as effectively.

The need to be consulted makes the web the customer service medium par excellence

MetaFilter is a blog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to. It’s different to the typical blog where one person posts their ideas on the unique things they find on the web. MetaFilter extends the idea of a blog to discussions across all its membership.

When Ford asked MetaFilter founder Matt Haughey what made it a success, he said, “I’d like to think it’s intense moderation and customer service.” So Ford’s point is:

The web is not, despite the desires of so many, a publishing medium. The web is a customer service medium. “Intense moderation” in a customer service medium is what “editing” was for publishing.

If you think about it, Google is built on consultation; it ranks results, among other things, by asking websites whether they’ve linked to a site.

I would say every writer can write for the web if they keep the question “why wasn’t I consulted?” in mind.

Web content specialists do this with a passion.

Speciality content for your customer service medium

Web visitors want to be consulted and not just in a “your-call-is-important-to-us” kind of way:

• Find out what they’re interested in by consulting: ie. find out their tasks
• Make your your site easy to navigation by asking through a card sorting exercise
• Use the words people most often use by checking out Google Keywords tool
• Get some training in writing for the web

PS. cartoon is from xkcd.com.

In a scene from the TV series Mad Men, 1950s Ad Exec Don Draper pitches a campaign to Kodak executives:  ‘The Carousel’. Draper’s monologue here on YouTube is clever storytelling, well written and acted:

… nostalgia literally means, ‘the pain from an old wound’. It’s a twinge in your heart, far more powerful than memory alone. This device isn’t a space ship, it’s a time machine. It goes backwards and forwards. And it takes us to a place where we ache to go again.

It’s not called ‘The Wheel.’ It’s called ‘The Carousel’.  It lets us travel the way a child travels. Around and around. And back home again. To a place where we know we are loved.

Wonderfully entertaining. (Also, a wonderful antidote to PowerPoint presentations but that’s another story.)

But when it comes to websites, carousels aren’t entertaining. Also called ‘sliders’, carousels are usually photo slideshows of 3, 4 or 5 large images that take up a most of the top part of a website homepage.

On a website, it’s not called ‘The Carousel’…

It’s called ‘The hinder-me-doing-what-I-wanted-to-on-your-website’

This is a phenomenon called ‘banner blindness’. It’s when visitors look anywhere else but your beautiful big banner that you spent so long on.

I recently did a site review on AchieveIT. One of my recommendations was to remove the carousel which included a number of hero shots of people and computers. Which they did – replacing it with more relevant content for their business.I also recommended doing some simple usability testing to find out exactly what they should be putting on their homepage. Which they didn’t.

But my question to them stands: how do you know that people are interested in things you’re showing them? Just because you can have a carousel… should you?

(And they’re not great for accessibility.)

Do some testing

When I tested my website I was surprised. Of course, I thought people would love to contact me and see my services. I was wrong. Visitors are interested in projects I’ve done and how they can plan their projects.

You just need to ask them.

Not all bad

NZ’s Optimal Usability has put some carousels to the test with their eye-tracker. Find recommendations about using banners in their recent article Hidden in plain sight? The ‘Banner Blindness’ effect on homepage banners.

Money well spent

For people who can’t afford an eye-tracker to test their websites, consider doing some really simple low cost and no cost testing.

Can it hurt? Retail businesses spend huge amounts of money making their shops look great. Why not spend a fraction of that on visitor testing of your internet presence?

Think about your website as a shop front.

And, if you’re looking for no cost: try this simple method.