You may have seen these blogs. Their tagline says, “Just another WordPress Blog…”, their unoriginal content comes from everywhere else, and it looks lonely as no author appears identified in the blog. Some of these blogs have RSS, XML, and robots doing much of the work. These blogs often don’t have ads, so why bother? … Read more
I received an .odt file for posting on an organization’s Web site. Open Office‘s word processor uses this file format. I didn’t want to download and install Open Office even though it cost nothing. And going back to the sender wasn’t a good idea because she would either not know how to convert it or … Read more
Taking cue from The One Minute Manager, Zapp!, Fish! and Who Moved My Cheese?, The Hamster Revolution uses a parable to show how to better manage and organize e-mail and information. The hamster represents people endlessly running on the wheel of e-mail. Right away, I start using concepts from the 90-minute book. Considering I’m an … Read more
Every new release of an application adds more features, but not always for the better. Get ten tips for getting feature frenzy under control. In writing an article about social network sites, I looked at over two dozen sites like MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, Sermo, TravBuddy, MyCreativeCommunity. Wikipedia provides a list of many social networking … Read more
It doesn’t matter how long the Internet has been around anymore… the argument of what makes a good link continues. Often when I write a blog post and want to reference another blog, site, resource… sometimes, I struggle to figure out what text to use as the link and what it should say. Plus, I … Read more
Smashing Magazine provided a wealth of expert tips, advice and suggestions in its popular and valuable 35 designers x 5 questions article. To celebrate its one year anniversary, the magazine found more experts and asked new questions. The result is 50 designers x 6 questions, which contains over 170 new tips answering the following six … Read more
The previous post discussed the value of saying, “Thank you.” But it’s possible to overdo it especially when it comes to e-mail. “Here’s your weekly report.” “Thank you,” said the reply. Add up all the thank you e-mails for things like that and it makes for a cluttered inbox. Sometimes a thank you e-mail has … Read more
I fill out too many surveys, but I like to help. Usually they ask opinions on a Web site, product, application, service and so on. I noticed an ugly pattern in that many don’t have a “Back” link. Sometimes surveys don’t like it when you use the Back button on the browser because of data … Read more
Some sites use flags to represent a language thinking visitors will click the flag that represents their language to view the site in that language. Well, do you use Mexico’s flag or Spain’s flag to represent Spanish? I don’t recall seeing a site using both flags. What about English? Some sites use the British flag … Read more
Tom Johnson offers a great writing tip especially for tech writers and others who write instructions. This method also works well with Web content and forms. Watching people use a Web site, a product, a service — anything is a superb way to get insight on how others use the product or service. Those involved … Read more