Case in point is a client I just finished working with. He has years of experience in his field, and his company is a 1-stop shop for all the needs people have when it comes to his particular service. He’s the personality behind the business, and the new website reflects this – which makes him a perfect candidate to start blogging.

How blogging helps your business

When he first asked me about blogging, the advice I gave him was based on my own experiences as a small business owner who blogs, and was that it could really help his business if he blogged regularly on your website. (Especially since he was already using WordPress.)

Here are some ways that blogging can help your business:

• Helps you reach out to clients and potential clients
• Establishes you as a subject-matter expert
• Gives you free publicity through search engine results
• Brings more web traffic to your website
• Makes your website more lively and friendly
• De-mystifies your business and makes it (and you) more approachable
• Lets you easily provide news, specials, etc.
• Helps you communicate in a timely fashion
• Builds a following of readers or visitors, who might turn into clients one day
• Provides technical support, online documentation, etc. – again, all part of establishing you as a subject-matter expert

I know that writing regular blog posts has helped my business out tremendously. One of the biggest benefits is that it helped me find my voice when articulating web design concepts to other people. Ultimately I think this has translated into a confidence in my professional skills and abilities.

Of course, the increased web traffic and better search engine results certainly hasn’t hurt either. Some of the posts that I’ve written have received a great deal of web traffic, none of which would have found my website otherwise. And since Google and the major search engines factor in the context of your website and what you’re writing about, the more keyword-rich content on it, the better off you’ll be.

Just remember…

While blogging is a great way to benefit your small business, I try to remind people that success with blogging isn’t easy and doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a lot of hard work, but that’s a concept that any small business owner already knows.

So if you want to start blogging, here are some things to keep in mind as you get down to it:

• Leave time to write regularly – Give yourself time to write. You may be swamped already, but set a schedule and stick to it, even if that means only publishing content once a week. No one says you need to publish content every day anyways.
• Keep expectations in check – It took me over a year to get 100 subscribers to my blog, but I don’t define success just by my subscriber count. Given the other benefits that I’ve received from blogging, I think I’m successful. So what do you expect to gain from blogging?
• Learn to write different – Writing for a website is much different than the more formal writing that people are used to. You might not find your blog voice right away, but keep at it, do some research into how to write for a blog (see some of the links below), and you’ll ultimately find it.
• You have info people want – As a small business owner, you have knowledge that people want to know – that’s why they’re coming to you in the first place. If you’re able to translate that knowledge into quality blog, people will find it and want to read it.
• Think journal entry, not thesis – You don’t have to write a lengthy dissertation for each blog post that you put together. Keep it short and on topic, and you’ll get your readers more engaged with what you’re talking about.

If you want more information about the art of blogging, there are a lot of great websites out there that can provide a ton of content for you to look through. I read some of these myself, so I can personally recommend them:

• Copyblogger
• Daily Blog Tips
• Problogger
• 25 Blogs About Blogging (great resource list)

Thoughts?

If you’re a small business owner who blogs regularly, do you have any tips, success, or advice that you think others might benefit from? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts with everyone!

What is a call-to-action?

A call-to-action is the fundamental reason that you have a website in the first place. In web marketing, it’s defined as something, either a design element or some piece of content, that compels a visitor to take some specific action that you can measure to determine whether your website is working or not.

Every type of website you can think of has a call-to-action built into it, although of course some websites are better at emphasizing it than others. Calls-to-action provide focus for your website and if done right, give direction to your visitors for what you ultimately want them to do. Examples of a call-to-action include:

• Make an online donation
• Request an appointment
• Purchase a product
• Fill out a request form
• Register for an event or program

What makes a call-to-action effective?

Unfortunately there are no easy answers to that question, and there are plenty of people out there who ponder that question every day. While every website and every situation is different, there are some general guidelines you can follow when making your calls-to-action, both from the content and the design perspectives.

Also keep in mind that you should continually test whether your calls-to-action work or not. There are some free tools out there that will give you a good start at this, especially from Google. Their analytics tool will tell you what people are looking at on your website, while their website optimizer can help you test different combinations of calls-to-action in order to see what works better.

Writing calls-to-action

Using the right words appropriate to your website will drive people to take the action; using the wrong words can distract them, at best, or cause them to leave your website, at worst. With that in mind, here are some tips for writing effective calls-to-action:

• Lay the groundwork – Before someone is willing to follow one of your calls-to-action, they first have to recognize a need that requires them doing so. Telling your visitors the benefits of taking that action will help give them the motivation to actually do so.
• Use action-oriented words – Using an active voice encourages people to follow your calls-to-action, and also helps people scanning your website quickly identify what your call-to-action is about. This is also one of the reasons you should avoid using “click here” in your link text.
• Have one on every page – There should always be at least one call-to-action within the content on every page of your website – no page should be a dead-end. Ending your content with a call-to-action tells visitors what the next step is and keeps them moving on your website.
• Limit the number and keep them distinct – Having too many calls-to-action on a website can be confusing for your visitors. Limit yourself to only a few, and keep them distinct so visitors know what the primary call-to-action is, as well as what you want them to do first from the choices.
• Keep your forms short and clear – Unless someone has a compelling interest, many people see a long form asking for unnecessary information and won’t fill it out. Follow some of my other tips for writing clear instructions if your main call-to-action is a form.

You can also look through a previous post that I’ve written about improving your titles and sub-headers for some tips that are just as applicable to writing effective calls-to-action.

Designing calls-to-action

Web designers can have a lot of influence over how effective calls-to-action are. Following general usability and design guidelines help make the website as effective as possible. Here are some tips for how to do that:

• Put it above the fold – You want your main call-to-action to be visible wherever people go throughout your website – almost like your logo. The right side of your website’s header is a natural location to do that; any other lesser calls-to-action can go in sidebars, above the fold as well.
• Use images for emphasis – Images or icons get people’s attention because they get noticed by your eyes before content on a page does. Buttons also do the same thing and are great to use because they stand out against text AND imply action by their very nature.
• Choose contrasting colors – If you’re using a button as your primary call-to-action mechanism, use a color that contrasts with your main colors for maximum effect. Just don’t choose a color that contrasts so much that it becomes too hard to ignore when reading the content around it.
• Consider homepage placement – We all know how important your homepage is, which is why you need to make it as usable as possible for your visitors. Your main call-to-action should be prominently placed on it where people will really see it.
• Use some white space – The more white space around your call-to-action, the more people’s eyes will naturally be drawn to it. Crowding your call-to-action in with surrounding content will decrease its effectiveness as it gets lost in the overall noise of the page.
• Make it bigger – Size isn’t everything when it comes to your call-to-action, but making it bigger definitely makes it more likely that it will get noticed. Just don’t make it so big that it totally overwhelms the rest of the content on your website – find the right balance.

Thoughts?

Creating effective calls-to-action are a HUGE topic and business for a lot of people, so I hope that this gave some good, introductory guidelines for making your calls-to-action more effective.

Have you had any particular success working with calls-to-action on your website or on a website you’ve done for a client? Leave a comment below to share your thoughts and experiences!

While some of these things fall into what I would call basic design practices that should always be done, others are what I think of as the little extra touches the designer can do to make a website that much better.

No matter what you call them, what everything on this list has in common is that they’re extra value that clients are receiving for their financial investment. It’s something that I communicate to them when giving a cost estimate for their project because it shows both how I’ll be spending the time and what they’re getting for what they’re paying.

See how many of these things you do when working on a website for a client – and if you’re not doing them, consider adding them to your regular design process.

Design and Navigation

• Create an error page – You may have checked every single link on your website, but it’s still inevitable that some visitors will type a URL wrong or somehow get to a page that doesn’t exist. A custom 404 error page will help your users find what they’re looking for when that happens.
• Add a favicon – Favicons are the little icons that you see at the top of a browser window and in your bookmarks list. They’re a great finishing touch for any website to have, and can even have some small usability benefits – great reasons for why websites should always use favicons.
• Validate the site markup – Make sure your website adheres to web standards before you launch. Validated websites load faster, better, and on more web browsers, and are also “future proof” in the sense that all web browsers will handle the website as you designed it.
• Cross-browser test – Your website should look and functions the same in all of the major web browsers and on all of the popular operating systems. Most of the popular cross-browser testing tools, such as Browser Shots, also test your website in various screen resolutions as well.

Server Optimization

• Resize images accordingly - If you’re calling an image from the server and the image files is really large even though it’s being displayed much smaller, resizing ahead of time will speed up the load time of that page, and help keep the amount of server space you’re using up at a minimum.
• Put javascript in the footer – If you’re calling external Javascript within your website, putting them in the header means that the server will try to load them first before loading your content. Putting them in the footer loads the content first before fetching the script – much more desirable.
• Clean up server of working files – While developing a website, I often find myself with extra files on the server that I had used at some point but am not using any longer. I delete those unnecessary files so that what’s on the server is only what’s being used somewhere on the website.

Search Engine Optimization

• Generate a sitemap – Creating a sitemap is useful for your users as a navigation tool, but for the search engines perspective it will help them find new content on your website faster than by relying on their crawler to find it. This will help you get more of content noticed and more links followed.
• Submit URL to search engines – If you’re launching a new website, the search engines won’t know about it unless you tell them to come and crawl your website. This one of the simple steps to bolster SEO on your website, so at a minimum submit the URL to Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Create a robots.txt file – This file tells the search engine spiders what they can and can’t crawl on your website. If you don’t want them to look at certain directories, this is where you would specify that. One way this might be useful for SEO is as a way to avoid duplicate content on your website.

Content

• Proofread your content one last time – There’s no excuse for spelling or grammar mistakes on a website. If you’ve written content for a website, such as links, intro text, etc., having extra eyes looking at it to make sure everything sounds good and is written properly will make sure any errors are caught.
• Check for broken links one last time – You can spend all the time in the world making your website as great as possible, but if you have broken links on it, the website looks bad. Before you launch, click through all the links on the website to verify that everything works properly.
• Set up Google analytics – Understanding what content your visitors are looking at on your website is absolutely essential in order to make it as effective as possible. Google Analytics is not only free, but incredibly popular and easy to use, which is why I use it on all my client websites.

Thoughts?

Is there anything that I didn’t list here that your normally do when you launch a new website for a client? Share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

Titles and sub-headers have the ability to not only break up your text into manageable chunks, but to engage your readers in what you’re writing about. Since people scan web content quickly, titles and sub-headers are what they’ll notice first – which is why they play such a big role in whether your content gets read or not.

Below are my tips for improving your content’s titles and sub-headers – recommendations that both web content writers and web designers can implement to make them more effective.

5 tips for the Web Content Writer

Writing great titles and sub-headers is easier said than done. It’s a skill that you need to develop as a writer, especially given the unique ways that people read content on a website. Here are some of tips for how to write more effective sub-headers in your web content:

• Keep them short and concise – Your goal should be to keep your titles and sub-headers to 8 words or less. At that limit, they will be long enough to make your point, but short enough so that they don’t wrap onto a 2nd line on the page based on how the designer has styled them.
• Strive for clarity, not creativity – You shouldn’t get so creative with them that people don’t know what comes below. Rather, sub-headers should convey information quickly so scanners can get an idea of what the content below is about without having to stop and think about it.
• Don’t re-state what comes below – When you can’t come up with an effective sub-header, the tendency is often to re-state what’s contained in the content below. That’s why writing great titles and sub-headers is a skill to develop – re-stating what comes below is the easy way out.
• Move the keywords forward – Put the keywords you’re writing about at the start of the sub-header for even greater emphasis. Scanners tend to notice only the first few words, so this will help emphasize what comes below in your content. (It can’t hurt for SEO purposes either.)
• Pose a question – Another way to get your readers to read your content is ask them a question within the sub-header that they’ll have to read the paragraph below to find the answer to. If you can do this effectively, it can be a great way to get people to look at your content.

5 tips for the Web Designer

Creating effective sub-headers isn’t just the content writer’s job. Web designers play a large role by giving the titles and sub-headers the visual qualities that will best capture the visitors’ attentions. Here are some design tips that you can use to make them more noticeable:

• Make them a different color – Rather than just making them plain black, choose a color from within your website’s color scheme to make them stand out. Go for a darker color though, especially on a white background, in order to give it enough contrast.
• Make them big and bold – You should always be able to tell what the headers are based on how big they are in relation to the rest of the content on the page. Make them bigger in size – enough so that were you looking at the page in black and white, you could tell what the sub-header is.
• Move the copy in – To make the sub-headers stand out even more, considering giving an indent to the rest of the content beneath them. An indent of 10-20 pixels should do – it will be subtle, but the effect is enough to give your content the desired visual separation.
• Keep the size proportionate to importance – Page titles should use the <h1> tag, which should always be styled the biggest; <h2>’s, <h3>’s, etc. should be used as sub-headers, and should all get smaller as you move further down the list.
• Keep the fonts simple – Since people are scanning, you don’t want your sub-headers to be styled in a fancier font that might take them longer to read and interpret. Style your sub-headers in simple, clean fonts like Arial or Verdana in order to make scanning as easy as possible.

Thoughts?

Do you have any common practices when it comes to either writing titles and sub-headers, or designing how they appear on the page? If so, share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

As a web content writer, the best you can do is to make sure that your intro text you serves a purpose and communicates something to your visitors. While editing your content as much as possible might seem like good advice normally, intro text does have a valid role, so you shouldn’t scrap it entirely.

Below you’ll find some reasons why you need to have intro text in your content, followed by some tips for how to write it so that it makes your content more usable.

3 reasons you should use intro text

The topic of intro text is something that I work with clients on all the time. Here are 3 reasons that I give them about why they need some introduction to their content, especially when it comes to lists:

• Tell visitors what your content is about – Yes, most visitors to your website will scan through your content quickly, but that doesn’t mean you don’t want to let people know what the content is about. If those scanners have any confusion about the content on the page, they’re likely to scroll back up and look for that intro text to help them.
• Bulleted lists look silly without it – Have you ever seen a section or page of web content that’s just a list of links or items? Something will feel a little off, and that’s because there’s no intro text telling you the visitor what the list is a list of, why it’s there, and how you can benefit from it. That’s what good intro text will do; it can be as simple as “The following ____ are/will ____:”.
• It’s unnatural to how we communicate – Try writing some content where you go right into the topic without any introduction to it. Or along the same lines, try explaining something to someone without giving them the context. Both are hard to do because not introducing something properly goes against the very nature of how we read, write, think, and speak.

6 tips for writing usable intro text

Now that you have heard some reasons for why you should write intro text, here are some pointers on how to write intro text that is both usable and useful to your visitors:

• Keep it short and concise – Good intro text should be no more than 1-2 sentences long and should concisely state what the page is about. If it makes sense to include keywords here, do so, but only if they make the sentence more helpful to the reader.
• Limit the jargon and fluff – Intro text isn’t the place to include marketing or technical jargon, but then again, no website is. (That’s another topic though.) And skip on the fluff as well – i.e., content that has no function and is only there for its own sake.
• Focus on the user – Strong intro text focuses on answering 2 questions that the reader has about your content: what will they find on the page, and why should they care about it. If you answer those in as straightforward a manner as possible, you’ll have done a good job.
• Precede it by a header – I’m not just talking about the intro text on a page of content here; the same principles apply to the intro text within a section of content. When writing a section header, the text of the header should be a phrase that summarizes what the intro text beneath it says.
• No more than 1 link max – Because of where intro text is on a page, a link in it is really going to get noticed a lot. If you follow some of these ways to make links more effective as you’re writing the intro text, you’ll increase the likelihood that people will follow the link contained within it.
• Experiment with formatting – Want to get people to pay attention to your intro text 100% of the time? Try experimenting with the formatting to bring more attention to it. Put certain keywords or phrases in bold print, put the whole intro in bold print, or try some alternate formatting within your CSS.

Thoughts?

To those who write web content often, what are your thoughts on including intro text in your content? Is it worth the space on the page, or should it be gotten rid of altogether? Share your thoughts with everyone by leaving a comment below!

For the Content Writer

• The first link is the most important one – The first link in your blog post, article, or piece of content will generally gain the most attention and have the highest click-through rates because that’s what people see first. So when you’re writing content, if you make the first link the one that is of the most interest to your audience, you’re increasing the chances that they’ll click on it.
• Don’t link to everything – Links are used to either emphasize something relevant to the point you’re writing about, or to get the reader to take a particular action. Linking every other word will make both more difficult because your links will become less noticeable. Make sure that your sentences have no more than 1 link in them and paragraphs have no more than 5, and you should be fine.
• Don’t depend on links to help your content make sense – People are either too busy to click on every single link you provide, or maybe they’re reading your article in a format where they can’t click on the links: print, offline, or mobile. My point is that as the writer, you need to make sure that the reader can understand your content without having to click on the links.
• Don’t hide your the URLs of links - People are used to being able to know where a link will take them when they hover over it – either by seeing it in their web browser’s status bar, or by reading the TITLE attribute (if you’ve written one). Either way though, you should avoid doing anything that hides the ultimate destination where they’ll be taken to once they click on the link.
• Make links scannable - This is something that I mentioned in last week’s post about why you should avoid using “click here” in your link text. Your link text should be written so that when someone is scanning through your content, they can quickly identify what the link is and where it will take them to. Using “click here” as the link text won’t do that.

For the Web Designer

• Links should look like links – I covered this topic exclusively in a separate post about how text links should be styled, but the gist of that post is simple. Text links should be underlined and in a color that stands out from the rest of your content. People expect them to look that way, and not styling them according to these conventions will make them less usable and noticeable.
• Use icons sparingly – Using icons on your links can help give your visitors a sense of what will happen when they click on the link, but going overboard with them can be a bad thing. My rule of thumb is that the only time you should use icons is if clicking on the link engages a software application other than your web browser – email, Adobe Reader, Microsoft Word, etc.
• Skip any gadgets that alter link behavior – You can find several applications that try to provide a more interactive user experience by giving people a preview of the website that clicking on the link will take them to. While good in theory, it can get annoying very quickly when used all over your website, so skip the gadgets and use your TITLE attribute instead.
• Make the links easy to click – Horizontal lists (“A | B | C | D | …” or “1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | …”) and vertical lists are often used to help users navigate through content. Either way though, make sure that the clickable area around each link is large enough so that people can easily use it; adding in some extra padding or margins in your CSS should do the trick.

Thoughts?

What do you think about link usability – do you have any tips that you do differently? Share with everyone by leaving a comment below!

#1 – It’s not informative

It’s an established fact that most people don’t really read the content of a website – they scan it. This applies to almost all written content on the web, and people tend to do it for a number of reasons, such as:

• They are too busy to read something fully
• They are looking for a specific piece of information, and once they find it they want to move on
• There’s a lot of information out there that is competing for their attention
• They might have other issues that make it harder for them to read content online, such as screen resolution, screen glare, tiny font sizes, contrast, etc.

When someone writes content for a website, they have to keep in mind that it’s probably not going to get read except by those who have an inherent interest in doing so.

Most people are going to scan it instead, and when they do, certain things will jump out at them – links being one of them. Of course, that will depend on whether the web designer styled the links properly by making them underlined and a different color from the surrounding text.

Yes, people scanning content will still see your link even if it says “click here”. But using “click here” as the link text doesn’t take that next step of telling them where the link is going to as they scan over it quickly.

The bottom line is that people like to – and want to – know where a link from your website is going to lead them. Using the words “click here” just doesn’t do that for them, and here’s a good example:

• Bad - If you want to learn more about this, click here to read this article from the New York Times
• Good - Learn more topic about this by reading this article on the New York Times

The second one tells people at a quick glance not only that there is a link, but that it’s to an article on the New York Times website. What does “click here” tell you? Only that a link is there for them to click on.

#2 – It’s not action-oriented

Most websites want people to take some action as a result when they are visiting it. People respond to action words, so those who write content for a website will want to keep that in mind by writing link text that encourages visitors to take the desired action. Here’s an example:

• Bad – Enjoy what you see? Click here to subscribe to our blog for free updates!
• Good – Enjoy what you see? Subscribe to our blog for free updates!

Notice the difference? The second one has the desired action contained within the actual link text, which will be much more obvious when someone is scanning the content quickly. Using “click here” doesn’t convey that desired action – again, it only tells them that a link is there for them to click.

#3 – It’s not SEO-friendly

Search engines such as Google use the strength of your links in their algorithm when they determine your placement in search engine results. While the number of links (both internal and external) on your website is important, how those links are worded can be just as important. Here’s an example:

• Bad – Click here to read more web design articles by Addicott Web
• Good – Read more web design articles by Addicott Web

The second one is the much-more friendly link. When you use “click here” as your link text, all that you’re doing is letting the search engines know that your content contains a link. If you want to also help them estimate how relevant that link is though, start using keywords in the link text instead.

#4 – It’s not modern

During the early days of the Internet, people defended the use of “click here” on the grounds that if it weren’t used, most people wouldn’t know what to do when they came across a link. Content writers came up with it as a solution that gave users the hint of what action they were supposed to take – literally, click here.

Needless to say, that’s drastically changed as more and more people have become familiar with websites in recent years. If you continue to use “click here” in your content, you can give your visitors bad impressions that you don’t want them to have, such as:

• That you don’t respect their intelligence enough to know what a link is
• That your website or the content on it hasn’t been updated in years

You always want to make a positive impression of who you are through your website, and most people nowadays think that websites that still use “click here” are just plain old-fashioned. I would venture to guess that that is definitely not the impression you want to convey about your business or organization.

Thoughts?

Do you still use the phrase “click here” when you’re writing links? Do you have clients or people you work with who still use it and don’t understand why they shouldn’t? Share your thoughts on this topic by leaving a comment using the form below!

My recommendations are based around the idea that a PDF file is, by nature, action-oriented. You want people to do something with the files they’re opening – and when PDFs are linked to properly, the intended actions can be one of two things (and sometimes both):

• Download
• Print

So, with that being said, here are my tips and recommendations for when to use a PDF and when not to use one, followed by some general tips for how to use them.

Yes – Use PDFs

• Forms – the US Postal Service, Internal Revenue Service, and other official government agencies are great examples of this. They all have the most requested forms available as PDFs for you to download. If you have forms that people need to fill out regularly and would be coming to your website to get, then posting them as PDFs is ideal. Just make sure that they are easy to find – but if your website is already designed with usability in mind, this won’t be a problem.
• Reference guides – Do you want to post information intended for distribution or for use as reference material? There’s certainly nothing wrong with that from a usability perspective, and posting that information as a PDF file is an ideal way to do that. Just make sure that if what you’re intending for distribution might also be useful as actual content posted on your website, then by all means do that – don’t bury it as a PDF.
• Menus – A lot of restaurants will post their menus as PDFs. Why? Because the menus change so frequently that it doesn’t make sense to have someone post the information as actual content on the page.

No – Don’t Use PDFs

• As a replacement for page content – My rule of thumb is to never, ever post actual content as a PDF file unless there is a very, very compelling reason to do so. Content should belong on an actual page on your website – that way, search engines (both internal and external) can find it and direct people to it. Making an actual page of your content also makes it as accessible as possible, since there are people who either cannot install the Adobe Reader on their computer, or who won’t install it, but can certainly see what is posted on your website.
• To show off your marketing material – Did your business or organization just have some snazzy new marketing materials printed, such as brochures, posters, etc.? It’s great if you want people to see them, but let them see those materials as they were intended to be seen. Besides, your website serves a similar purpose as marketing material anyways, and if people are already on your website, then your marketing material has already done its job. And to further complicate matters, often times marketing material is designed to get people to go to the website and do something, which they are already doing! The catch is that the “something” is most likely not opening up the very marketing material that brought them there in the first place.

Tips for the Best Ways to Post PDFs

If you are going to post a PDF file, then here are some general guidelines I use:

• Indicate that it’s a PDF file – By default, most people expect a link to take them to another page on a website. But if you’re linking to a PDF file, that’s not the case. So generally, I try to let people know that the link they’re about to click on is a PDF file – either by writing (pdf) after the link, or by using the little Adobe PDF icons.
• Have it open in a new window – Just by nature, PDF files tend to be dead-ends in the sense that when you click on a link to open one, there’s no way to incorporate another link within the PDF file to allow people to go back to your website. They have to use their browser’s “Back” button, and more often that not, people will just close the window entirely. So why have them close your website altogether just because they opened a PDF? Just code it so that the PDF opens in a new window, and that way, when they close the file, they’ll still be on your website.
• Make the PDF printer-friendly – This is a big one, especially if the file you’re posting is intended for people to print in some way. The contents should be in black and white only (skip the color), and absolutely must be formatted for a standard, 8.5″ x 11″ sheet of paper.
• Optimize it for the web – Newer versions of Adobe Acrobat allow you to optimize your PDF file for web browsers. Of course, if you have a lot of images and artwork in your PDF, it will take longer to load anyways when compared to a black-and-white document with nothing but text in it. So if you are posting something with a lot of colors, photos, etc. in it, make sure to optimize it when you create the PDF file in the first place.
• Include a link to download the Adobe Reader – I’m iffy on this one, only because the Adobe Reader is getting to be a pretty standard feature on most computers nowadays. But, there are still people out there who don’t have it installed already, so the easy thing to do is provide a link to the Adobe website, where they can download it for free.

Thoughts?

What do you think about this – do you have any ideas or best practices about this that you would like to share?

The short answers I’ve given to those who have asked are that it:

• Gives the impression that I actually know what I’m talking about
• Helps me gain exposure to others within the design community, which will hopefully help me attract new business

The folks over at Vandelay Design wrote something on this topic earlier this year, which sums up perfectly how blogging can enhance business for web designers. They include the two points that I mentioned above, but their list also includes some of the other benefits as well.

To summarize what they wrote, there are ten reasons why designers should blog:

• Increased exposure
• Improved name recognition
• The learning experience
• Networking
• Helps customers find you
• Improved site content for search engines
• Improved communication skills
• Demonstrate your knowledge
• Potential promotion when needed
• Variety of work

You can read the full post here if you’re interested in reading more of an explanation on each point.

So now that I’ve helped answer your question, let me pose two questions to give you an opportunity to add to the conversation. Are there other benefits to blogging that aren’t mentioned above that should be? Do you think blogging would benefit people in other industries in the same way as it does for web designers?

A quick aside: managing updates like this is something I used to do when I worked for USY in New York, so my expectations might be on the high side. When I did these updates from 2002-2004, given the resources and technology of the time, posting written updates and photos on our website was all we could do. (See this sample.) These days, there are many more tools that to make these type of updates more user-friendly.

We’ve had two updates so far. The first came the day after the group left (the next morning here but the next evening in Israel, with the time difference) and let us know that the group had landed safely and was doing well. The second came two days later (three full days in Israel), and while it didn’t mention anything about what the group was doing, it did direct us to photo galleries on their website.

Let me pause here. If I were writing the updates, how I would write them differently?

• Have more frequent updates. I was expecting daily updates, so to not get that is surprising. I’ve been to Israel several times and know exactly where the group is, so I’m not looking for updates because of safety concerns. I think daily updates would just be something family members back home would want to see.
• Have more detailed updates. Here’s my thinking: if someone is on the trip in the first place, there is a decent likelihood that their parents and other family members haven’t been to Israel either. Both groups are the same in terms of not necessarily knowing about the significance of the places that will be seen – the difference being that participants will see those places in person, while those back home won’t. So just as important as exposing participants to Israel should be exposing family members back home as well. I think a good way to do so would be by providing some brief background information on where the group is and what they are seeing. Some people who have been to Israel (like myself and my sister) might skip over the information, since we are already familiar with a lot of it, but I think in general, it would be more useful than not. And this information doesn’t have to be anything written on the fly either – whoever is writing the updates could prepare it ahead of time and save it for when that day came.
• Post the written updates on the website as well. Don’t just send them out over e-mail, which can be lost easily. It also helps to be able cross-reference what we are seeing in the pictures with where the group is. Plus, once participants return from the trip, they might want to see what their families were seeing as well.

When I looked at the photo galleries that I was directed to, they were a bit disorganized for my taste and somewhat difficult to use. I noticed four things that I would improve on:

• Organize the photos. It would have been a lot more helpful if the photos were categorized by day, rather than as long pages with no way to distinguish between when and where the photos were taken. When I did the updates for USY, we organized the updates from each trip by week rather than by day – see this sample. But those trips also ran for 6 1/2 weeks; birthright’s trips only run for 10 days.
• Have the pop-up windows sized correctly. When I clicked on a thumbnail of a photo, it appeared in a pop-up window that wasn’t sized properly. So in order to see the full photo, I had to take the extra step of expanding the window, either by maximizing it using the scrollbar. Some simple coding would have fixed this and made browsing a bit quicker.
• Make it easy to browse through the full-size photos. Giving the ability to browse through the full-sized photos using “Previous” and “Next” buttons in the pop-up window is an easy and simple way to do this. Something in a slide show format like the Kodak or Google’s Picasa photo galleries would be even nicer, although the time and budget required for something like that make it more difficult to implement.
• Keep you at your spot on the page. When I clicked on a thumbnail to view the full-sized version, the main page behind the pop-up window went back to the very top of the page. So to find where I left off, I had to scroll through the photos again. Not the most user-friendly feature, particularly in combination with super-long pages of photos.

Despite my issues with their website, none of these concerns impact the experience of those on the trip. My brother seems to be having a great time, and word is he’s even tried falafel, which before the trip would have been unheard of. And ironically enough, until our mother told him that everyone in our family was excited to see him in pictures, he didn’t even know that there were photos being posted.

The moral of the story is that like all websites, these smaller points, when taken altogether, do have the potential to influence others’ perceptions of an organization. As a reflection of who they are, sometimes it is the attention to detail that can make people think that much more highly of them.