Is it Time to Rebuild Your Website?
Websites don't last forever. Without consistent upkeep, sometimes they barely even make it three years! The rapid change of web technology can overtake what was once state-of-the-art and reduce a website to a quaint relic in pretty short order, which is why it's so critical to realistically consider the "shelf life" of your website when you first build it...
Navigating Navigation
You probably often think about the content of your website, but how often do you give due time to how you are structuring, organizing, and naming the navigation and menu items of your site? Navigating the navigation of your site is an important part of your information architecture that can result in a better user experience for anyone landing on your site...
Thinking About Information Architecture
Information architecture should be the fundamental concept to which every decision in the prototyping phase is held accountable. You should always keep in mind how your target audience will be interacting with the site, not just how you want it to function.
My Mixbook for 2010
Exactly one year ago (unplanned, believe it or not), I posted about a book I'd assembled of web articles, which I called "A Year of Ideas." I wanted to take an idea introduced to me by Emmet Connolly a bit further
Quick Content Idea: The Image-Driven Post
Some of us are visual thinkers who find it much easier to explain ideas with images than with words. Even though your blog should be predominantly written content, there's plenty of room for the occasional image-driven post...
Quick Content Idea: The No-Frills Video
Not every blog post has to be written. Why not fire up your webcam and record a short video to share something quick with your readers?
Quick Content Idea: The Interview
People love to be asked questions. Couple that with the diversity you can bring to your blog by interviewing the thoughtful and smart people you know and you've got a great blog post in the making...
When a Persona Can Be Your Best Advocate
As a project manager, it's easy to gauge the success of a project on the happiness of the client alone. No matter how much I believe in a particular solution for the site's users, if my client isn't happy, it's hard to get beyond that. Likewise, my client is under pressure to make internal stakeholders happy, even when they know those decisions may not be right for users. At some point or another, anyone involved in a web project will lose sight of the anonymous user's interests as they face real life demands from the people they work with day in, day out.
Quick Content Idea: The Transcript
I bet you have really great conversations almost every day with coworkers and colleagues that are crammed full of insight and expertise. Why not turn them into blog posts and show the world your intelligence at work behind the scenes?
Content 101
This month, we go back to the basics of web content strategy and look at the various kinds of content, including blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, webinars, audiocast and video, that you might create for your website and examine the best practices for each...