Semantic Web and Content Strategy
View more presentations from Rachel Lovinger
Showing posts with label content layout. Show all posts
Showing posts with label content layout. Show all posts
Semantic Web and Content Strategy: What are you doing about it?
I was lucky enough to attend a talk last night organized by UX Melbourne. Rachel Lovinger from Razorfish spoke about her work on Nimble, and I found it so interesting I decided one of her presentations needed to be on my blog.
More Services Less Advertising
The 'meat' of a website can often become overshadowed by trendy fluff counteracting the integrity of a site. The current formula is a simple one: get the "exclusive" stuff that users want to look at and then blast them with advertising- pop ups and banner ads, flash video is a must, and don’t skimp out on the explosively loud audio that will get a user to leave your site faster then the librarian can get across the room.
What we need is more services like RSS feeds, iGoogle, and all those great apps that help us reach the content we want to find. Having content fed to us and restricting the amount of searching may make you wonder: What about the advertising that pays for websites? If there is less traffic to sites how do we make money? Don’t fret there are lots of ways to get attention and promote products then flash banners and pop-ups.
Regarding SEO, let's say you have mastered your keywords and SEO’d the crap outta every page on your site. Do you really think that all you have to do is sit back and watch the dollars flood in? You could have the most perfectly constructed website when it comes to being found easily through search engines, but your site is meant for humans - opps.
I’d recommend most sites focus on the following: Quality Internal Search, Precise Auto-Recommendations (ex. if you like ‘this’ you may also like ‘this’), RSS Subscriptions, and Applications that have a purpose in the real world. A few ideas that quickly come to mind are: a wishlist to save time shopping - with a recommendation tool of course, a digital loyalty card (it worked for Starbucks - why not make a digital version to suit you?). Be bold and creative instead of following every other site - the point is to get noticed not be the same, correct?
Promotion is more effective when it seems to happen serendipitously. Make sure your business or product is associated with review sites or other recommendation tools and apps. Become a sponsor of online events and games. Focus on partnerships to combine products and services. Where you exist elsewhere is almost more important then existing at all. Being an online player is no longer a passive relationship between site and user. Ex. trade-shows, conferences, live events and performances, contests, etc. Find out what else is relevant to you and become apart of the experience. Wired Magazine's latest issue discusses Facebook's most recent advertising strategies which willfully block out Google. Integrating into social networks is important, and might overshadow the effectiveness of SEO in the years to come.
Being locatable is not enough. If a user finds your site and isn’t impressed they’ll leave and all that time (and money) becoming a SEO savant is wasted. Think of a website as a service instead of a presentation, and hopefully you’ll manage to find a way to connect more meaningfully with your users instead of relying on bots.
What we need is more services like RSS feeds, iGoogle, and all those great apps that help us reach the content we want to find. Having content fed to us and restricting the amount of searching may make you wonder: What about the advertising that pays for websites? If there is less traffic to sites how do we make money? Don’t fret there are lots of ways to get attention and promote products then flash banners and pop-ups.
Regarding SEO, let's say you have mastered your keywords and SEO’d the crap outta every page on your site. Do you really think that all you have to do is sit back and watch the dollars flood in? You could have the most perfectly constructed website when it comes to being found easily through search engines, but your site is meant for humans - opps.
I’d recommend most sites focus on the following: Quality Internal Search, Precise Auto-Recommendations (ex. if you like ‘this’ you may also like ‘this’), RSS Subscriptions, and Applications that have a purpose in the real world. A few ideas that quickly come to mind are: a wishlist to save time shopping - with a recommendation tool of course, a digital loyalty card (it worked for Starbucks - why not make a digital version to suit you?). Be bold and creative instead of following every other site - the point is to get noticed not be the same, correct?
Promotion is more effective when it seems to happen serendipitously. Make sure your business or product is associated with review sites or other recommendation tools and apps. Become a sponsor of online events and games. Focus on partnerships to combine products and services. Where you exist elsewhere is almost more important then existing at all. Being an online player is no longer a passive relationship between site and user. Ex. trade-shows, conferences, live events and performances, contests, etc. Find out what else is relevant to you and become apart of the experience. Wired Magazine's latest issue discusses Facebook's most recent advertising strategies which willfully block out Google. Integrating into social networks is important, and might overshadow the effectiveness of SEO in the years to come.
Being locatable is not enough. If a user finds your site and isn’t impressed they’ll leave and all that time (and money) becoming a SEO savant is wasted. Think of a website as a service instead of a presentation, and hopefully you’ll manage to find a way to connect more meaningfully with your users instead of relying on bots.
A Few UX Pet Peeves
Job hunting is perhaps the best way to find lots of badly designed websites. As someone focused on web usability it's hard to overlook poor content strategy.
Here are a few of the biggest mistakes I’ve noticed regarding content hierarchy, poor categorization, and confusing layouts.
1) Everything is in the middle of the page. Upon arriving to a website we have a tendency to look at the centre and then we normally scan the content from left to right (this makes sense considering in using the English language we also read left to right). When a home page is scrunched up into the centre of the page with everything competing for attention the brain has to think too much. And when we have to think too much our experience is usually poor.
An easy way to avoid this is to determine what is the best available service for the user. In the case of a job search it is the tool which allows the user to get quick results. Yahoo! Jobs illustrates this perfectly by placing the search tool in the top left corner and electing a clean palate to demonstrate quickly and easily the hierarchy of content. Another great attribute of of the Yahoo experience is the grouping of similar content. This simple cohesive organizing of content creates value for the user, and ideally elicits registration and regular visits.
2) What am I supposed to be looking at? This is a question you never want a user to ask. When everything is all over the place, and no formal navigation is in sight we have a tendency to loose interest. Solid navigation isn’t reserved for websites only. Blogs also need to think about the audience and their ability to locate specific content. Too often with a popular and well established blog the content takes on a life of it’s own leading to a confusing experience for new users.
When there are links to social media tools and real-time conversations there should be a clear distinction between this and blog posts. The ‘About’ content does not need to be above the fold or even on the main page. I have a tendency to prefer blogs from the likes of Blogger for this very reason. The tools provided allow you to manage content in a clear and concise fashion. We can easily asses who writes the blog, who reads the blog, what tags are associated with the posts, what types of categories exist, badges clearly assert how one can contact the blogger(s) associated with the blog, and a community results from links and a blogroll.
The sense that everything is related is the calling card of a well organized website or blog. I don't think a Home page needs to explain everything at once. To me, the Home page is similar to a thesis statement. A first impression is hard to change and it's really important to be able to illustrate the core attributes of the site in a clear and concise fashion. This also includes pages that take longer then a few seconds to load - I realize that Flash and other cool media stuff makes a site pretty and adds lots of razzle-dazzle, but I don't think any type of media should block or slow-down entry into a website. Let the user control their own experience by providing clearly laid out content and navigation.
Here are a few of the biggest mistakes I’ve noticed regarding content hierarchy, poor categorization, and confusing layouts.
1) Everything is in the middle of the page. Upon arriving to a website we have a tendency to look at the centre and then we normally scan the content from left to right (this makes sense considering in using the English language we also read left to right). When a home page is scrunched up into the centre of the page with everything competing for attention the brain has to think too much. And when we have to think too much our experience is usually poor.
An easy way to avoid this is to determine what is the best available service for the user. In the case of a job search it is the tool which allows the user to get quick results. Yahoo! Jobs illustrates this perfectly by placing the search tool in the top left corner and electing a clean palate to demonstrate quickly and easily the hierarchy of content. Another great attribute of of the Yahoo experience is the grouping of similar content. This simple cohesive organizing of content creates value for the user, and ideally elicits registration and regular visits.
2) What am I supposed to be looking at? This is a question you never want a user to ask. When everything is all over the place, and no formal navigation is in sight we have a tendency to loose interest. Solid navigation isn’t reserved for websites only. Blogs also need to think about the audience and their ability to locate specific content. Too often with a popular and well established blog the content takes on a life of it’s own leading to a confusing experience for new users.
When there are links to social media tools and real-time conversations there should be a clear distinction between this and blog posts. The ‘About’ content does not need to be above the fold or even on the main page. I have a tendency to prefer blogs from the likes of Blogger for this very reason. The tools provided allow you to manage content in a clear and concise fashion. We can easily asses who writes the blog, who reads the blog, what tags are associated with the posts, what types of categories exist, badges clearly assert how one can contact the blogger(s) associated with the blog, and a community results from links and a blogroll.
The sense that everything is related is the calling card of a well organized website or blog. I don't think a Home page needs to explain everything at once. To me, the Home page is similar to a thesis statement. A first impression is hard to change and it's really important to be able to illustrate the core attributes of the site in a clear and concise fashion. This also includes pages that take longer then a few seconds to load - I realize that Flash and other cool media stuff makes a site pretty and adds lots of razzle-dazzle, but I don't think any type of media should block or slow-down entry into a website. Let the user control their own experience by providing clearly laid out content and navigation.
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