Station wagon words

In the 1970s it was THE family car. It was versatile and roomy and functional. But these days no one wants a station wagon. Even cars that look like station wagons don't call themselves station wagons.

Why? It's an outdated term - associated with wood paneling, loud clothes and other remnants of a bygone era.

The words we use can have strong connotations. Here are some words I recommend you don't use on your website (or anywhere else for that matter). They have fallen out of favor and connote "web 1.0" instead of current times and technology.

• "Listserv" - Even if you have one - call it something else.
• "Cyber" anything - very 1995.
  
• "Information Superhighway" - Avoid the cliche and refer to it as "the web" or "the Internet."
• "Chat room" - Most chat rooms are not "chat" but are actually message boards or forums.
• "Virtual" anything - Maybe the worst of all to still see. Shudder.

In contrast to those five, here's a post claiming that these are the Five Most Important Words You Can Have on Your Website.

Hello, Mom?

Not an mp3 player. Not a camera. Not an email device. Just a simple, well-designed cell phone that even my parents might use.

A Cell Phone for Baby Boomers

Free! Write Headlines 1000% Better!

A nice article from A List Apart on the most effective ways to write and use headlines online.

Friday Fun: Got Glass?

I have no idea if this site helps sell more milk but it's cleverly done and impressively designed.

Play Get the Glass.

LinkedIn for Good

This seems like a great idea. Now you can leverage your professional network to help support the causes you care about. Check out the brand new LinkedIn for Good.

LP Content

Think about the changes the music industry has gone through in just the last 30 years. The focus has shifted from 8-tracks and albums to cassettes to cds to digital. A show like "American Top 40" (with Casey Kasem back in my day) used to have incredible power is now marginalized by MTV, iTunes, Amazon and satellite radio.

The focus of music as a product has shifted too. The main focus used to be selling albums: 33 1/3 LPs. Yes, you could buy "45s" - also known as singles, but the main focus was on selling whole albums. Today, it's downloads and ringtones.

Even the name is telling. The name LP stands for "long play." Who has time for long? As we've already discussed, short is the new long.

Written content is undergoing a similarly radical change. Freed from the confines of books and magazines, information is flowing, searchable and available. It's become a commodity. Being an "author" is no longer reserved for only the elite as decided by a publishing company - anyone can blog or self-publish and have their voice be heard.

Just as you are no longer bound to the record player to hear your music, users of the Internet won't forever be tied to a computer. Users will access your content from their phones, PDAs and other portable devices. Just as your Pink Floyd LP can't be played with your iPod, these new devices aren't good for digesting "LP content." Reading a long article or downloading large pages on your phone is tedious and painful.

Content is (and will always be) king. But the king is changing.

Clever parody

Check out State Farm's creative parody of the e-Harmony.com campaign.

Customer service (?)

A fascinating, but sobering post from Rob at FasterForward on a new report from Accenture on the perceptions of customer service from customers and executives of the companies providing high-tech support.

It's amazing that some companies still don't see the value in taking care of the customer.

You can download the full report here.

Taking care of the customer

In one evening, in ten minutes, I was shown two different examples of businesses taking care of their customers.

First I was in the grocery store, in the checkout line to be specific. I was behind a gentleman who was almost done. Just a couple more items to be scanned and then he would pay and leave. As the cashier tried to scan one of his items - a bottle of saline solution - the product woudn't scan. A sticker had been placed, either by the manufacturer or the store, over the UPC barcode. It was not going to be easy to get off. The cashier quickly flagged down his supervisor and held up the item and asked for help. The supervisor said "that's either $1.79 or $2.49. Let's charge him $1.79 and call it close enough." It was quick and simple. Neither the customer nor I (in line) was bothered by it at all. Yes, maybe the store lost an extra 70 cents they could have made if they told the customer to wait, irked me, got on the microphone, asked for a price check, and basically cost everyone 3 minutes of their lives. Instead, they looked friendly, responsive and flexible.

The second example came about ten minutes later when I walked into my neighborhood Chinese food restaurant. I'm in there about once a week so certain staff members had gotten to know me and they are always nice and polite. But when I walked in this time, I realized they had entered a new era. Instead of taking phone orders on paper receipt tablets as had been the case before, they were typing everything into a computer. They were talking to a customer on the phone and capturing his order, specific requests, his phone number, delivery address, etc. Going forward, they would have a better picture of their clientele, be better able to target their advertising, be able to track order history, etc.

Technology can help a business run more smoothly and efficiently, but ultimately it's how this technology is applied that will determine success. In both cases, the grocery store and the Chinese restaurant seemed to understand that the technology they employ is merely a tool. Taking care of the customer will always be more important.

Business intelligence

From the always spot-on Dilbert:

Get your site to the doctor, stat!

My wife recently reminded me that I should go to the doctor for a checkup. I know she's right- it's been a couple of years. But it goes against my nature a bit to go see a doctor when everything is fine. The preventative, proactive doctor visit is not something I'm accustomed to. In my family, you went to the doctor if your arm was falling off - not if you felt fine.

Still, I know she's right. There could be any number of things wrong with me that an expert is going to find.

Similar to my attitude, you may think you know your website like the back of your hand. "If something were wrong, I'd know it" you say. You'd hear about it from your customers. You'd notice the problem.

But maybe not. How many customers find something wrong or (heaven forbid) broken on your site and simply leave without informing you of it? They just clicked away from your site and took their business elsewhere.

When was the last time you tried all the links or tested those forms? Do you know what your site looks like on a mobile device? Or how it works in different browsers?

A periodic "expert site review" is often helpful. It can provide a fresh, outside perspective from a authority on website design, navigation, and usability. Plus a site review can help you not only ensure that your site is working and usable, but that it is optimized to generate the results you want - more traffic, more sales, more conversions.

Get your site to the "doctor." Most of the time great improvements can be made, without major surgery.

How appropriate

Click on the pink timeline at the top and see the evolution of the site's design. Very cool.

d.Construct

You deserve a fake today...

It's not just models that get posed, airbrushed, and made to look flawless. It's food too.

Choice and loyalty

Years ago my grandfather dismissed the idea of cable television saying "what good are all those channels? You can only watch one at a time anyway."

He was right of course. But he grew up in an era of limited choices. Few, if any options. Henry Ford once told his car customers "You can have any color you want as long as it’s black."

Today, the customer has choices. There are dozens of car manufacturers willing to paint your car any color you want. (You can even get a car that changes colors.) If a bad show comes on, you're likely changing the channel. If you don't find something interesting or compelling on a website, you're gone.

Because we have options, our loyalty to one brand of car or one source of news has eroded.

Why stick with a bad product when there are plenty of suitable substitutes? No company could survive today by doing as Ford did and blatantly dismiss the wants of its customers.

A case of the Mondays

The Office Space Kit: Yeah, we've got sort of a problem here. If you haven't seen it, you need to.

More on staying relevant

John Moore has more on the topic of brand relevancy on his Brand Autopsy blog. Up next: Radio Shack.

Analyze this

Read an interesting article about TV viewership and advertising on CNN yesterday. Particularly this paragraph:

"Television has made billions based on how many people watch a show at its regular time. That idea may already be obsolete. So should the industry use DVR viewing when setting ad rates? If so, how quickly must people watch the shows -- within two days? A week? What about people who watch shows on their cell phones or on network Web sites, which Nielsen doesn't measure yet? Later this month Nielsen will begin measuring how many people watch commercials. Should those be used to compute advertising costs?"

It's funny that TV is now suffering the same fate the Web has been suffering since its inception: figuring out what to measure. What metrics are important and how do we measure and compare them accurately?

For years we reported how many "hits" our websites received. Then everyone realized hits was meaningless. Then came user sessions, page views and unique visits. Add in other measurements like sales, repeat visits, impressions, and user satisfaction, and the picture gets even murkier.

Even after years of refinement and technological advancement, I think there remains a lot of confusion around what websites should be measuring and much to be done before the picture is completely clear. Not that you should just throw up your hands and wait. On the contrary, you should work hard to understand what it is you are trying to accomplish on your site and look for ways to measure your definition of success.

Here are some good resources I recommend for more information about web analytics:

Wikipedia - Good overview
Google Analytics - recently redesigned and free
Web Analytics Association - representing the industry
Chris D'Allesandro - his blog has lots of excellent information.

Cutting corners

One summer I helped landscape the front of a bank. There was a paved walkway from the parking lot to the front door that took a 90 degree turn. As I was planting some new plants, my boss Steve told me not to put one too close to the corner. I asked why.

"Because people cut corners" is all he said. If we put a plant right on the corner, it would have been stepped on and killed by visitors cutting the corner or at a minimum, brushed often and irritated by pant legs and shoes.

Take a look at this picture of a traffic gate. Notice the tire tracks. If given the chance, people will cut corners and take the path of least resistance. Easy is better than hard.

The organization of your website should not only allow but encourage
this corner-cutting behavior. Don't put up a roadblock and make them click 4 times to get to a popular feature if you can provide a direct link. Add a list or drop-down box of "Popular Destinations" and allow users to jump right there. Configure your search engine to deliver the right results for key search terms.

Help your users cut corners and save time and suddenly your site will become more useful and user-friendly.

Digital nation

In 2001 Marc Prensky put forth the notion that there is a digital divide among us:

• Digital Natives (those born post-1980) grew up with modern technologies - computers, cable television, video games, the Internet
• The rest of us are Digital Immigrants - new to the digital world, trying to make sense of it all and assimilate technology into our lives
  

The article is called Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants -- A New Way To Look At Ourselves and Our Kids (PDF). It's a great read and it provides thoughtful insight into how the younger generation of Internet users has different needs and expectations.

I'm an Omnivore

A fascinating new survey report from the Pew Internet & American Life Project points out some interesting distinctions within the "wired" community. The report is a typology of information and communication technology users.

It found that adult Americans are broadly divided into three groups: 31 percent are elite technology users, 20 percent are moderate users, and the remainder have little or no usage of the Internet or cell phones. But there are many sub-groups within each category and a quiz to see what group you belong in.

Friday fun: Corporate etymology

Fascinating list on Wikipedia of the etymology of company names. For instance:

• Kinko's — from the college nickname of founder, Paul Orfalea. He was called Kinko because he had curly red hair. The company was bought by FedEx for $2.4 billion in 2004.
• Nabisco — formerly The National Biscuit Company, changed in 1971 to Nabisco.
• Reebok — alternate spelling of rhebok, an African antelope.
• Starbucks — named after Starbuck, a character in Herman Melville's novel Moby Dick.
• Williams-Sonoma — founded by Chuck Williams in Sonoma, California.
• Yoplait — from the merger of Yola and Coplait in 1965.
  

Who knew?

The password is...

As a kid I always liked the game show Password. The point of the game was to convey the "password" to your playing partner by giving only one-word clues.

In some ways we play this game with our users on our websites. We label buttons and navigational choices with a word or two that we hope conveys the right meaning to the user. But what we think of when we hear or read a certain word is a complicated thing. A major task of good Information Architecture is choosing words that will mean the same to the users as they do to the organization.

Check your site's search engine reports to see what users are searching for on your site. Sometimes this information can indicate content they are having difficulty finding using the navigation. Often a minor change in wording can help users find their way.

When do you cut off the long tail?

Average life of a major league baseball: 7 pitches
A housefly: 20 days
A giraffe: 25 years
The sun: 10 billion years

Some content on the web? Even longer. Or so it seems.

Much has been written about the benefits of "The Long Tail." And it's true that modern technology has allowed businesses to cater to and profit from niche audiences more than ever before.

But I think it raises an important topic: What's the distinction between "older", valuable content and "old" content that should be deleted? How valuable does something need to be for you to keep it?

In many cases, deleting older articles or files from your website is not a necessity - as long as the information is still accurate. But if old content clogs up your search engine, it may be doing some harm. Consider keeping older items in an archive directory that can be searched separately.

Do an occasional content audit and review the metrics of your site. Then you'll have a better idea of what to keep, what to archive, and what to trash.

iGoogle

I might have gone with YouGoogle instead. Or YourGoogle.

Two reasons: They already own YouTube, so there could have been some consistency and maybe they start a franchise of product offerings focused on "You." Secondly, doesn't the "iProductname" format make you think of Apple?