Hackpacker

Finding the right weight for your content is a balancing act. Image via pixabay . Recently, I've been working with a university who has a lot of very complex information on their website. Their content has to simultaneously speak to a range of audiences including students, prospective students, current staff and more. The problem of many audiences often makes for long pages that are hard to decipher. So how do you keep that content clear for everyone without making content too complicated? 1. Pick the perfect page length. Lots of clients want to know what’s the perfect length for a web page, which is like asking how long is a piece of string. The perfect length depends on what you want the page to do. On Medium, they define their page length by reading time, with the magic number being a 6-7 minute read (along with a lot of other recommendations for writing a successful Medium article ). As Medium puts their average reading speed at 275 words per minute, this gives y

The best way to understand your content is by auditing it. It's a simple process of taking out that digital clipboard to tick what you’ve got and what you need. While there are several purely quantitative methods (content age or visitation), a content audit is the best way to test those opinions like "All our content is stale" or "No-one ever uses our content". It gives you the hard evidence that equips you for content improvement, migration or even killing off large parts of your website. Time to give your content a check up? (Image via  pixabay ) Brace yourself. A content audit means going through your content page by page (by page, by page…). If your site is particularly large, you might want to start with a small, representative sample – say all of the About section. Start with that to get a snapshot of your content and how it’s structured. But a full content audit is your chance to get a deep understanding of your content that should help form

Most website projects start with the promise of a new design fixing everything. Once you've implemented that sexy new design and locked in a clear IA, users will start looking at what is actually on the page. For most organisations that's the hard part: an ongoing approach to content that will hold people beyond the new design. The content maven Gerry McGovern writes about the user experience from awesome design to average content as "walking out of a plush hotel straight into a rubbish dump". But for most organisations, the rubbish dump is huge and has been growing organically for years so how do you start tidying without going mad? Content strategy is the place to start. User experience methodology starts looking at your site with your user's eyes, not those of the organisation or a specialist writer who gets all your jargon. McGovern says to surface the top tasks users want to complete on a site. Put your effort into making it clear how to complete the top

There's been an odd devolution on the web from procrastination to poisonous. For some the Trumps and trolls are all too much so there's been lots of quitting Twitter, sending Facebook dark or adopting a kittens-only policy on Instagram. Artists and writers have to be selective in their intellectual diet so a few years ago I wrote an article called "The Distraction Engine: Digital Detox for Writers" looking at ways to moderate the harmful intake of web and social. Recently while talking about her book The Natural Way of Things at the National Library of Australia (full talk online) , Charlotte Wood talked about her decision to leave social:  So I was on Twitter for ages and I loved it... but I was completely addicted to it then and I was just never off it... when you’re writing a book you do need to be private, you know you need to be quiet or I need to be quiet. So I went off Twitter for nine months when I was writing this book. Wood recently returned t

One of my favourite resources for writing for the web is Michael Agger’s Lazy Eyes article for Slate. Written in 2009, much of the content is still relevant for digital writers as Agger observes the techniques that are required to sustain limited attention spans. For those playing along at home, these techniques include using bullets, shorter sentences and subheads. Moreover the article acts as a junction box of links to excellent resources including the man Agger calls “a cross between EB White and the Terminator”: Jakob Nielsen. Gremlins creep in everywhere, Original image  U.S. National Archives and Records Administration ,  On checking out the article recently it was disappointing to see that Agger falls down on maintaining his links. When I first looked at this article, Agger finished with a gag that our attention span could only be held for so long before we’d wander off so he links to a Rickroll video. Unfortunately Rickrolling has fallen out of favour

One of the best justifications for using metadata is that it is “a love letter to the future”. It means planning for metadata will give your content a chance to be found.* But I can't find who coined this phrase by Googling it or hours of browsing. It should show up under keyword searches like "metadata" or "love letters", but because a friend told me it's hard to track down the origin. If only conversations were tagged. Library Confusion 23/12/1952 by Sam Hood (courtesy of State Library of NSW) In the blur of the web, losing information is becoming more common. If you want your content to be found, tag it. As the web gets busier all those keywords, topics or subjects just get more important. Apps like Zite or services like paper.li create newspapers for users just by pulling this descriptive metadata. On a bigger web presence, metadata creates dynamic feeds that allow the robots to do the curating. While it's fallen out of favour with search e

When asked about the worst words of 2013, The Atlantic ’s Richard Lawson responded that he hated the usage of curation. His objection to the word was that it has shifted far from its original high-art meaning: "It's a reappropriated term that used to mean something good - putting lovely and interesting things in a museum! - but now denotes a technique of cobbling together preexisting web content and sharing it with readers/followers/whomever. In other words, linking to things.” And he’s got a point. Social media means we’re all curators now. Anyone who signs up for a Twitter account is curating a stream of links and cat videos for their followers and friends.  But personalised curation is a response to the information overblown that the web has created. Social media has given many users a way to make sense of this by looking to trusted curators: their friends. Learnist is a good example of social media curating lessons as users learn from their friends about