I help companies and organizations create, acquire, collect, edit and organize content for their web sites. Many projects begin with a web site that has grown into a giant, organic mess over the course of several years – adding content here and there like weeds enveloping a garden. This happens for many reasons, but the primary one is, people think more information is better. However, this only true if the information has more details, depth, clarity and offers several perspectives.

What content is right for you

One must determine what information is suitable to publish online and create guidelines that benefit the company’s business objectives while satisfying visitor expectations. A good way to accomplish this is by defining some criteria all content must meet. These criteria are created by asking questions about the content:

• Is it relevant to the conversation we need to be having with our visitors?
• Is it unique to our business, services or products?
• Does it support a particular position, or philosophy we endorse?
• Do visitors expect it?
• Do we have the resources to produce and manage the content in an exceptional manner?

The first three questions are introspective and an organization’s marketing message is partly the result of them, but often web sites need to pick up where ad copy leaves off with more details. The fourth is knowing your audience. This is often overlooked and is very important. Lastly, being able to create the content without sacrificing from other business operations in a way as to not create a negative effect is important. Too often trying to do too much ends up being a weak attempt.

Things to keep in mind

• Quality over quantity. Quality over quantity. Quality over quantity.
• Always have a specific business goal for spending time to produce content.
• Be the authority, but make it relevant to your specific differentiators.
• Don’t be an encyclopedia. Most often, there are other sites that are far better than you could ever be at presenting general information.
• Don’t be redundant. Use cross-linking to refer to content located in other sections of your site. If you must repeat something, do it from a different angle using different wording.
• Leverage other online resources. Visitors are appreciative for the help in finding additional information and it costs you little.

I'm not the first one to say this, but I'm going to. It is not necessary to write "click here" for hyperlink text. Let me repeat it another way. Don't use "click here."  It's just not good web.

http://www.w3.org/QA/Tips/noClickHere

http://www.accessibilityblog.com/2005/10/17/how-to-anchor-text-dont-click-here/

The proper way is to have a link clearly appear to be a link by the traditional underline or a well-establish alternative heuristic and link the action text.

Examples:

Click to here view year-end report - BAD

View year-end report - GOOD

Click here to download PDF - BAD

Download Annual Report (PDF) - GOOD

In addition to saving words, space and not insulting your visitors intelligence, hyperlinking the descriptive words help search engines. So please stop using "click here." Please.

My friend Eric turned me on to this handy app for media conversion. Maybe you can use it too.

http://www.formatoz.com/

As of June 2008 Apple has made a version of Safari for PCs. It seems to have the same quirks as the Mac version. Should prove useful for testing. Thanks Apple.

Learn grasshopper.

Hey shutterbugs. Corbis has these cool ReadyMech pinhole cameras on their site. Neat.

Twitter was the darling app of SXSW07.

I don't use Twitter and when I found out about I thought it was utterly unnecessary.

However, this video does a great job of explaining it. Perhaps you can be become enlightened and your life better.

Information is disseminated at amazing speeds across the web and here is a prime example.

I was watching a keynote by Mark Zuckerberg at SXSW. The crowd took exception to the line of questioning by the interviewer and began to complain. Within seconds the whole Internet was a buzz of what was happening. Notified by Twitter and RSS feeds, curious people, attending other panels, started coming into the room to see what was going on.

Attendees at SXSW constantly blogged and tweeted during panel discussions. Information was posted online in almost real-time: faster than a thousand phones calls could possibly be made, or a news announcements could be created. Pretty powerful stuff.

1. Content is most important
2. Content is most important
3. Content is most important
4. User/Customer experience = marketing
5. E-commerce business is built on repeat customers
6. Share knowledge
7. Plan for now
8. Be kind, mindful and honest in everything you do
9. It’s easy to talk things to death
10. Social Networks are real and apply to business too
11. Buying is highly social
12. 60 Million+ users are worth $15 billion or ~ $250 per user (to Microsoft)
13. Keep users by helping them live better
14. Some of the most important things that affect the quality of a deliverable are momentum, motivation, movement. Delays kill!
15. Internet geeks really like Twitter

Guy Kawasaki just launched a new blog index site, Alltop.com

In this site are his picks of folks most influencing the web. He titles it egos. Nice group.

Often when analyzing a client's needs, I try to find ways to use the Web to impact all aspects of their business, whether it's old-school web content, rich media or social apps.

This article, Harnessing the Power of Social Applications, on MIT's Sloan Review site does a great job of describing how to use "groundswell" to benefit business and has several prime examples.

Ted.com

Inspired talks by the world's greatest thinkers and doers

Library of Congress

Browse some of the digital collections. Awesome.

Did you know many historical photos are part of the public domain and may be usable for commercial purposes? Just make sure to check usage rights first.