In reading articles and books — over time, I’ve learned to try to avoid beginning a sentence with “There” and using “is” or “are.” Doing this enriches your writing and encourages you to find more interesting verbs. Write and Drop or Substitute When I catch myself writing, “There are…” or “There is…” I complete the … Read more
Bulleted lists on Web pages help readers scan and find what they want. Two situations that do well with bulleted lists are series and instructions. Also, beware of indenting, spacing, formatting, and whitespace. Series For situations where three or more items appear separated by commas, they might work better as a list. Instead of, “Bring … Read more
Bill Moore of RadioTime shared his experience of gathering feedback from users in a sandwich shop. It’s amazing how easy it is to get user feedback with zero overhead, that’s cheap, and leads to actionable results. I asked him why didn’t he go to the (in)famous coffee shop since their wi-fi usually works well (wi-fi … Read more
Since taking a class that discussed Edward Tufte‘s work, I’ve been fascinated by turning information into visual data. His site contains many examples that you could easily spend hours on the site. I have. Plus, I spent several days browsing sites with articles, resources, and examples of infovis (information visualization) in action. It’s not just … Read more
The wizard in The Wizard of Oz and the guy behind the curtain pretending to be him have different personalities. Which one would you rather listen to? The wizard who comes across as larger than life and unreachable, or the guy hiding behind the giant green face, a person like us? Companies that publish newsletters … Read more
It’s easy to overwhelm yourself with so many things and ideas that nothing materializes. For example, a writer might think about article ideas for different magazines, project ideas, and Web site / networking pages content ideas. Thinking about all of these will likely produce nothing except one overwhelmed freelancer. This became a problem when I … Read more
The Success Effect takes a different tack to many books with interviews by printing them in question and answer format. Such an approach doesn’t always succeed. However, Eckberg successfully culled great material from past interviews and put them together to create a conversational and educational resource. A chapter consists of an interview and interviews range … Read more
The previous post looks at companies that help those that already have stuff on the Internet they want to go away, be deleted, be erased from the memories of man and machine. Being proactive is always better than being reactive, so keep your name free of mud with these tips in mind whenever posting anything … Read more
The following books that I read this year are my favorites — they didn’t necessarily come out this year. Fiction: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Cliche’, but it was a great book and I was happy with the way Rowling finished the series. It was nervewracking because we didn’t want her to be too … Read more
How often does this scenario happen to you? When you land on a Web site, it doesn’t instantly answer the most important question: What is the Web site about? The second question depends on the site. For business sites: “What does the business do?” For blogs: “What is the topic of the blog?” My blog … Read more