At Webreality one of our most unfavourite requests from clients when specifying their new website is the so-called "splash page". You know the sort of thing - a 15 second example of the web designer gratuitously showing off his or her Flash animation expertise... while you wait... to get... to the... home... page... where you can finally perform the task you need to perform. Most splash page designers thoughtfully provide a "skip" option... which begs the question why have it in the first place? By the time it's finished, the user could have hit the back button, gone to Amazon, found their product there and be checking out!
I'd love to point you to some examples, but we've all seen them and they don't need the extra traffic!
Splash pages are all about image and brand, but increasingly, the web is a place where people come to get things done. Our best advice is always to avoid putting things in the way of allowing your site user to get the job done. That means simple navigation, limited use of imagery, concise and well-formatted text, and no splash pages! We've not always succeeded in dissuading our clients from having splash pages, so you will see them on a few of our sites, but not very many. Jakob Nielsen takes the view that a splash page "always says to me that this is a site that cares more about image than usability."
If you're really thinking about what matters to your site user, rather than about your own priorities, don't splash!
Thursday, 29 November 2007
Friday, 19 October 2007
Dale blogs!
New Webreality team blog kicked off today! Dale Broadhead blogging on software development - right at the heart of what Webreality's all about. Go Dale...
Wednesday, 17 October 2007
Hail the content visionaries!
Just a quicky. If content is king, then every website needs its king maker.
Our experience here at Webreality is that the best sites tend to result from the single-minded pursuit of a content vision which is usually the product of one individual's mind. A website should ideally speak to its user with a compelling single voice throughout. So many corporate sites feel like the product of a content committee - and I guess that's probably because they are, in fact, the product of a content committee. Nothing wrong with that approach, I say, as long as a trusted individual is given the scope to filter everything into a coherent whole.
Some examples of Webreality sites that hit the spot:
- Little Green Rock: two content visionaries, Debbie and Buter Buterbaugh, but somehow they seem to speak with one groovy voice! And Debbie's artwork is stunning.
- Channel Island Executive Coaching: Tracey Turmel's passion for coaching shining through in her web copy.
- French Imports: Julie Rombaut's boundless enthusiasm for wine - and for her wine expert husband Eric! - translates into energetic language that makes you want to taste and buy.
- Spiral Tree: Anyone who's met Sarah Spiral Tree will testify to her intense belief in the power of meditation and focused relaxation. It makes for a compelling web experience!
I'm not naive enough to imagine that large b2b businesses can transform the tone and style of their content overnight. But, at the very least, the biggest b2cs can make a massive impression on their markets by learning from content visionaries and adopting a tone that recognises that people tend to buy most willingly from businesses they like. Making people like you starts with the way you communicate with them - Apple and Orange are good corporate examples of success in this respect. The web offers the greatest opportunity businesses have ever had to transform the tone and style of their comms for the better. And every business needs a content visionary.
Our experience here at Webreality is that the best sites tend to result from the single-minded pursuit of a content vision which is usually the product of one individual's mind. A website should ideally speak to its user with a compelling single voice throughout. So many corporate sites feel like the product of a content committee - and I guess that's probably because they are, in fact, the product of a content committee. Nothing wrong with that approach, I say, as long as a trusted individual is given the scope to filter everything into a coherent whole.
Some examples of Webreality sites that hit the spot:
- Little Green Rock: two content visionaries, Debbie and Buter Buterbaugh, but somehow they seem to speak with one groovy voice! And Debbie's artwork is stunning.
- Channel Island Executive Coaching: Tracey Turmel's passion for coaching shining through in her web copy.
- French Imports: Julie Rombaut's boundless enthusiasm for wine - and for her wine expert husband Eric! - translates into energetic language that makes you want to taste and buy.
- Spiral Tree: Anyone who's met Sarah Spiral Tree will testify to her intense belief in the power of meditation and focused relaxation. It makes for a compelling web experience!
I'm not naive enough to imagine that large b2b businesses can transform the tone and style of their content overnight. But, at the very least, the biggest b2cs can make a massive impression on their markets by learning from content visionaries and adopting a tone that recognises that people tend to buy most willingly from businesses they like. Making people like you starts with the way you communicate with them - Apple and Orange are good corporate examples of success in this respect. The web offers the greatest opportunity businesses have ever had to transform the tone and style of their comms for the better. And every business needs a content visionary.
More bullfighters
Delighted to see that my friends at salterbaxter in London are dedicated to fighting the bull too. They publish "bull of the month" at their site. Click "words" from their home page.
Thursday, 11 October 2007
Trust Mourant
Mourant has just launched a first in the offshore legal profession - you can go to their website (built by Webreality) and buy trust precedent documents.
This might seem an unremarkable development, but most lawyers remain very sniffy about even acknowledging that aspects of their work might become commoditised. Mourant operates in the rarified world of corporates and high net worth individuals. It's not unusual to find "high street" legal services available now online - wills, leases and even divorce documentation can be bought and downloaded in the UK. But in Mourant’s markets "consumer" approaches to service delivery are much slower to take hold. So hats off to Mourant for blazing a trail in the very specialised offshore trust market. I hope it pays them back handsomely.
From a content point of view, the story here is obvious. Lawyers trade in time and knowledge. Knowledge x time = content. Most law firms worldwide have yet to grasp that client expectations are changing, driven not least by the web's ability to deliver information, knowledge and answers quickly and 24/7. Lawyers who recognise that early in their markets, and deliver high value content how and when clients need it, will achieve big market share wins.
This might seem an unremarkable development, but most lawyers remain very sniffy about even acknowledging that aspects of their work might become commoditised. Mourant operates in the rarified world of corporates and high net worth individuals. It's not unusual to find "high street" legal services available now online - wills, leases and even divorce documentation can be bought and downloaded in the UK. But in Mourant’s markets "consumer" approaches to service delivery are much slower to take hold. So hats off to Mourant for blazing a trail in the very specialised offshore trust market. I hope it pays them back handsomely.
From a content point of view, the story here is obvious. Lawyers trade in time and knowledge. Knowledge x time = content. Most law firms worldwide have yet to grasp that client expectations are changing, driven not least by the web's ability to deliver information, knowledge and answers quickly and 24/7. Lawyers who recognise that early in their markets, and deliver high value content how and when clients need it, will achieve big market share wins.
Monday, 8 October 2007
Do you write bull?
Back in 2003 Deloitte Consulting came up with a brilliant little software application that analyses text to find meaningless business jargon. Three of the Deloitte consultants involved then set up on their own, with the kind assistance of Deloittes who let them take this fabulous invention with them.
Download it to your PC here: http://www.fightthebull.com/bullfighter.asp.
Buy the book here...
Or you can be a little bit mischievous with the Mystery Matador. Paste up to 20,000 characters from a particularly jargon-laden website into this page of their site and send the site owner an anonymous bull-busting e-mail with the results!
I love this. It's hardly news, but it's as important and valuable now as it was then. In fact, it's even more important on the web where there's so little time to catch a reader's attention and make a sale. There's no room for space-filling guff!
There are still too many people on the web thinking out of the box and pushing the envelope. Keep fighting the bull.
Download it to your PC here: http://www.fightthebull.com/bullfighter.asp.
Buy the book here...
Or you can be a little bit mischievous with the Mystery Matador. Paste up to 20,000 characters from a particularly jargon-laden website into this page of their site and send the site owner an anonymous bull-busting e-mail with the results!
I love this. It's hardly news, but it's as important and valuable now as it was then. In fact, it's even more important on the web where there's so little time to catch a reader's attention and make a sale. There's no room for space-filling guff!
There are still too many people on the web thinking out of the box and pushing the envelope. Keep fighting the bull.
Monday, 24 September 2007
We We or You You?
You'll have heard marketing people like me banging on about the importance of communicating with customers on their own terms. Often, this involves decisions about how and when you choose to communicate with them. The web has delivered a well-documented paradigm shift (do I win a prize for saying "paradigm shift"?) in marketing communications. Customers can consume marketing messages when and where they wish to consume them. But you control the message they receive.
So you need to keep a firm grip on the bit of the process you can control, and in that respect you should treat web communications no differently from any other type. And that includes the need to write in a way that engages the customer's interest. I'll write another day on wider considerations of style for web copy. But today's message is all about "you." It's a very simple message, actually. When a potential customer is reading about your business or any of your competitors with a possible purchase in mind, they have a single all-important question in their mind: "What's in it for me?"
In marketing it's so easy to fall into the trap of telling people all about how wonderful your products and services are.
"We are Birmingham's leading provider of carbon fibre sewing machine needles."
"We offer the finest quality fishing tackle in the UK market."
"We have bigger cojones than any other cojones supplier in the galaxy..."
What the buyer wants to know is whether your products and services will be wonderful for them. "You" is a magic word. It forces you to describe your offering in terms that relate to the buyer.
If you're worried that your current website copy doesn't engage buyers as it should, Future Now's We We Monitor is a useful, slightly tongue in cheek tool to help you check:
http://futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm
Simply type in the URL of the page you want to check and it'll tell you whether your content is we we or you you!
Here's the result for Webreality's Services page at www.webreality.co.uk:
For the url: http://www.webreality.co.uk/section/3/index.html
Your Customer Focus Rate: 65.22%
You have 15 instances of customer-focused words.
Your Self Focus Rate: 34.78%
You have 7 instances of self-focused words.
You have 1 instances of the Company Name.
You speak about your customers approximately 0,002 times as often as you speak about yourself.
Excellent!
Not bad at all... and better than some other pages on our site. I'm off to purge the we we...
So you need to keep a firm grip on the bit of the process you can control, and in that respect you should treat web communications no differently from any other type. And that includes the need to write in a way that engages the customer's interest. I'll write another day on wider considerations of style for web copy. But today's message is all about "you." It's a very simple message, actually. When a potential customer is reading about your business or any of your competitors with a possible purchase in mind, they have a single all-important question in their mind: "What's in it for me?"
In marketing it's so easy to fall into the trap of telling people all about how wonderful your products and services are.
"We are Birmingham's leading provider of carbon fibre sewing machine needles."
"We offer the finest quality fishing tackle in the UK market."
"We have bigger cojones than any other cojones supplier in the galaxy..."
What the buyer wants to know is whether your products and services will be wonderful for them. "You" is a magic word. It forces you to describe your offering in terms that relate to the buyer.
If you're worried that your current website copy doesn't engage buyers as it should, Future Now's We We Monitor is a useful, slightly tongue in cheek tool to help you check:
http://futurenowinc.com/wewe.htm
Simply type in the URL of the page you want to check and it'll tell you whether your content is we we or you you!
Here's the result for Webreality's Services page at www.webreality.co.uk:
For the url: http://www.webreality.co.uk/section/3/index.html
Your Customer Focus Rate: 65.22%
You have 15 instances of customer-focused words.
Your Self Focus Rate: 34.78%
You have 7 instances of self-focused words.
You have 1 instances of the Company Name.
You speak about your customers approximately 0,002 times as often as you speak about yourself.
Excellent!
Not bad at all... and better than some other pages on our site. I'm off to purge the we we...
Sorry, but content really IS king!
I've been planning to start my blog on web content for some time, but what it took to get me started was an article I read at the weekend:
http://www.searchengineguide.com/degeyter/010785.html
Do you ever get the impression that commentators sometimes comment for the sake of getting a reaction? Stoney deGeyter argues that content is dead and community is the new king. I'm glad that there have already been a number of well-argued comments refuting Stoney's position.
I agree with the premise that community is THE great new force in defining the evolving role of the web in our lives, but it isn't the heart of the matter. Content is. No website can exist without content. Community follows content, and content will adapt to (or be defined by) community. But no web community has yet emerged without a pre-existing shared interest in content of one flavour or another.
Youtube - "I come here because I want to share videos."
Flickr - "I come here because I want to share images."
Facebook - "I come here because I want to share myself."
I don't pretend to be able to see beyond the "community era" to what great strategic development will follow it, but I do know this for certain - neither community nor its successor will replace content as the reason for the web's existence. Isn't it nice to have at least some certainty in the wild world of the web?!
http://www.searchengineguide.com/degeyter/010785.html
Do you ever get the impression that commentators sometimes comment for the sake of getting a reaction? Stoney deGeyter argues that content is dead and community is the new king. I'm glad that there have already been a number of well-argued comments refuting Stoney's position.
I agree with the premise that community is THE great new force in defining the evolving role of the web in our lives, but it isn't the heart of the matter. Content is. No website can exist without content. Community follows content, and content will adapt to (or be defined by) community. But no web community has yet emerged without a pre-existing shared interest in content of one flavour or another.
Youtube - "I come here because I want to share videos."
Flickr - "I come here because I want to share images."
Facebook - "I come here because I want to share myself."
I don't pretend to be able to see beyond the "community era" to what great strategic development will follow it, but I do know this for certain - neither community nor its successor will replace content as the reason for the web's existence. Isn't it nice to have at least some certainty in the wild world of the web?!
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