• you would make it easy for them to find the things they really need most from it.
• you wouldn’t have  irrelevant links and content on your homepage.
• your bounce rate wouldn’t be that high.
• you wouldn’t have people calling you up to ask you questions, the answers to which are already on your site.

“But this is how all the <name of industry here> companies do their sites!”, you say?

Well then, it’s time for you to be the one that does it differently.

XKCD really hit this one on the nail

Here’s the link to the offer. There’s even an iPad version.

Have you seen Ms South Carolina attempt to answer a question during the Miss Teen USA pageant in 2007? Chances are – you have, because at the time of writing this post the video below has already been viewed 44,282,293 times. Even if you have watched it before, just go ahead and watch it once more.

Alright, it’s a nerve wrecking moment for anyone. But what could have saved her, is if she had actually taken the time to stop, relax and think about her answer first, before making an attempt to answer the question. It was an easy question – without a set right or wrong answer. No chance of getting this wrong because it’s just asking for her opinion. Yet, she still managed to mess it up really badly.  Here are my thoughts on where she failed:

1. She decided to start giving an answer right away without taking a moment to pause and think about a response.

2. She obviously tried memorizing answers to possible questions, which unfortunately didn’t get asked. So in panic, she blurted bits and pieces of the “shelved” responses lying in her subconsious mind.

3. She didn’t attempt to answer the question honestly. If she had, she would have come up with a personal and unique answer.

We’ve all been put on the spot before. Perhaps while answering questions after a presentation you made recently or a tough question put forth during your last job interview. Rather than panicking or trying too hard to answer quickly, there’s basically two things you have to remember in order to not come out of it looking like a fool.

Take a moment to think about the question and what it means to you.

No one is going to shoot you if you don’t answer their question the moment the finish their sentence. It’s okay to even ask for some time. People are not going to think you’re slow. In fact, they will think here’s someone who’s taking my question seriously. Well done.

Be honest – say what you really think or feel.

Whatever the situation, whatever the question – just speak the truth and you can not go wrong. The moment you start making up a response, or using memorized phrases or cooking up an answer which you think people want to hear – you’re fried. Maybe not right away, but eventually, you’ll be found out.

altavista.com. March 2000

yahoo.com , March 2000

Google looked like this (and it was a real breath of fresh air!):

google.com, March 2000

That, and the fact that Google was vehemently against pop-up ads at a time when all the other search engines seemed to be embracing them wildly.

Back to the present. Google’s homepage still looks about the same. Still the clean, white, spacey interface it has always had. Once you click on the search button however, you can’t help but notice that the results page seems to be more and more ‘filled up’ then it ever used to be.

That’s the reason why Gabriel Weinberg from Valley Forge, PA, USA created an online search engine called Duck Duck Go. Apparently, Gabriel noticed how additional advertising related content was creeping into google search results pages. Learning from what Google itself did earlier in the millenium, Gabriel decided to go with simplicty in his design. Going a step further, he studied what users didn’t like about ‘googling’ so that he could implement solutions in his version of the ultimate search engine (or as his tagline goes, Duck Duck Go – the search engine with less garbage and better results).

In his About page, he shares some of the reasons why one might convert from Google to DuckDuckGo (personally, I like the way it automagically populates the next ten search results as you near the bottom of the page – just like it does on most mobile apps these days).

I don’t know about the name Duck Duck Go though,it’s just a bit too out there for me.

But Gabriel’s got the concept right. If you want to be better than your competition at attracting visitors to your site, and giving them the best online experience they can have, then do the following:

1. Listen to the crowd

Find out what problems people are facing with your competitors’ site(s), find a solution and implement the solution on your site. You’ll be surprised what you can learn if you start monitoring the social media channels, scanning customer blogs, etc. NFIB provides a short list of 5 ways you can monitor the conversation online.

2. Simplify, simplify, simplify

In his book the Laws of Simplicity, John Maeda talks about three ways to simplify almost anything:

• Remove elements
• Hide elements
• Shrink elements

Paul Boag from Boagworld shares some practical tips on how to actually do this for your site – with some excellent examples to help you get started.

In the meantime, have a go at DuckDuckGo. I’d love to hear what you think.

I must say, Dan does everything right in this presentation and here are three good takeaways worth spreading:

1. Kick off your presentation with a question that engages your audience

Most people would start off by introducing themselves and their topic. Hi I’m Jimmy Khoo and I’m the Lead Developer on Project Shmoject…bla bla bla. Although there’s nothing wrong with a basic introduction like that, it’s just a waste of a great opportunity to make an impactful first impression on your audience. The first few seconds are when your audience are trying to size you up. So, if there’s a way to connect with them in those few precious seconds, you should. One good way would be to ask them a question that gets them thinking.

Kathy Sierra creator of the Creating Passionate Users blog writes about beginning your presentation with a question the listener wants to have answered.

Begin with a question. A question the listener wants to have answered

It doesn’t have to be a literal question, just something they want to find out. In a good movie or novel, you find yourself thinking, “Who is this guy? Why is he in this situation? Will he get out of it? What’s this secret thing they keep referring to?” Make them curious. Curiosity is seduction. I’m astonished by how often we suck the life out of technical topics, when they could be fascinating. Find the passion. If YOU don’t care about the answer, why should they?

Just make sure you ask the right question! Not random questions about how they got to the venue or what they thought about the weather. The answer to the question that you ask should give you a chance to smoothly transition to the topic of your presentation.

2. Highlight key terms, cells or areas when explaining your visuals

I know Seth Godin says not to have more than 6 words per slide. But sometimes, you might need to share a chart or a part of a spreadsheet, or a block of text within which you have an item that you’d like to talk about. A lazy presenter would simply place the entire block of text or a full sized chart on the slide and talk through it. The danger in this however is that the audience may not be listening to you because they are looking at all the information that has suddenly become available to them on the screen. This dillutes any point that you are trying to make at the time. To avoid this it would be best to find a way to highlight the areas that are of interest, and grey out or dim out the areas that aren’t important.

For example, in Dan’s presentation he shares some average textbook math questions. Some of these questions are pretty wordy. But rather than just copying an image of the question and popping it onto his presentation, he went a step further and greyed out the text that didn’t need to be read. He gave the audience a specific visual cue to look at only certain parts of the text – which he highlighted in white.

Full block of text

Audience knows exactly what to look at

3. Break down complex points into easy steps so that your audience can follow you easily

Its easy to forget sometimes that our audience may not have the same level of understanding that we do – on the topic that we’re talking about. I’ve attended many presentations where the speaker runs off with a tough concept losing the audience at hello. Instead, the right way to do this is to break down a concept into digestible parts and then bring your audience on a journey through each of these parts. Powerpoint Ninja calls this technique content staging.

When you’re presenting your slide content, the last thing you want to do is overwhelm your audience with too much information on any one slide. If you find that you have too much content on one slide, you can divide it up and spread it over several slides. However, sometimes it’s not about simply breaking the content apart across multiple slides but about displaying the information more effectively in bit-size, digestible chunks in one slide.

For example, when explaining the concept of how to transform a conventional math problem into one that encourages patient problem solving, Dan breaks his process into four parts. First, he separates the visual layer from the math problem. Next, he separates out the question layer. On top of that, he places the structure layer, and finally the steps layer. As he talks about each layer he displays them on the screen one by one. This way, the audience can easily keep up with his explanation.

Dan also makes great use of stories and video in his presentation. All in all, a very entertaining and insightful talk. I’m quite confident that he’s well on his way to creating the patient problem solving society he talks about.

You can follow Dan on Twitter (@ddMeyer) or read more about his work on his blog.

So the question now is, “How do I write an ‘About’ page that is effective and works to my/our advantage?” Or if you already have one in place, “How do I know if my ‘About’ page works? To help you answer these questions, I’ve compiled a list of ten great resources on the web that should give you some ideas on what to do next!

Writing ‘About Us’ pages

1. ‘About Us’ Information on Websites

Jakob Nielsen, guru of web usability shares some great insights on writing an effective About Us section on your website, backed up by actual user research showing what works and what doesn’t.

2. How to Write the Perfect ‘About’ Page (by Numbers)

A great break down of what should be included in your ‘About’ pages and in which order.

3. The Power of the ‘About Us’ Page

Bryan Eisenberg author of “Call to Action” and “Always Be Testing” writes about the opportunities the ‘About Us’ gives you and the common ‘About Us’ page mistakes.

4. Guide to Writing Effective ‘About Us’ Web Pages

Judy Artunian writes about how to win potential customers through a well written ‘About Us’ page. She provides a seven items to include and some action steps to go about writing them.

5. Your ‘About’ Page is a Robot

A fantastic perspective on writing ‘About’ pages, using the analogy of your ‘About’ page being a robot which is ed with information, directives and is sent out to represent you in the world. A very entertaining and insightful read.

6. Writing an ‘About’ Page

If you don’t read any of the others, this one you should read. Six Revisions takes an in depth look at ‘About’ Pages, and also provides some great examples of websites which have got it right. Well written and easy to read.

7. Effective ‘About Us’ Pages

If you’re writing an ‘About Us’ page for your eBay store, then read this first. It’s catered especially for online storefronts.

Free PDF Download

8. Writing Effective ‘About Us’ Pages

Web consultant Wayne A. English is the author of WebContentRx A Quick and Handy Guide for Writers, Webmasters, eBayers and Business People. In this free downloadable PDF document, he outlines a few tips on how to write an ‘About Us’ page that works. Some very useful step by step tips included.

Writing About Me pages

9. Writing an Effective ‘About Me’ page

Another great set of tips on writing the perfect ‘About Me’ page for your blog, corporate or business web site. Again, this post provides some great questions to trigger your thoughts on information to include in your ‘About Me’ page.

10. How to Write Your ‘About Me’ Page

Catered more for bloggers and one-person shows, this article by the Problogger, provides a simple example of a well written ‘About Me’ page which answers 4 basic questions.

image source : ilco

When we’re using the web, every question mark adds to our cognitive workload, distracting our attention for the task at hand. The distractions may be slight but they add up, and sometimes it doesn’t take much to throw us.

He goes on to describe a short list of questions that visitors to a site shouldn’t be thinking about:

• Where am I?
• Where should I begin?
• Where did they put ……?
• What are the most important things on this page?
• Why did they call it that?

And here are a couple more I could think of:

• How do I get back to that page I was just at?
• Where’s the search function?
• What do they mean by …….?
• What does this error message mean? What do I do now?

The bottom line according to Steve, is that you don’t want to design a site in which your visitors have to think about how to use it. If you haven’t read his book yet, I totally recommend it – very easy to grasp and full of ideas you can use right away.

Now would be a good time to go through your site and see if there’s anything about your site that would make your visitors ask questions or scratch their heads. Find ‘em and fix ‘em.

Your turn: What other questions do your website visitors ask that they shouldn’t be asking?

To mark the celebration, they created a video to show the history and evolution of Youtube from the days of its humble creation to where it is today.

I think its a great example of what companies can do with video combined with a visual timeline to tell their own story.  Here are two suggestions on when might be a good time to do such a video in your project:

1. Project Kick-off

A video with an evolutionary timeline of what things used to be like – leading up to the present – depicting the different stages of improvements achieved in the past. This leads the viewer to the present date in the timeline, an opportune moment to introduce your project and depict how it will change the way things will be done in the future.

2. Project Go-live

A video which tells the story of all the hard work and effort that went into the project, the challenges that were bravely overcome, and the satisfaction at the end – would fit really well at any Project (go-live) launch or celebration event.  Even better if the photos and short video clips used in the final video are contributed by the project team members themselves. Everyone has a digital camera these days – so it won’t be hard to organise. This gives everyone an opportunity to get involved in this celebratory production!

But with open source forging ahead and free apps (useful ones) becoming  more and more available, cost of licensing and software options won’t be an issue for small businesses and individual contractors for much longer.

One key application that I would prefer to use when working on communication projects is Photoshop. I use it for editing images I use in newsletters, to upload on the intranet, to morph for posters, to convert images before sending them off to the printers and a host of other reasons. Sometimes however, the organisations that I work for don’t have the budget to buy a Photoshop licence or do not see the value in it. I could bring my personal macbook to work each morning to get my image editing done – but a smarter, easier way would be to use the free stuff available online.

In this case, my pick would be to use pixlr.com.

pixlr.com combines image editing with paint tools and allows you to do almost everything a communicator would ever need to do. Even if you had Photoshop installed, you might not ever use more than 40% of its actual capabilities – unless you’re also the graphic designer in your firm. But if it’s layers you want, or use of filters, effects and level adjustments… pixlr.com can handle them all, and the results are amazingly good in comparison with what you would get from conventional photo-editing software.

So whether you’re starting out on your own and you don’t have enough dough to purchase a licence, or if you work for a firm that doesn’t want to spend on software – here’s an alternative that just might work for you.

Project PayMeNow Kickoff Session

or

The Financial Management System (Payroll Module) Upgrade Project Information Session

Okay, I admit. Project PayMeNow is a very corny name. It was the only thing I could think of from the top of my head. But my point is this.. you’ve lost most of your potential audience the moment they read the word Financial (except for the dudes down in Accounts and Finance, of course). If the session were directed only at a select few individuals or departments, then it might still work if you serve some really great refreshments. But for something that affects a majority of the staff, you would hope that a lot more people decide to attend.

Having a project brand usually means the project has an identity of its own, a personality even – with a name and a face(logo). A strong project brand makes it much easier for Change Communication teams to communicate project related information both within an organisation and externally.

It’s not difficult to do, and it shouldn’t cost you a lot of money – if it’s done right to begin with. Here are some quick guidelines to follow when creating a brand for your project.

1. Get your people involved!

The main reason you would want to brand your project is so that it can help you capture buy-in. So why not get your people involved right from the start? Hold a NAME THE PROJECT competition. Offer a fantastic prize and some consolation gifts that people would actually want to take home. This also gives you a great opportunity to introduce the project to everyone – through the competition rules. People will want to know what the project is about, and how it relates to them so that they can think of a good name for an entry.

Why stop there, let them come up with a logo idea while they’re at it. At the end of the day, everyone will know what the project and they’re already tuned in to your project communications.

2. Keep it simple

The simpler the better. For a name, one word would work best. If the chosen word relates to the key concept of the project even better. But sometimes it may not.  Most of the time, organisations prefer to use 3 or 4 words in a project name and then use an acronym to brand it. The problem with this is you will be adding another acronym into the already vast plethora of organisational acronyms so common in almost every industry.

I once worked on a project for an airline. Airlines as you know are famous for shortening everything into an acronym. ETD – estimated time of departure, ETA – Estimated Time of Arrival, VGML – Vegetarian Meal, PNR – Passenger Name Record…. the list goes on and on…The project name of course was PSS – which stood for Passenger Services System. Apart from people forgetting what the letters stood for, the name wasn’t able to carry much excitement or buzz for very long. It soon joined the ranks of the hundreds of other technical acronyms already existing in the Airline manuals.

Simple logos work best too. Take a look at Nike’s logo for example. You can’t get simpler than that.  Apple uses an apple. Shell uses a shell. Fantastic. No confusion there. I’ll explain more about the benefits of simple logos in the next bullet point, but in the meantime, have a look at some of these well known simple logos that have worked (and are still working) very well.

3. Refine it so that it’s easily reproducible

Recently I worked on a program called COMPASS. The original logo used was actually a map of Eastern Melbourne (which is the area in which this organisation was located and also the area in which it provided its services to) and a full detailed classic compass on top of the map. Try putting that on a cap!

No doubt, the name was a good one, but without an easily reproducible logo, it’s hard to market and promote the project. During key periods of the project, it’s a good idea to promote the project using change collaterals like caps, t-shirts, pens, USB sticks, memory cards, etc (you get the drift). For example, as you near the go-live date of a new system, it’ll be great to give away free t-shirts for everyone to wear on the day. So having a simple vectorised logo helps a great deal when you’re trying to organise the print work with an agent. Here’s a great article from iStockphoto that explains how to design a logo that works.

4. Make it relate clearly to your project

Lastly, and most importantly – the project name chosen should be something that relates to the project itself. The moment someone reads the name and sees the logo, the connection between the project brand and the project itself should be very clear. For example the COMPASS Program I mentioned earlier depicted the fact that the project was charting the course for the organisation’s success . Brilliant. Brands with obvious connections are easily accepted by people in general.

You can use elements of your logo to symbolise messages you want your project to represent. What do your logo colours mean? What does the icon in your logo represent? Amazon uses a curvy arrow that starts at the letter A and ends at the letter z to represent the fact that they have everything from A to Z in their online store.

It takes time to come up with a great brand, but it’s well worth the effort. Good luck!

image source: nkzs