The Webmasters’ Desk

Eyetracking points the way to effective news article design is a fascinating article. The first two case studies in the article offer strong scientific evidence that a picture is not always worth a thousand words. The third case study has some disturbing insight into the male psyche.

People read faster and retain more if copy is formatted in a manner that is easily scanned, easy to read from top to bottom. That means subheads, bullets and good use of whitespace. This approach allows readers to answer the questions “where am I?”, “what am I reading?” and “do I want to be here?”

The bottom line is that good, clean text formatting is far more important than a random pretty picture. So be sure to ask yourself if the images you’re using are vital to the page you’re publishing.

Remember: good design is the practice of subtraction, not addition.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted, but this topic has drawn me out from underneath my teetering inbox: electronic newsletters. Everybody’s doing them, or wants to. Why? We’re getting lean and mean. High-gloss print pieces are expensive and require longer lead times. Often we don’t have time to think past the next cup of coffee that will sustain us through the next sprint to the end of the next project.

So, are we spinning our wheels? What are the best practices? Are people even reading these things?

Well, because your Webmaster loves you, I went to great lengths to type “e-newsletter best practice” into Google. I found this gem: It’s time to raise the bar on e-newsletter best practices.

The best advice is item #1: Content is King. Seriously folks, this is 80% of the battle. Content trumps fancy design every time. If you’re pressed for time, groom the content. Get an editor to look at it. See if you can take out words. Make it punchy. Make it lean. Design is the art of subtraction and good writing is the art of reducing the number of words and making each word carry its weight.

This article is rich with good advice and required reading whether you’re thinking about doing a newsletter or want to improve your current newsletter.

A huge tip of my hat to all the hard work done by MBA Career Services (Blair Sanford, Alicia Schetter and Lucas Wall) in creating their first video podcast. You may recognize the velvety-smooth voice of Lucas on the presentation.

This is a great use of Movable Type in conjunction with some of the built-in tools on the Mac to create a powerful, engaging presentation and deliver it to a wide audience instantaneously. Great stuff. Great, great stuff.

Which reminds me, I need to update the MBACS templates.

Okay, I’m still reading How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web’s Haystack, but this much is clear:

PageRank is complicated.

My motivation for posting this is entirely selfish. Next time someone asks “can you tell Google to put my page at the top?” I can reply “that all depends on your eigenvalues, here’s a link.”

I don’t know about you, but in my experience, using the word eigenvalue usually puts an end to any conversation.

A few weeks back I attended a Campus Communicators meeting that focused on new media use around the UW campus. Paul Baker over at WCER has a great summary on his EducationPR Blog: Communicating with video at UW-Madison.

In the interest of the “don’t repeat yourself” principle, read it for yourself at Paul’s blog. Good stuff.

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about podcasting lately. So much so, that I’ve decided to try it. The following is the story of my foray into the realm of podcasting.

First, I heard that DoIT has a partnership with Apple for podcasting. So naturally I did a Google search for DoIT podcasting site:wisc.edu and clicked on the top link (because that’s all anyone ever does, right?).

After poking around the DoIT site (and, admittedly a few others) I found that I needed a few things.

1. A microphone (I bought an inexpensive Logitech microphone for about $13)
2. Recording software (Audacity is free
3. A place to publish the podcast (that would be this blog).

Now I had a premonition a while back that this podcasting thing would eventually catch fire here at the School of Business. So I found and installed a plugin for Movable Type called MTEnclosures that assists in publishing podcasts.

Now that I had a microphone and Audacity installed, I could record my first podcast. I’ve decided to read this post verbatim. Very, very exciting stuff.

To top it off, I registered with feedburner so I could track subscriptions to the RSS feed. Here’s the final result.

I haven’t posted in awhile, and in the spirit of today’s link, I’m just going to post on something.

Here’s a interesting 37signals article on building and maintaining momentum on your Web site (amongst other things). Sometimes, when you don’t know what to do, work on the things that are easy to fix. Clean up the dusty corners of your site. Go ahead and fix that weird line break. Find out why that photo looks a tad wonky.

Now, whether or not you think that this approach is what helped clean up New York City is a whole other discussion. Bottom line, make it look like someone cares.

So sayeth Nielsen Media in a recent study.

Some quick numbers from the article:

• only 15.8 percent of iPod users ever played any video content on their iPod or iTunes
• only 1 percent of the content items played on an iPod or iTunes was video content

Unfortunately, the article doesn’t talk much about the demographics of the 400 iPod users they sampled. It would be interesting to run a similar study of college student iPod use where lecture videos were available via iTunes.

From great comments and questions comes great fodder for blog posts.

The first question comes from yesterday’s post on search engines. Chris asks:

But webmaster, your stats seem to indicate that 99.7% of our traffic comes from a search engine. Aren’t there some visitors that just come here because they know about us already? Or, what about someone like me that has a page in the www.bus.wisc.edu domain set as their homepage, so I visit like a bajillion (also a math thing) times per day? Is this an example of the skewed statistics that [insert partisan talk show host] keeps warning me about?

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I get a lot of questions about search engine optimization (SEO), and with good reason. A recent competitive analysis found that over 50% of prospective students conducted an internet search during the course of their evaluation of different MBA programs. Not only that, but this method of research was the largest percentage of any other communications channel. Let me repeat this by yelling on the internet: THE LARGEST PERCENTAGE OF ANY OTHER COMMUNICATIONS CHANNEL.

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