• 10 Stunning (and Useful) Stats about Twitter: Whoa! I guess with way over 150 followers/following… I’m an example of overkill Seriously, not surprising. But it’s disappointing Twitter slows down so often based on these facts.
• Show or Tell? Never can get enough of this topic. Still need to work on it myself though I write nonfiction. [Link: Jane Friedman]
• Entitled Ten: Ten Things to Help You with Titles: Great tips good for more than just titles. [Link: Jane Friedman]
• Should You Outsource Your Online Presence?
• 99 Ways to Improve Your Web Site

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• Icon Directory for Designers: You don’t have to be a designer to benefit. [Link: @davidvanvickle]
• World’s Fastest Remote Control Car: I love remote control toys. Cars, flyers and boats.
• Roller Baby Ad: Wow. How much time did it take to put this together?
• 20 Funny and Creative Toilet Signs (Not appropriate for work or children)
• Eternal Moonwalk: Awesome tribute to Michael Jackson’s famous moonwalk.

While we’re seeing more drop down menus on web sites, designers don’t always do what’s best for the users. How many times has a drop down menu unexpectedly popped up and you try to make a selection only to have it disappear? It doesn’t matter if a person has arthritis or other hand mobility issues, even folks with steady hands don’t always make it before the menu disappears. This disappearing menu problem also shows up in Windows.

So I’ve advised people not to use drop down menus. After all, users make a decision only to see another menu and have to make another decision. However, I don’t feel that way anymore as drop down menus become a standard and do work when done right.

A new trend has appeared with regard to drop down menus. Rather than disappearing, they stay until you close the window or click outside of the window. It also helps when a little down arrow appears next to the menu hinting more options will pop up.

Jakob Nielsen believes the X to close the window isn’t needed and that these drop downs should go away on their own when the user selects another item. This again is tricky because of the steady hand issue. But I would think if a user selects another top menu item, it’s by choice. It’s the selecting of a submenu item that proves hard. Like Nielsen says, timing can help here.

Also, some menus expand the sub menu directly below the top menu item instead of off to the side. This works much better since the users just have to go straight down instead of carefully navigate to the side. The image above shows an example of this from the Dallasnews.com web site. This menu leaves little room for error since the submenu starts at the left of its top menu and goes a little wider. Many submenus tend to start at Sports (shifted).

While the Blue JMR menu goes off the side, it has a timing mechanism so the user has time to select or pick another top menu item. This method works.

Even with this changing navigation menu practice, it’s still helpful to accept the user’s clicking of the top menu item. Of course, this depends on the site’s navigation design and content.

In sum: Drop down menus work well — as long as the design handles them right.

Navigation testing has one advantage. You can ask friends, family and colleagues to check out the menu’s functionality for you even if they’re not the dream user. These folks, however, aren’t the ones to ask about findability. For that, you need to go to your target audience.

What menu styles do you not like? Why?

I’m hooked on As Time Goes By, a British TV show starring the Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer. I’m also getting into British-based Prime Suspect with Helen Mirrin.

Not only do I enjoy the repartee between Dench and Palmer, but also hearing the British accents. While I may not have good hearing, I can see and recognize the differences between British and American English.

I watch these shows with closed-captions or English subtitles. An interesting thing to note is that the captions use the American English spelling rather than British. For example, if a character says “color,” the captions also says “color” rather than “colour.”

Now why would a British TV show use American spelling? Because the DVD, a BBC America production, targets the American audience. This confirms Jakob Nielsen’s belief that web content need to use the correct variant of English and stick with it throughout the web site.

I love learning the differences in our languages including sounds, terms (football instead of soccer; Earth instead of dirt; loo instead of bathroom), and slang.

What amazes me is the shows make many American references. As an American, I might notice this more. However, I don’t think I’ve seen references to other countries and their cultures except in reference to an event such as Palmer’s character’s time spent in Korea.

Back to English and content. As much as I love the British culture and language (UK is one of the first places I want to travel whenever I get to the other side of the world), I use American English on this web site.

After all, most readers and clients hail from the US plus it’s where I live. Now, if I had an audience of 75% from the UK, then it could be a different story. However, it wouldn’t be a straight-out easy answer of using British English.

As much as I have picked up British slang, concepts, and terms, I will probably make mistakes. So is it better to stick with what I know best and stay consistent, or take a risk to devote thhe site  to British English and make a bad impression when I make honest mistakes?

Experts says to “speak in the audience’s language.” But does US and UK variation English count? In either case, we’re speaking English. For credibility’s sake, I’d probably need to stick with American English.

One of the more important rules regarding web content is “consistency.” That means deciding whether you use American English or Queen’s English, web site or website, Internet or internet.

Ever receive a link to a business web site where you can’t figure out what the company does? The home page sounds like something from the company’s fancy and non-sensical mission statement. Unfortunately, many companies rely on content from their business plan and other internal documents.

I had a brief client who did this. The filler content came from the business plan. So what the company did wasn’t instantly obvious to the target audience. So I massaged the content, webified it, and shared a draft with the client.

She preferred the business plan. I couldn’t believe it. But then, she knew her business well and it would make sense to her.

I explained the approach I took and the reasons for them. It didn’t convince the company, so we agreed to part. Reflecting on the project, it was good that it didn’t work out. We weren’t compatible and it would’ve been a miserable project. Easier to get out earlier rather than later.

Different Businesses, Different Needs

A business web site should quickly communicate what it does. It largely depends on the company’s business. If it sells products, can you tell what kind of products? Is it a secure site? Reputable? I’ve seen too many commerce sites with no names or company details on their about page. This screams the site isn’t credible or trust-worthy.

Professional service businesses need to communicate what services they provide and include names and bios as people matter in this case. These sites should list companies and industries they’ve served. Testimonials are also powerful.

Designers do well in including a portfolio of their work on their web site.

At the end of every project, try to obtain testimonials and permission to publish information about the project (such as posting the design for a portfolio and publishing case studies). Better to do it as soon as the project ends while it’s fresh in everyone’s mind.

An Example…

IBM is huge and does many things. Its home page doesn’t begin to tell the company’s story. About the only valuable information is “Migrate to a mainframe.”

“What does a smarter planet look like?” implies the company supports more efficient technology — but it’s still a broad question and it doesn’t give me an idea of what IBM’s involvement is with a smarter planet. Click it and it provides jibber jabber about what people want to do.

The first couple of paragraphs are the only problem. The rest does a good job of showing a bulleted list of problems, the solution, and what IBM can do.

“IT managers, are you building or blocking transformation?” Click it and the page tells a different story that doesn’t quite connect to the headline.

Should you insult the manager? Or is it touching a nerve that managers will want to click the question? People will argue for and against this. Besides, the picture takes up too much of the page pushing down important content.

At the bottom of IBM’s home page is “What IBM can do for …” and lists different industries and careers to help the person go in the right direction. Smart move — maybe it should be more dominant on the home page? IBM does have a wide audience and this solution works in helping them along.

I like the home page image and the moving cars. It still takes up a lot of above the fold (area before scrolling) space — a problem with many sites today. It takes effort to find the heart of the content.

Jakob Nielsen reports seeing a 9 percent improvement on company About pages. I rely on About pages when looking at companies either for research or for buying from them. I still run into the following problems:

• Struggle to find the About pages when they have one: they shouldn’t be buried or hard to find. “About” deserves top level navigation because it’s about earning trust and credibility. I shouldn’t have to use the search box to find them.
• Receive little valuable information: many companies provide only an overview that tells nothing about the company and what it does: sometimes it sounds like the company posts its useless vision or mission statement, which rarely makes sense to most of us (and sometimes employees, too!).
• Find no information about employees or executives. It helps to have some bios on the site along with photos. This puts a human face behind the company.

When looking at About pages, I expect to find the following (at a minimum):

• Instant understanding of what the company does. I shouldn’t have to read the whole page to figure out the company’s business. Unfortunately, this is common. The home page should also make it obvious what the company does.
• Contact information: Some companies put this on a Contact page, but it should also appear on the About page. Depending on the business, it also helps to have contact information on every page — it could be a toll free number for businesses selling products or an address for stores.
• Bios and photos: Again, people make the company and it adds credibility. I’ve seen too many sites selling products without bios — which doesn’t give me much comfort in shopping with them. Whose bio should appear depends on the company. Small companies might list all employees while large companies list the CEO and vice presidents.

Other useful About content (not all of these would appear on the About landing page), but not a requirement of all companies:

• Fact sheet: Basic information about the company including when founded, milestones, key bios. Sometimes referred as company backgrounder.
• Press page: This contains press contact’s information, media kit, list of press releases (linking to the full release), list articles appearing in (with links to full article or a file containing the article), photos, and logos.
• Company history: Where the company came from and where it is heading.
• Investor information: Provides the information investors want to see such as financial reports.

What other things do you look for when researching a company or considering doing business with them?

• From Great Writers of Note: Advice from great writers divded into eight categories. [Link: Steve]
• Be a Better, Tastier Booyah Blogger [Link: Cincom Expert Access]
• VocabTest.com: Boost your word power.
• 3-point Game Plan to (Way More!) Productive Meetings
• 10 Examples of Truly Exceptional Writing

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• Cupcakes That Take the Cake: Cupcakes are enjoying a revival. One show presented a challenge of creating a cupcake the size of cake. Many stores now offer cupcake cakes. A local newspaper’s food section recently discussed mini cupcakes that looked yummy.
• Totally Useless: Collection of useless web sites.
• FunnyAnimalz: Photos of… what do you know? funny animals.
• Disability Awareness Month: This week is deaf awareness week. I was on the Department of Transportation Deaf Awareness Week committee in 1993. We were fortunate to have Jack R. Gannon, author of Deaf Heritage, as a speaker.

Back update: Herniated disc and inflamed piriformis muscle. Thanks for asking and for caring.

When you or a kid signs up to play a sport for a season or to take music lessons during the school year, do you quit after a couple of lessons because you’re not good enough? Of course not! Most of us know it takes months (even years) of practice to get better at something.

My son would disagree. He expects to be good at something NOW or forget about it. I took up tennis three years ago because I longed to play a sport again and there weren’t any volleyball or softball leagues to be had. I was embarrassed by my play for at least a year, but I kept at it.

You see, I grew up playing sports. That was my thing. I lucked out that I turned out to be a good player in several team sports. Sports gave me confidence and made me feel like a normal person — not a inferior deaf person. To boot, I was good. So my team appreciated my efforts. It was nice to feel wanted.

Newsletters and Sports

What does this have to do with newsletters? People give up “before the season is over” and fold their newsletters. They take time to get going and once they do, they strengthen your relationship with your clients and to-be clients. They trust you more with each tidbit you give them in every issue.

My little meryl’s notes newsletter doesn’t have many readers for a newsletter that’s five years old. In the beginning of its life, it didn’t come out on a regular basis. Now, it goes out every one to two months. I don’t work hard to promote it. I focus on client newsletter’s instead and theirs grow to five or six figures.

Making the Time

Whenever we talk to a new or a “we hope to land soon” client, we take care to stress the relational aspect of newsletter marketing. In fact, we go lengths to tell people that it takes time to build a list, time to develop trust, and time for people to feel comfortable enough to make the contact to initiate a purchase.

We say this because we believe it. Wholeheartedly and without reservation. We also believe this is the only way to be effective. (Well, another way is to have tens of millions of dollars of VC and ….. wait, that didn’t work well, eh?)

We take the time to advise people how to start newsletters, get the list rolling, and begin building the relationships with prospects and customers and, over time, they reap the rewards.

Since we spend lots of time doing this, you’d think we are calm folks, sipping cafe lattes while waiting patiently (yeah, right) for our brilliant marketing strategy to work. Right? Unfortunately for our poor stomachs, the answer is a resounding, “nope!”

Patience, My Dear

Hey, finding new clients today is a rough ride. The end rewards of newsletter marketing are great after taking the time to get the ball rolling to see the effects. We like to say, “It’s like a locomotive. It can take a while to get rolling, but once it does, it pulls a lot of weight.”

The knee-jerk response to moments of slow sales, or prospective sales, is to renege on the principles behind newsletter marketing and hunt for prospects rather than maintain the farming system put into place. Occasionally, we become tempted to throw our own advice out the window and, in a knee-jerk reaction, hunt rather than farm.

Dealing with Slow Results

Here is how to cope with such moments and get our minds back into gear, where we can pay attention, once again, to our own logic:

• Look at the number of new subscribers: Nothing makes you feel better than to look at the number of new subscribers. It gives you a warm fuzzy knowing that people respond to the message and choose to opt-in to the newsletter. We think that every new reader is also a potential client and colleague.
• Look for reading patterns: Next to new subscribers, nothing gets us juiced like checking out how people are reading the newsletters. This tells us that we have done our jobs properly and people do find the newsletters valuable. (We give each other high-fives here.)
• Look at the statistics for our Web site: In the final analysis, the only stat that matters is new orders or new service requests. But farmers know that “you reap what you sow.’”We look at the total number of visits to our Web sites, see if people are visiting the “right page” (the page with our free offer), which other pages they look at, and which continents from which they come.
• Plan a strategy of attack for the next round: Two things we never lack are ideas and energy. We have them both in good supply, we constantly put our ideas out there, and suggest new ways to bring clients on board. This helps lots because — at a minimum — it distracts us and gets us working on something. Always a good thing.
• Review our current client list: We love this because it confirms that things works and more good things will come.

Tasks like these are the keys to building and maintaining your trust in the newsletter marketing philosophy. It’s not quick and easy. It’s not a marriage proposal on the first date. But, over time and through repeat contact, it does work and we build and deepen our relationships.

Lesson: When you believe something is true, and you advise others to act in accordance with that truth, make sure you walk the talk.

So I keep on practicing tennis and my son sees that. I can only hope my actions will help him realize it takes lots of practice to succeed. All of my teams have come in last place. However, when I played in a progressive league over the summer (in the end, it’s individuals who win), I came in second!

I tell my son about my teams’ losses and wins focusing on the fun I had and putting my skills to work. It paid off and I’m confident that I will see more winning seasons just like you’ll see wins from your newsletter.

• Is Updated Technology Important to Productive Work? Unless you’re a designer using resource demanding software, a software reviewer (then I recommend installing and using them on a secondary computer instead of your main one), or using a 10-year-old computer — then this sounds like another excuse from a procrastinator.
• DIY marketing is not always cheapest.
• Massive List of Killer Freelancing Tips.
• The Design Process Of Creating A $40,000 Creative Newspaper Advertisement: Love seeing Jacob’s thought process in action.
• Great explanation on Law of Attraction.

And for fun because we’re allowed…

• The Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites: My client’s site, RadioTime, made the list.
• Thank you to Customized Engraving for the lovely keychain with my name on it.
• Kids, This Is What We Call “Scapegoating”: Hilarious. Moms and Dads — ya gotta see this one. Good or bad parenting… be danged… simply funny.
• Photoshop Disasters.

In all these years, I don’t think I’ve ever posted anything about starting a blog. Someone emailed me asking how to get a blog and start blogging. So here you go.

There’s an easy way and there’s a hard way.

The Easy Way

Here you just fill out a form, make a few choices, and you’re in business. This solution uses a developer-hosted solution. That means the company or developer of the blog application hosts the software and blogs. These require no installation and minimal set up (after all, your blog needs a name or something). My first blog took the easy way approach using blogger.com.

Advantages

• Easy.
• Fast.
• Painless.
• No tech knowledge needed.
• Free or cheap.

Disadvantages

• At the mercy of the host’s server, which hosts thousands of other blogs.
• No personal domain name. Sure, you can pick a name. But instead of www.meryl.net, you get meryl.bloggingservice.com.
• Risk business reputation. Businesses without their own domain name communicate they’re cheap and not serious about building the business.

Easy Way Blogs (known as developer-hosted)

• Blogger.com: URL is in the form of yourname.blogspot.com. My first blog used Blogger.com.
• WordPress.com: URL appears as yourname.wordpress.com. This blog runs on WordPress. Offers paid upgrades.
• TypePad: From SixApart, the folks behind MovableType. URL is yourname.typepad.com.
• Other developer-hosted blogs.

The Hard Way

This takes more work and may require hiring a pro to help you through the whole process of…

1. Registering a domain.
2. Creating a design (or creating a template from your site’s design to work with the blogging application). Sure, you could use the free templates for starters, but many spam-like blogs use these templates and they may turn away visitors at first glance. Plus, you lose out on branding opportunities when using a template.
3. Installing the blogging application.
4. Adding plug-ins to make it easier for you to manage.
5. Helping you get started, if needed.

I run this blog on WordPress and Bionic Ear Blog on MovableType.  They both have strengths and weaknesses.

Advantages

• Branding.
• Easy to remember domain name.
• Builds credibility.
• Less blog downtime than a hosted blog solution — depends on your web site’s host.

Disadvantages

• Not free. Factor in the costs of buying a domain name, signing up with a host provider, and creating a design (if you don’t use templates).
• Not easy.
• Not fast UNLESS you already have a domain and a Web site. Then you just need to install the app with your current design.
• More work in maintaining: Software upgrades, plug-in updates, etc.

Hard Way Blog Apps (known as user-hosted)

• Movable Type
• WordPress.org
• Drupal
• Other user-hosted blog software.

Of course, businesses need a valid reasons for starting a blog and determine its purpose before running with it. Is a Blog Right for Your Business? Part I and Part II.

I can’t help but hear… “You’ve gotta fight… for the right… to own your site” in my head. I can’t help but have that ’80s group Beastie Boys who remade You’ve Got to Fight for Your Right to Party playing in my head from time to time. {Taps head to try to get the song out.}

Travis Vocino brought up an interesting point in Paige Eissinger’s Do You Own Your Web Site?

Paige talks about owning your domain. Travis brings up an important point in response about owning the content on your site. The credit for the rest of this entry goes to Travis. Of course, consult with your legal experts if you need to take action. We’re just the messenger sharing experiences.

“Paying a web developer to create your site doesn’t necessarily give you the rights to it. Generally, that work is still the intellectual property of the designer and derivative works might sometimes be the subject of legal issues in the future.

“One of my clients had this type of issue with their previous designer who was basically holding some material hostage. Our legal team who we introduced through my consulting took care of it but not without some substantial cost. Intellectual property law can be a bit tricky.

“That’s why it’s important to accurately document who owns the entire rights package of the work and whether that is handed over upon payment of the final invoice or if it’s a situation where the designer is considered to be your employee and any/all works default to your ownership. Also, once those contracts are in place, it’s much easier to require things like source files (e.g. PSD, AI, FLA, etc.) that will allow you to have an exit strategy in case the relationship with your developer goes south.

“After hearing a couple of these stories and being directly involved in helping a client out of one, my company has begun including specific verbiage regarding the issue in our consulting agreements. This is primarily for the client’s peace of mind, more than anything, since we do give them the ownership rights.

“I’ve also been in a situation where the company was sold based on technology developed. The people that were contracted to bring the original concept to market still technically held the intellectual property rights and when they saw there was money to be made, they came knocking.

“Usually it’s not a problem until the relationship with the developer goes sour and the company goes on to great success. That’s when the phone starts ringing with someone wanting a cut.”

I think you get the moral of the story here.