Fuzzy Content

OK…maybe that’s a little harsh, but in many cases, it’s true. As I look across the great educational Web landscape, so many home pages are way too assuming. Assuming you, as a reader, will read everything on that page word for word. Assuming you, as a reader, care more about events on campus than finding information. Assuming you, as a reader, will be able to navigate through the institutional speak.

Some simple steps to improve your homepage:

• Let the rest of your site build your homepage. So many projects I have been a part of lean heavily on what the homepage will look like in the beginning. Consider that 90% of your visitor sessions are under 30 seconds…now tell me how much of that time your site visitors are spending on the homepage. Let site structure and Top 10 pages (from your logs) determine what visitors see at first entry.
• Restructure the real estate for what’s important. You only have so many pixels vertically before parts of the page need to be scrolled to (we call this “above the fold”). And everyone is fighting for a place on the homepage. Use the area above the fold to answer readers’ first questions: 1) Who are you? 2) Do you have …? If they cared about the latest news release, they would scroll. Get to the point, because your homepage should be the most scannable.
• Understand the focus of your page. I know, I know. Home is supposed to be all things to all people. But this is your five seconds to tell your story. If the structure of the site is most important, make global navigation your focus. If personality is, move stories and photos front and center. If your name is the most important, that logo better be big. Pick your focus for the page. By the way, this isn’t true for just the homepage…every page should have focus.
• Rely on interior pages to tell your story. Be brief on the homepage. If you are having news and events, make them headlines only. The interior pages have all the information they want. If you have global navigation, write good labels so you don’t need to explain each link. Get to the point.
• Understand how your visitors use your site. Seems like a no brainer, right? People look for links, click on them, and find the information they want. Remember that about half of every visitor to your site is looking for one thing - the search box. Use labels that they use in navigation, use pictures and color contrast to separate sections. And most importantly, grab 10 people a month and watch them use your homepage.

[Eric, give me some examples.] You got it. Try these on for size:

• Seattle University. This one I’ve been a fan of for a long time. Global navigation is the focus, giving you two steps in from home. They also show personality very well with the rotating main graphic and the student stories…all this above the fold. And if you want to scroll to more, that’s where you’ll find news and events, along with audience navigation.
• Duke University. If you are a searcher, you will love this site. The search box is the primary option, with global navigation the next step. Also, good use of images to tell secondary stories.
• Boston University. This page is the essence of Web convention. They have their search box in the upper right corner with resource links. Then the focus of the page are their distinguishing points (forward thinking with the use of video), then global navigation with (instead of rollovers) sectional navigation below. This may be my favorite.
• Cornell University. Much like Seattle University, but they use the main image to promote a seasonal concept.
• Northern Illinois University. The big distinguishing point between NIU and other Web sites is how much real estate they dedicate to action. The main image drives to a particular action. Which, let’s be honest, is the main reason people visit your Web site…to do something.

Didn’t see your site on the list? Send it to me (or leave a comment), and I would be happy to tell you what I think.

Dimitri and I just got back from Rochester, NY for this week’s highedwebdev conference. With over 400 attendees and five session tracks, there was plenty to soak in.

The first thing that caught my eye was that many of the sessions (at least in title) were focused on the very thing that we love…fuzzy content. The sessions were not as much about what you do to your site, but more of how your site is a bigger piece of the Web puzzle.

I also found that sessions were focused on the front-end how-tos. With the potential for this to be a nuts and bolts conference, I was delighted to see usability as its own track. And content management as a separate track. I thought the “design and strategy” track could have been sprinkled a little more throughout the other tracks, but just the fact that there were sessions dedicated to “planning before investing” brought a smile to my face.

All in all, a good week spent with an army of those moving toward a similar goal. Now if we can only get VPs to drink our Kool-Aid, we’re in business.

To relive (or to live vicariously), goto del.icio.us or flickr for more. And follow Dimitri’s (and others’) guest posts on collegewebeditor.

Gender optimization may be the next big craze. We’ve been ignoring it for quite awhile.

I think Peter Morville, Chirstina Wodtke, Jeffrey Veen, and others started talking about men as hunters and women as gatherers back in the mid to late ’90’s. But Web sites have mostly ignored these gender traits.

SEO and SEM have been proven to be effective. How effective could gender optimization be? A couple recent articles got me to thinking about this again: one on Jewelers Circular Keystone and the other over at Women’s Watch: Girls Gone Wired.

You might argue that our redundant and overlapping navigation systems, i.e. task, audience and search; provide sufficient opportunities for hunters and gatherers to find what they need. But that’s like saying I write well so Google and Yahoo! should rank me well. I’m not talking about providing information so others can find it.

I’m thinking of a conscious effort to optimize a specific click path for males-and those women who tend to shop like males; and one for females-and those men, like me, who shop more like a female. (Ask my wife.)

And when you have a marketplace that is clearly dominated by the decisions of one gender, such optimizations could override the preferences of other genders. “What!? Alienate half our customers?” No. Optimize. Don’t exclude.

What made Fonzy cool was his lack of effort to be cool. But he didn’t wake up in the morning and say, “Today, I am going to be as cool as I can be.”

• Flickr is cool. What makes Flickr cool is that millions of people contribute photos and share stories because they want to, not just because they can.
• iPods are cool. They have revolutionized the way that music is listened to, downloaded, categorized, and used.
• Tagging is cool. Information on the Web is no longer a series of islands. Now, content can be syndicated, bookmarked, and searched through del.icio.us, newsgator, and technorati.

What makes these cool is the fact that they have been embraced. It’s not a matter of how fantastically structured the technology is. Who cares how Flickr does what it does. It’s more cool to see what the people do with Flickr. It’s more cool that Web sites embrace microformats and RSS.

I ran across this quote from Gerry McGovern. It’s not earth-shattering by any means, but it defines what cool is.

“I embrace technology. I love it. I’m surrounded by it. What I have to keep reminding myself is that it’s not about the technology itself; it is about what we can do with the technology.”

Cool is a reflection of what people do, or say, or how they act. They determine success. They determine what’s relevant, and important. They determine what’s cool.

In my dealings with messaging on the Web, one of the gaps I try to get organizations to overcome is “institutional speak”. But it goes beyond labels used, acronyms, and slang. I’ve blogged on this before. What’s more important is that what you are trying to get across is the right message, to the right people, at the right time. Without those three elements, your message falls on deaf ears.

Right Message…wait. We’ll save that one for last.

• Right People. Every Web site is built for visitors, plain and simple. Who visits your Web site? What subgroups are there within audiences? Is there overlap between some audiences to join them together? Understand who visits your site, and you are a third of the way there.
• Right Time. Eric, the Web is a 24/7/365 thing. What do you mean right time. Your Web site is always up and running, but people want different things at different times. I hate not knowing where I come across stats, but for prospective students, they will visit your Web site 35 times before they choose to enroll. [I apologize for not being able to name the source of this stat...I'll work on it.] You can bet that what they want to do in the first visit is completely different from what they want to do on that last visit to your site. Use a calendar to determine what your audiences want at what times. Two out of three.
• Right Message. The Web is not a radio, or TV, or newspaper. There is no better tool out there to segment and target messaging. The nature of your Web site is hierarchical. By design, information funnels from broad to specific. Use this to your advantage. The “About Us” page is about the last content page that should fit all audiences. The rest of your site should be tailored. Every page should reflect specific audience need and next steps.

If I am an alum (with lots of money that I can’t spend on my own), the “Alumni & Friends” page should move me to opportunities to reconnect with the institution, see students in action, and give. If I want to donate today, the next page that I go to should show me all the ways to give and how my money will help. This is not a general page for all audiences, this is specific to me (with gobs and gobs of money) and me alone. You better be telling me features and benefits, or I am gone. If the message isn’t relevant to me, my gobs and gobs of money may not become your gobs and gobs of money.Get rid of departmental structure on your site. Get rid of “About our department”. Get to why I, the site reader, am visiting this page in the first place. Without relevance, the only person you will be talking to is yourself.

I browse the e-mail I get from ComputerWorld almost everyday, but I seldom click to read an article. Today I did.

A recent message from the ComputerWorld First Look included an article title “Toy or Tool? Google Docs & Spreadsheets Reviewed” that panned Writely which I’ve been using actively since early 2006.

I completely disagree with the article. But that’s not the point of this post. I’ll get to that next. First, some props for Writely:

I’m a content person. I’ll I do is create, organize, manage, present and deliver content. Writely is great for basic wordprocessing which is all I have ever needed in my 13-year career. Yes, there are some delays while the Web site reponds. But I have the same problem with my Pentium 4 when I have all my usual apps up: Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Trillian, three different browsers with many tabs (one of which is usually Writely), and an bloated e-mail client that my organization requires me to use.

My point and why I beleive ComputerWrold is irrelevant; is that I can’t post this comment on the article’s page! All I can do is send feedback. Which I would have done quietly and gone about my business. But they forced me to blog about this by STICKING AN AD in my face when I clicked the “send feedback” button! And in this world of social content, the happy little icon () they provide is misleading at best.

So. I read an article. Have some experience with the tool reviewed. Would like someone else to benefit from my experience and try to share with others. What do I get? This:

How dare they! This kind of treatment is unacceptable. It has no place in my world. BTW: my world is the computer world.

Dimitri pulled it off BarcampBirmingham and has a couple others up his sleeve.

And now BarCampOhio will attempt lift-off.  Wish us well and sign on if you’re an Ohioan.

More to come!

Blogged with Flock

We seem to have confused “management” with “writing” and “publishing” which might explain the poor state of Web content over the last 14 years.

e-fuze.com (beta, of coarse) describes itself as:

[A] new social content management system [that] will allow registered users to submit online content. The entries with the top votes get published on the homepage. Voting will be open to all users, though submitting content requires a free account.

As usual, e-fuse views content management in terms of:

• Authoring
• Permissions
• Posting
• Editing
• Voting

This is the technologist’s view of writing. The technologist is concerned with who is allowed to write and where are they allowed to do it. The technologist is concerned with business rules and policies. The technologist is concerned with management, and while management is a necessary evil it should not be the purpose of our efforts.

Content is wasted unless it has meaning to the reader. Making content meaningful requires much more than a workflow process or attention to the brand position. It requires an intense awareness of the readers purpose and intent. It requires contextual awareness at any given moment in the readers experience.

That level of awareness is best illustrated by a conductor who creates an two-hour experience out of a tangle of instruments, expertise, sounds and intervals. The conductor is concerned with:

• Orchestration
• Concert
• Symphony
• Harmony

Look these words up and consider their meanings beyond their typical usage.

Dom DiLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Kurt Vonnegut each create a single experience out of a complex environment of characters, personalities and events. The collaboration of author, editor and publisher results in a concert of emotion and meaning for the reader. That should be the goal of a content management tool. Orchestration.

Web conductors can attempt to produce a meaningful experience for their readers if the conductor knows their audience well enough. But few of us do. We have to get out of the office and into the field to meet them face-to-face. We need to record and make sense of their online behavior. Or we need to acknowledge that we cannot know everything and hand the baton to the audience. This is not to say that we surrender, rather we acquiesce and embrace collaboration.

What kind of cacophony will a thousand conductors create? Which audience member will the bassonist follow and at what tempo?

e-fuze, Digg and most other social content sites tend to address this problem through voting in one way or another. But that takes us back to the management issue and all its pitfalls and shortcomings.

Social content management isn’t about voting, it is about sharing experiences. Web sites can allow our readers to share experiences in many ways:

• Page-level commenting
• Blogs
• In-page chat
• Page sharing
• Repurposing content on other sites

But that requires a lot of effort from the reader and not all readers will be willing to take the time to do those things. So what else is there? I’m interested in tools that will help aggregate experiences and that can assume some of the reader’s context as derived from online behavior.

Social content management is about personal content aggregation. NetVibes anyone? Sure, but what about the automation and the sharing? Nextumi? Now there’s a big question.

A recent post by Donna Bogatin at ZDnet talked about a presentation given this week at Shop.org’s conference. The presentation was by Kelly Mooney, author of “The Ten Demandments,” and focused on her firm’s research on Millennials: “Decoding the Digital Millennials.”

If you’ve been here before, you know that I enjoyed the view Howe and Strauss provided in their “Millennials Rising” and “Millennials go to College.” Mooney’s research seems tailored for the mass of mass marketers which is great. There are many opinions in the higher education blogosphere about marketing to Millennials. I’ll be happy to read other points of view from outside the industry. We higher ed marketers could learn a lot.