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This is the second talk I gave at the recent Create Conference (November 2009), which is all about more effective writing for websites. I thought I’d reproduce it here for those who were asking me about it afterwards, and for anyone else for whom this might be useful. You can also view the slides (below) and on Slideshare. There’s nothing really ground-breaking in this presentation, but it’s intended to be a primer for anyone who wants an introduction to writing for online media. It’s also tailored a bit to church websites.

Short version

You can view the slides of the presentation below:

Can’t I just whack the A4 brochure onto the website?

Before we plunge into the 10 golden rules, it’s worth comparing the traditional way of reading with the online way of reading. I’ll look at differences in format and our reading behaviour.

Format

1. Print tends to be portrait format, whereas reading in a web browser tends to be landscape format; this affects how long our eyes can sustain reading along one horizontal line before fatiguing and getting distracted.
2. In print, you’re more or less locked into a linear bunch of pages, where one follows another. With web, you can jump all over the place, usually with links. The one different example I can think of is those old Choose your own adventure books I used to read as a kid. They were the web of my childhood!
3. Printed material rarely has text opening and closing and popping out at you, whereas in the online space, there’s all sorts of dynamic things going on to show and hide text in the context of what it’s there to say.
4. Online material has the added dimension of time; it takes time to download, it’s not (yet) instant; in print, all the information is already there when you pick it up.
5. We have some control over its presentation (in web browsers and handsets), e.g. how big or small the text is; with print, the producers have total control.

Behaviour

1. In print, there’s not much of what psychologists call cognitive load in turning a page. In web, we always stop and think at some level “where will this link go? Will it go where I expect it to go? Do I have time? Will I keep going in this direction? Or another?” and so on.
2. People are very task-oriented when reading content online, and have diminishing patience the longer they have to read text. People scan rather than read all the text on a screen. This is known as the F-pattern. You can see this F-pattern in action in the heatmap screenshots here.
3. The increases in download speeds has actually made us jump around websites more, so we’re even more impatient and more fickle than we used to be about staying on one page.

OK, so with these things in mind, let’s jump into some golden rules:

Rule 1: Be clear

Think about why you’re writing in the first place. What do you really want to say? It can be easy to shift into auto-writing mode and churn out the same phrases, but we all appreciate accuracy and clarity. Avoid clichés and phrases that don’t actually mean anything. Avoid acronyms and prioprietary terms that readers may not know what they mean (unless you’re going to explain what they mean). In ‘Christianese’ we have to be careful using words like sermon, worship, grace and parishioner. Even the term ‘non-Christian’ can be pretty alienating.

Rule 2: Be concise

Considering what we know about online reading behaviour – that people scan, rather than read – be ruthless in cutting your text down; be as sharp and brief as possible, without losing meaning and clarity. Use shorter sentences and shorter paragraphs.

Rule 3: Be compelling

Have you thought about what reward there is to your reader for reading your content? Know your audience and decide who you want to grab first. Depending on the nature of what you’re writing, be bold, stake a claim, be exciting and excited, be honest, be real, be confident. Use words that will resonate the most with your intended audience, and not necessarily you. Using keywords that people are actually looking out for as signals to ‘hook’ onto will not only make it a more compelling read, but it will attract more visits to your website through search engine indexing for those keywords.

Rule 4: Be creative

Could there be a new way of presenting your message, rather than three paragraphs and a title? Would starting the content with an intriguing question help? Could it be presented like an IKEA catalog? A chart?

Rule 5: Be current

Replace or remove old content. Update the home page. Update the blog. Leaving outdated content lying around a website is like never cleaning the church. Who’d want to walk through a door and have to brush away the cobwebs? Or brush the crumbs off a chair before sitting down?

Rule 6: Mind your spelling and grammar

It is worth it, it does matter, people do notice, and it does reflect better on you and your church/organisation. Why? In his book Don’t make me think, one of Steve Krug’s lessons is to remove the points of friction between your message and people’s understanding. Every error or poorly constructed sentence we have to read makes us stop and think, which distracts us from the actual goal of the writing. So mind your apostrophes and ellipses, learn about sentence fragments and clauses and use commas correctly and so on. Try to use active voice where you can. Separate your ideas and statements so that there’s one idea per paragraph. But having said that, know when you can break the rules of grammar a bit, to add colour and interest to your writing.

Rule 7: Arrange your content for scanning

Remembering that people scan online content, there’s lots of things we can do to maximise the scannability of our content:

• Use plenty of subtitles
• Short paragraphs
• Bulleted lists
• Think about the priority of your messages. If people only took one thing away from your web page, what would it be? What’s the most important message? Make sure this is most prominent, and so on.
• Use magazines as inspiration to see how they move your eye around the page. Think about the various chunks of information they present that help scanning. Think about how you can chunk your content into a title, a primary area with, say, one leading paragraph, and a couple of associated content areas.

Rule 8: Adapt your writing for the right type of website

Writing will be different depending on whether it’s a ‘location and directions’ page on your church website, or on a blog, or on Twitter. Here are some applications:

Twitter

• Make those 140 characters count! Hone your skills in clear concise text.
• If including links, it’s good to include a punchy lead-in for the link, but even better to make it personal and different, e.g. “This blog post changed how I pray! [Link]”
• Remember to use link shorteners, like bit.ly and clicky.me
• Leave room in those 140 characters for others to retweet
• use hashtags, like #create09

Blogs

For blogs, I’ll focus on the headings. According to top copywriters, there’s a 50/50 rule of headlines, where they say you should spend half the time it takes to write an article just on the headline. Here’s where we can apply our rules 3 and 4 (being compelling and creative), e.g.:

• Read this, or the puppy gets it!
• How to design better church handouts (or How to anything, really)
• Top 10 reasons… 10 Golden Rules… (you get the idea)
• What I didn’t know about Jesus

Marketing and advertising companies know that on average, 8/10 people read headline copy, but only 2/10 will read the rest. That’s why it’s important to invest time in a killer heading. To be effective, try to make it useful, convey a sense of urgency, and convey a unique benefit.

You can also use subheadings within your blog posts to tell the story of the post:

• “I used to mock Christians”
• “Then He turned up”
• “Now by God’s grace I’m planting my third church”

Another tip for blogging: front-load your post. Start with the conclusion. You can then include the rest of the vital details, and then off you go. Next time you read a newspaper article, just tick off how many of the who, what, when, where, why and how of the story are dealt with in the headline and first paragraph.

Rule 9: Don’t let the experts write your web pages

By this I mean, just because you’re super knowledgeable and passionate about your subject, you may not be the best person to write the web page. If it is going to be you who writes the content, I hope these sorts of rules help. But delegate and share the load if you can, and if you think it’s appropriate. Here’s some ideas on how you can do that:

• Assign one person to take charge of gathering all the content from everyone who has the content. They might be the writer, or they might just be someone who is champion of the website, or tends to be the person who just gets things done.
• Ministers and pastors, endorse this person to your congregation or organisation, give them support and authority to gather the content and ask people’s time to interview them.
• Define a content workflow: for each page, or content type, who writes, reviews, edits, approves and publishes? Think about a publishing schedule: change the home page once a month? One blog post a month? A few tweets a week? That sort of thing.

Rule 10: Use content templates

Make it easy on yourself, and others tasked with content on your website, and come up with some templates. These are a big help for people you need to get the information from, and it makes it much easier to know what ‘boxes to fill in’ rather than giving them a ‘blank canvas’. For example, a template about a church event could look a bit like this:

1. Title
2. Short description, mentioning purpose and selling benefit
3. Where is it
4. When is it (date and time)
5. Cost
6. Contact information
7. RSVP date
8. Full description
9. Quote from previous event?
10. Photo from previous event, or a generic ‘event’ photo?

Well that wraps up the 10 golden rules. I hope you found them helpful. Are there any areas that have particularly helped you in your writing? Do you have any other ideas that have helped you?

This is the first talk I gave at the recent Create Conference (November 2009), which is all about improving the organic search engine results rankings for your website. I thought I’d reproduce it here for those who were asking me about it afterwards, and for anyone else for whom this might be useful. You can also view the slides (below) and on Slideshare. I’ll say up-front that there’s nothing ground-breaking in this presentation, but it’s intended to be a primer for anyone who wants to get started in search engine optimisation. It’s also tailored a bit to church websites.

Short version

You can view the slides of the presentation below:

Wave your hands in the air

Years ago I was down the front at this concert in Canberra, it was near the end and the guitarist strode up to the front of the stage and got ready to toss his pick out to the crowd. Now, who knows how he would choose where he’d throw that pick – or who to – but I jumped up and down and waved my arms around like a total git, as much as I could, to get his attention. And it paid off – he threw it right at me, and I caught it!

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is EXACTLY like that – it’s all about getting your website to wave its arms around to say hey! Here I am! Click on me! The 10 tips will focus on SEO (rather than search engine marketing (SEM)) and cover the three areas of SEO: your website’s code, your website’s content, and your website’s link popularity.

The top 10 tips

OK, so strap yourself in, here we go.

1. Ask the tough questions first. Why do you want people to come to your website? This seems pretty obvious at first, but really breaking this down will help you be strategic in your approach and efficient with where you spend your time. Church websites usually aren’t selling products and services like commercial websites, and they tend not to be in direct competition with other church websites, but they do tend to promote the church’s meetings, events and resources such as sermons and Bible studies, and of course presenting the gospel in various ways. You might find there are specific answers that come out, like:
   • Your church is the best one to go to for a certain area of suburbs
   • Your church is passionate about holding local community events
   • Your church has great worship music, or kids’ groups, or outreach nights… and so on.
2. Pick an SEO-friendly CMS. Now here I’m assuming that you will manage – or are managing – your church website using a content management system (CMS). If not, that’s fine, the same principles apply (and you should still consider using a CMS). But if you are looking to use a CMS, here’s a bit of a checklist to bear in mind:
   • Does it publish your website using standards-compliant code? It’s very nerdy, but it does matter.
   • Does it allow you control over code that’s relevant for SEO, like meta tags, especially on a page-by-page basis, or is that part locked away?
   • Does it allow you full control over all of the text on each page?
   • Does it allow for website links (or URLs) that you can use specific keywords (e.g. http://www.yourchurch.org.au/drummoyne-events/) rather than something like http://www.yourchurch.org.au/?xid=9875&y=8&z=wonderwhatthisallmeans?

   I would recommend: Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal, or Typo3.

3. Do your keyword research. Find out the sort of words people already use to get to your website. Your website traffic reports might tell you this, or if you have Google Analytics plugged into your website it definitely tells you this. Ask around your church membership; odds are there are people at your church who found out about it online by using Google. And remember that the sorts of words you use may not be the ones others use. Use online keyword suggestion tools like the Google Adwords Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal.
4. Write really good keyword-rich content. Use your keywords throughout the text of each page, especially in text headings and sub-headings, and link text (e.g. Download Mark Driscoll sermons rather than click here). Use most (all if you can) keywords on your home page, and one main keyword per content page.But be careful of keyword density, i.e. the percentage a particular keyword is used in a page compared to all text on that page. Anywhere from 2% to 8% is fine; any more and search engines may drop your website. It happens. Using a free tool like Link Vendor’s Link Density Check tool is the best way to check.Most of all, don’t try to contrive text to be full of keywords; if it’s relevant and engaging to your readers, it’ll be relevant and engaging to Google.
5. Optimise your code for SEO. Remember to ensure your keywords are used well in <title> tags of each page (e.g. not just ‘Home page’; more like ‘Family-friendly church in the inner west – Drummoyne Presbyterian Church’), and meta tags, including meta description and meta keywords. Most people say these tags don’t count for much, but I like to think it makes good sense to categorise your pages like this – a bit like in a library – and I reckon meta tags will have their day again, just you wait and see. You can get help generating them with this tool: http://www.webmaster-toolkit.com/meta-tag-generator.shtml.When it comes to the Alt attribute in image tags (img alt=”...”) try to make it more meaningful, e.g. Not just ‘Church front door’, but ‘Front door of our church, replaced after a fire in 1948′. Don’t forget about all the searches people do on Google Images.Sitemap XML file – this is a text file stored as part of your website to help search engines index your website better. It’s really only for very large websites, though. You can generate these for free at http://www.xml-sitemaps.com/.
6. Work keywords into the URLs. If you can, register domains that contain your primary keywords and point them to your main URL, e.g. drummoynechurch.com. See if you can make the URLs to specific pages keyword-rich, like http://www.drummoyne.org.au/drummoyne-church-events.html.
7. Submit to directories. It goes without saying, but having said that, Google will find you by itself. It just does. But it’s still sort of worth registering your website with the gazillions of other search engines and directory websites out there. I’m not going to spend much time on this one, because I don’t think the effort pays off nearly as much as…
8. Reciprocal linking. Work hard at getting other websites to link to yours, whether or not you link to them too, to increase your website’s link popularity. Search engines heavily consider how relevant your website is depending on your inbound links, so it’s like votes in an election. But linking is not a true democracy, that is: not all links are equal. Google’s PageRank is a measure of how important Google thinks a particular page is compared to all other pages; a number between 0 and 10. You can see this PageRank score either by installing the Google toolbar.How is PageRank derived? I’m no expert at this, but it’s roughly from the number of inbound links to the page, as well as the PageRank of those pages that have the inbound links, relevance of words searched for on those pages, and actual visits to that page. e.g. a PR9 web page that links to your website has more ‘value’ than a PR3 web page.So how do you get all these inbound links? Here’s some ideas:
   • Talk to owners of websites in your community – like schools, daycare centres, libraries and so on – and see if they’ll link to your website if you link to theirs
   • Encourage your church members, if they have online presences like Facebook and Twitter, or their own blogs, to link to their church website
   • Donate content to other websites, like opinion pieces, Bible studies and other resources, provided they link back to your website
   • Tweet like crazy!
   • Leave comments on other people’s blogs and respectfully include (where appropriate and relevant) a link back to your church website
9. Get your SEO serviced. SEO is like a car: it needs regular tune-ups. One thing you might want to regularly check on is what websites are linking to yours. You can use link popularity online tools like this one, or Google Analytics, or if you feel you must part with case, use something like Raven SEO Tools. The rules of the game change slightly from time to time, and the nature of the content on your website will change over time too, so it’s worth the effort.
10. Get someone else to do it! Yes, if it’s all too hard, you can get someone skilled in web development, standards-compliance and SEO to assess your website for you, and/or optimise it as a one-off, or agree on a regular schedule. This definitely includes SEM: if you’re interested in investing money in pay-per-click campaigns, unless you’re experienced I would definitely advise taking on an experienced professional for SEM. Trying to do PPC campaigns yourself is time-consuming, distracting, and you could be throwing good money away – it may not be good stewardship of funds.

Well that’s my top 10 tips. SEO is a complex art and science, and I don’t pretend to be an expert, but hopefully this is a good introduction for you. Very happy to hear if you think anything here is erroneous or could be improved.

References:

• Google SEO guidelines
• Yahoo! SEO guidelines

Create Conference - the conference run by FEVA for churches and other ministries to tackle gospel communication issues - is on again soon, and I’ve just completed the latest version of the website.

Create Conference 2009 website

The Create Conference is on Saturday 14 November, and by the looks of the program, it’s about twice as big as last year. The conference aims to equip Christians to understand the times, generate compelling ideas and messages, and package them relevantly.

Last year, the website design I did focused on the vintage neo-Victorian aspect of the airship, the main part of the Create identity, so it came out looking all steampunky and weathered. This year I expanded on the steampunk-inspired pop-art feel to the illustrations, but went for a lighter, airier feel.

My illustrations went to Andrew Nobbs over at Barton Design, who put together an amazing brochure for the event. His exploration of sky and clouds and bold typography was then translated to the website design. What a neat little example of collaborative design. 

Visit the site, and if you’re keen, register online.

After Day 1 of Oz IA, I thought I’d put up a few extra thoughts about Day 2. It was cut short for me due to other responsibilities, but all up it was a hugely humbling, rewarding, energising and inspiring experience.

The coffee, gourmet juices and tweets continued to flow freely, and the sessions got even more animated and engaging:

• Gary Barber took us into the courtroom with a scathing critique of tag clouds and who is to blame for their faults (hint: it could be the IAs). I was talking to him afterwards, and it’s not so much all tag clouds that are wrong, but their implementation as-is, rather than being critically assessed by IAs and reinterpreted for each individual use. Great stuff.
• Matt Moore’s Playing games with culture was the one workshop-oriented session, where everyone had a ’serious’ play with the Organisational Culture & Knowledge Management Methods Cards from Straits Knowledge. A fun way of revealing the sorts of team-culture lessons that may otherwise be lost if only resorting to dry presentation and workshop formats.
• Melissa Cooper from the ABC showed us how ruthless you have to be in designing search experiences for mobile interfaces. I can only aspire!
• Matt Fisher took us way out of our cushy little high-bandwidth graphics-rich always-on bubble and showed us the sort of ingenuity you need for designing systems for Defence, where water and dust wreck laptops and there’s no constant connection. What humbled me was the sorts of challenges that diggers are surrounded with when trying to carry out the same sorts of communication- and tech-related tasks we take for granted, and their contribution to refining such systems that can go on to be used for remote communities in developing countries. Very very worthwhile. Sort of puts my dinky little interfaces into perspective.

Oh, and one more thing I encountered: there’s this huge connection between being an IA and loving good food! You know who you are, and more power to you.

Can’t wait for next year!

I’m finally home after day 1 of Oz IA 2009, and absolutely knackered. What. A. Day. The presentation content was as diverse and interesting as the program suggested, but for me the greatest highlight was the meeting of minds of so many IAs.

First up was Matt Hodgson’s The Evolution of the Agile IA. Matt took us through a rollicking ride with where IA has come from, where it’s at now with the emergence of agile methodology, and where it’s going. One of the things I took from his messages about IA and agile was that in some ways we as IAs are already practicing some degree of agile without even knowing it; taking the big step into agile and leaving waterfall behind shouldn’t be too much of a pain.

I was up second, presenting on Guiding the way to living greener: how psychology helped IA for a new government website. I got some great feedback after it, including some requests for more information about how the ‘concierge’ model manifests itself in the various user interfaces used in the livinggreener.gov.au website. It was always going to be tricky to include the principles aspects of the presentation along with the applied aspects. I erred on the side of principles, given that the focus was on how motivational psychology can contribute to IA design. Maybe next time I would focus more on the UI aspects!

Cast herewith for your perusal (or go to my prezo at Slideshare):

Matt Balara was doing some awesome sketches of his thoughts coming out of each talk on the day, and here’s a pic of the page he sketched for my talk. It’s interesting that the key points that arose for him were:

• Designing for people where they were at
• Maslow’s hierarchy of needs
• ‘The Concierge’ interaction model - answer question and offer even more
• Personas are partners

Other highlights of the day:

• Non-stop supply of fantastic real barista-served coffee - Single Origin, no less. I think I had 5? Stopped counting… Oz IA, you have spoiled me for any and all conferences in future.
• Non-stop supply of fruit juice cocktails. Wanting to hold on to my masculinity, I didn’t indulge in this aspect of the conference much. But dayam, muddled mint and watermelon tastes good.
• Stamford Interactive’s war stories of the pleasures and pains of being involved in a massive government intranet redesign project. Girls, I felt your pain.
• Suze Ingram’s lightning-paced but highly entertaining review of prototyping tools. Expression Blend and Axure came up pretty well. I won a demo access pass to one of the online prototyping tools… no idea which one, now! But full points to Ian Stalvies, who won a fresh spanking new copy of Axure, for getting the trivia question right about the capital of Brazil (or somewhere like that).
• Last and definitely not least: I have never seen so much twittering in all my freaking life! It was quite weird to see so many laptops open with people having one eye on the speaker and one eye on tweetdeck. Extra extra weird to see my own tweets retweeted on other people’s screens.

More fun in store tomorrow…

OZ-IA, the Woodstock for Australia’s information architects, is on again - Friday 2nd and Saturday 3rd October. It should be a hoot, and this year I’ll be speaking in one of the short-session slots.

The OZ-IA program content is pretty diverse - as it should be! - and includes topics such as Agile IA, information flow in social networking websites, case studies, and prototyping software reviews. And hopefully some industry war stories too.

Me, I’m looking forward to hearing from Matthew Hodgson’s take on IA practices, Mia Horrigan giving social networking websites’ IA a good shellacking, and Captain Matt Fisher on designing Defence software systems. I’ll be presenting on the psychology aspects that went into the personas, information model, navigation and user interface for livinggreener.gov.au.

If you’re interested, there’s a poll going on which sessions people are looking forward to seeing. It’s good to see Matt reigning supreme. 

I have the privilege of sitting next to some smart gents this Saturday as part of the Arriving and staying on the web panel session at the Create Conference 08, and one of the ideas I’d like to throw out there is the idea of turning your website inside out.

What I mean is this: say you were after a copy of the Rolling Stones’ Flowers album (hey, it’s got Ruby Tuesday on it, what a great song). Where would you go to get it? These days you might shop at iTunes, or Amazon, or countless other online avenues. Or you might scour some second-hand music stores. No doubt you would go to where music is available for sale.

Now say you had a copy of that album to sell. Would you keep it on the shelf and hope someone will knock on the door and ask to buy it? Unless your house is a famous music museum, you’re probably going to take out an ad somewhere where you know people will read ads for music to buy. Or maybe you’ll take it to the second-hand music store to sell. The point is: you would go to where people are who would want to buy it, to tell them about it.

Obvious? In my line of work, I often find that people build websites assuming that others will knock on their door to buy that album, then (understandably) get discouraged when it doesn’t sell.

Go to where people are

We should be taking the content of our websites to where people are already congregating, not just ads to try to get people to leave what they’re doing and visit our websites. There are so many websites around these days that thrive on communities sharing their content with each other. Whether it’s for fun, like photos and videos on facebook, MySpace and flickr, or to make a coin, like on Etsy or Threadless.

There are loads of opportunities for creative thinking to take our websites’ content ‘out of the house’ and into the street to where people can see it, engage with it, share it, have a conversation about it — be it to promote events, news, topical articles, relevant services and products — whatever you and your business have a passion for.

I’ve learned a great lesson from doing the Create Conference 2008: you never how how valuable the various design artefacts you come up with will be during the life of a website project. Your throw-away thumbnail-dipped-in-tar scrawls may well lead the way to other areas of creativity and visual assets for the website that you hadn’t anticipated.

When I was first thinking about the visual concept of the Create Conference 2008 website (read more in the work section if you like), I was combining their existing visual ideas of an airship and a clockworky steampunk theme into some pretty scratchy concept sketches, with notes and call-outs all over them.

I showed one of the pages to the client. She loved it. But the thing is, it wasn’t just the concept, it was the actual ‘look’ of the scratchy sketching as well that fired her imagination. And boom: thus was born the visual concept for the print brochure.

I didn’t know at the time that the client was working on the print brochure for the conference, but that one sketch launched a series of extra sketches I did, all around the same theme, and centered on the airship theme. The client ran with the sketch idea, and wanted to convey a ‘Leonardo da Vinci’-esque theme, which actually fit in very nicely with the creative spirit of the conference, and with the playful ‘bygone grandeur’ visual theme I was originally after.

What’s more, once I started thinking about what I could sketch of this thing, the whole contraption under the airship came alive in my mind; I could see it in 3 dimensions; I could see where people moved around on top, and the living quarters in the hull… everything. Now I’ve never been into model ships or anything like that… but suddenly i wanted to build this thing!

I’ve put a few of the sketches in this post. Looking carefully at the Create Conference website and the brochure, you’ll see how they’ve been knitted in.