Hello to everyone who found this blog via my guest post on Anywired: How to Write Your Way to Online Success (Even if You’re Not a Writer).

If you’re looking for a few good articles to start with, I suggest:

• 18 Productivity Haikus - Get Things Done and Achieve Inner Peace through the Power of Poetry
• 5 Questions to Ask When Evaluating a Web Site Design
• Saying More by Saying Less
• The Business of Fiction - 5 Ways to Help Your Business by Reading a Novel
• The World’s Most Powerful Form of Networking

Thanks for stopping by!

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If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe via email. Thanks for visiting!

Photo by rblock (license)

I’ve been writing this blog for a few months now, and it’s doing pretty well. But the other day I realized that I’ve never asked for any feedback other than for individual posts. Today I am fixing that and opening up the suggestion box.

Leave a suggestion

Want to see a post on a particular topic? Something about the current design bugging you? Do I post too frequently or not frequently enough? If you have any suggestions at all, please post them below, and I’ll do what I can to make this blog a better place for you to hang out.

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Photo by Coneee (license)

If you’ve been following along with me so far, you know that content is more important than design and that the way you judge a website’s content is by its purpose. So now it’s time to start translating that purpose into great content. Here are a few questions to get you started.

Warning: Mediocre to painful Star Trek analogies ahead.

1. Is the content full of mistakes?

By mistakes I mean things like spelling, typos, grammar errors, etc. While online writing is much less formal than offline writing, that doesn’t mean that you can be sloppy. An occasional spelling mistake can be overlooked, but consistent errors of language will eventually affect your reputation.

There are exceptions to this rule, and engaging content can overcome weakness in this area, but by and large it holds true. So it may be useful to have Mr. Data *cough* spellcheck *cough* proofread your work.

2. Does the current content support the purpose?

If you are trying to sell Star Trek uniforms, but the content on your site doesn’t offer anyone a reason to want them* you probably aren’t going to be selling many uniforms. Or consider the much more common case of a blog that says you should subscribe but doesn’t tell you why. Yes, I’m guilty of this one, but not for much longer.

* “Look absolutely dashing in this alternate future uniform worn by Picard in All Good Things…”

3. Is the content engaging?

Engaging content is absolutely critical. It isn’t enough to just say “You want to buy my product. You want to buy my product,” like the Borg endlessly repeating that resistance is futile. To get people thinking your way, you probably need to be a bit more seductive.

4. Who should be writing this?

Most of the content on the web isn’t created by professionals. Instead it is created by the website owner, or perhaps a web designer or some other member of the organization who doesn’t necessarily have a particular talent for it. There isn’t necessarily anything wrong with this, but really think over the effect that this will have on different sections of your site.

In my case, I’m a decent informational writer, but not all that great with a sales pitch, so my self-written sales pages tend to sound like a logic-obsessed Vulcan trying to persuade ordinary human beings that I can provide an emotionally gratifying product. To help fix this I’ve been working with Naomi of IttyBiz to update the sales-related portions of my website, and have been extremely happy with her work.

Do you have a horrible Star Trek analogy of your own? Post it below!

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Photo by a VeCeS Veo… (license)

Last week I talked about how a website’s content is more important than its design. The point of a design is to support the website’s content. But how can you tell if the content itself is doing it’s job? You have to know what your website’s purpose is.

Now, you may be thinking to yourself, “Duh! Of course you need to know your website’s purpose!” But even if you have some idea of your website’s purpose, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a very clear idea.

This all leads me to my main point. If you don’t have a clear idea of what your website’s purpose is, you have know way to tell whether it’s working or not.

How to figure out your website’s purpose

1. List the things you want your website to do for you

For most websites, there will be more than one goal that your website helps you accomplish. ( Such as providing product information to potential buyers, as well as providing post-sales support information.) Some are more important than others, but right now, your job is just to list them all.

2. Distinguish between goals and means

After you’ve created your list, look over it carefully. You’ll probably find that it’s actually a combination of goals and methods. So, for instance, “convince people to give me money” might be a goal, and “positioning myself as a well-known expert on the plight of unemployed Fortran coders” a means. (The line between them, of course, can be a bit fuzzy.)

Go through the list, keeping this distinction in mind, and mark each item as either a goal or a means.

3. Rank the goals

Now, looking at your collection of goals for your website, you’ll need to rank them from most important to least important. If you have a hard time ranking them, just compare two at a time and ask yourself, “If someone held a gun to my head and forced me to choose just one of these, which one would it be?”

By the end of this process, you should have a pretty clear idea of which goal is your website’s primary purpose, and which are just secondary.

Often, just going through this exercise and figuring out will help to clarify your thinking about your website. But save your list (of both goals and means) because it will be useful in going through my next blog entry on using your list of goals to evaluate your website’s content.

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Hey guys! I hope you’ve been having a great week. Here are some of the best posts that I’ve read recently.

• AnyWired–Middlebrook Make Money Online Challenge: The Beginning
  Mark at My Tropical Escape has started an online money-making challenge. And Jarkko Laine has accepted the challenge as well. Looks like this will be interesting to watch.
• Coffee Break: Your Best Piece of Advice - FreelanceSwitch - The Freelance Blog
  The commenters at FreelanceSwitch offer their best advice on freelancing. Some great ideas here!
• Attentional Feng Shui of a Room | The Growing Life
  Is the arrangement of your room distracting you from what you need (or want) to do? Read this article.
• Moleskine Notebooks: The Ultimate Guide (and how to rank your addiction) | Put Things Off
  Nick Cernis offers a complete guide to the Moleskine notebook and a very funny ranking of addiction-level. (I’m a groupie.)
• ? theAdmin.org - Your Marketing Game ?
  If you’re like me, you probably don’t find marketing the most exciting aspect of business. But this marketing game from Eric Davis might change that.

Have a great weekend!

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One thing that I’ve noticed about web designers who care about good design is that we often tend to focus on a design as if it were the most important aspect of a web site. The problem is that it’s not. To adapt a phrase, “It’s the content, stupid!”

Exceptional content can overcome bad design

Steve Pavlina’s site is a striking example. It is a bit of an eyesore — Whoever thought that the green and blue on his site worked well together? — yet because of the consistently interesting content, still ranks in the Technorati 100. The main thing that the design has going for it is that it makes the content pretty easy to read. Read the rest of this entry »

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I made more progress toward my goals this month than last month, but still not quite as much as I would have liked. Here’s how it breaks down. Read the rest of this entry »

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Photo by ecstatisist (license)

It is pretty common to hear web designers complain about clients’ not understanding good web design. Sometimes the complaints are justified. But many times the problem isn’t the client but the designer’s failure to educate them about what constitutes good web design.

And there are also times when, despite all odds, a web designer might just be wrong.

In all of these situations, it is important to have a clear set of questions to ask so that both web designers and clients can evaluate a design objectively. Here are five such questions. Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week, I put together a giant collection of links about blogging. It may look like it was a lot of work, but it actually only took about ten minutes. Want to find out how? Keep reading.

1. Find quality links

This is the most important part of creating the links post. But for me, it didn’t actually add any work. Why? Because I’ve been bookmarking sites about blogging as a personal reference. Over the past few months I just read and explored my feeds trying to learn everything I could about blogging. When I found something valuable, I’d bookmark it. That means that it has gotten past not just one, but two layers of filtering.

• I read the article and found it worthwhile
• I wanted to be able to refer back to it

The better you are at filtering, the more likely your readers will find the list useful. Read the rest of this entry »

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• Wishful Thinking » Is it Better to Be a Creative Generalist or a Specialist?
  A really interesting post comparing the benefits of specializing in one thing versus having wide ranging knowledge. Personally, I think a balance of the two works out pretty well.
• You Weren’t Meant to Have a Boss
  Paul Graham explains why humans (especially creative types) weren’t meant to have a boss.
• Frogs « Tim’s Blog
  What do frogs and lilypads have to do with making money? Read this post to find out.
  
• Location Independent Destination Guides
  Lea and Jonathan Woodward of Location Indpendent Living have launched a new destination guide with detailed information about some great places to work. They only have information on Panama City, Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town, but it looks like it will be an awesome source of information as they add more locations.
  
• Writing Things Down (WTD): 13 Reasons to Switch Back to Paper Today! | Put Things Off
  An excellent rundown of why paper is almost always superior to digital.
  

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