How did Google beat Yahoo! in the Great Search Engine Race?

Gerry McGovern, a web marketing specialist often quoted here, thinks that Google beat Yahoo! in the competition for top search engine by focusing more on the needs of its users. Yahoo!, he argues, focused more on the needs of its advertisers.

See Gerry's newsletter "The real difference between Google and Yahoo."

How can we relate this focus to the TWU website?

For most TWU websites, the primary goal* is recruiting new students. To accomplish that goal, your department's website should focus on what potential students want to know or what they want to do when they come to your website. This may differ from what you want to tell them or what you want them to do when they come to your site. But if Gerry's right, we'll be more successful recruiting new students when we focus on what they want.

*not the only goal, but the most important one

Simpler is better

I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the leisure to make it shorter.
-- Blaise Pascal, from a letter

Editing copy to make it shorter and easier to read, or designing web pages to make them simpler and easier to use are difficult tasks. It's one of the ironies of the human mind: making something complex is easier than making something simple. But simpler is nearly always better.

So I hope that Rosabeth Moss Kanter is right that simplicity is the next big thing.

How Users Read on the Web Redux

by Leen Jones

They DO.

I feel the need to say what should be the obvious. Why? Because recently, while catching up on my Twitter feed, the following statement smacked me like a gauntlet:

It’s a fact that users don’t read, and we have to design for it. *

I was too late to join the conversation, but the statement has concerned me ever since. In the user experience and design communities, has an assumption locked our thought about reading so tight that we refer to it as a “fact?”

Read the whole "How Users Read on the Web Redux" piece...

Does your organization suffer from organaritis?

Does your organization have organaritis? If you answer yes to one or more of the following questions you probably need to seek medical help:

• Do you have pictures of very important people within your organization (your needy children) on your webpages?
• Do these needy children require messages from them to be published prominently on the site?
• Do you have big pictures of smiling actors pretending to be customers? (Shiny, happy people.)

See more organaritis questions in the full article...

You're so not welcome

Just read a terrific little piece on doing away with "happy text" on websites. We all want to be polite and welcome visitors to our site, but the best way to do that is to build a better site, a site that gets to the point.

Read "You're so not welcome" on Brain Traffic's blog.

Writing Killer Web Headings and Links

by Gerry McGovern

It's vital to get the first couple of words exactly right when writing effective web headings and links.

The first two words have a huge impact on whether or not people will click on a link according to a new study by Jakob Nielsen. This basically confirms the findings of a 2004 Eyetrack study from the Poynter Institute that found that, "Most people just look at the first couple of words-and only read on if they are engaged by those words. For headings-especially longer ones-it would appear that the first couple of words need to be real attention-grabbers if you want to capture eyes."

The Jakob Nielsen study tested 80 people and found that they typically see the first two words in a link. The study tested links from websites such as AT&T, Intel, Dell and UK Directgov.

The best links in the study:

* Used plain language
* Were specific and clear
* Used common words
* Started with the essence of the message
* Were action-oriented

The worst links in the study:

* Used bland, generic words
* Used made-up words or terms
* Started with after-dinner-speech-introduction language

Read the full article on Gerry McGovern's site...

Don't "Click Here"!

We've all seen them and most of us have made them. Links that say "click here," that is. Some would call these kinds of links "crimes against hyptertext," but we would simply say, "There is a better way."

Instead of "click here" or "more," why not include words in the link text that help explain to site visitors what they can expect when they click on the link. So instead of...

Click here to learn more about our undergraduate program in Incredibology.

how about simply...

Learn more about our undergraduate program in Incredibology.

It's clear from the color of the text (and often an underline) that the text is a link, so people who've used the Web at all know to click on the link if they want more information on Incredibology.

And by including the relevant words in the link text itself, we can also help boost the "findability" of the content about the undergraduate program in Incredibology on our site. Search engines use links and link text as signs of relevance in search results.