I’ve noticed when meeting with clients or associates about a website project, it’s pretty common for them to say some variation of “I’m not tech-smart at all, so I need this to be easy to use.”

In many cases, this is a matter of the client being modest, and a little uncertain, about what the project means for them. Technical knowledge is entirely relative to a given task or application, so a statement belittling ones own comfort level with technology can mean just about anything. Further details of the same meeting will usually bring this into focus, and can reveal whether the project is ultimately going to be worth your pursuit as a designer/developer. Read More…

Over at Daring Fireball, Gruber posts: Attention is the Real Resource.  Nice insight into how a very successful site utilizes full-content RSS feeds.

..The problem, I say, isn’t with full-content RSS feeds, but rather with a business model that hinges solely on web page views. The precious commodity that we, as publishers, have to offer advertisers is the attention of our readers. Web page views are a terribly inaccurate, if not outright misleading, metric for attention. Subscribers to a full-content RSS feed are among the readers paying the most attention, but generate among the least web page views.

The routine argument for supplying RSS feeds has been to “drive viewers to your Web site”  -  with an underlying implication that the Web site is your “real” product, and RSS just a route into it.  That tunnel-vision gets pushed away among leading edge sites like DF, even as many media sites plow the opposite direction.

When I encounter a site that is clearly in the game for pageviews – doing stupid stuff like running photo galleries with full page reloads for every new photo, just so they can load in a more ad impressions – my tendency is to leave and not come back.  The tactic of deliberately annoying your users seems a pretty shaky path.

Here’s info some higher-end restaurants might prefer you NOT know about – William Poundstone’s new book Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) includes a section on menu design, summarized here at New York Magazine.

Poundstone describes a variety of ways that marketers use your own instincts against your best interest, from cereal box sizes to the housing market. Here he is on a segment from NPR’s Talk of the Nation Science Friday.

Tired of Web pages that plaster your reading experience with blinking ads, or worse yet, popups that dance in your way until you move your cursor and kill them?  Try out a “bookmarklet” called Readability, and choose a format for reading that suits your style, not the style of some interruptive marketer.

David Pogue chalked up the value of Readability the other day, in a post that probably didn’t thrill his ad-buyers at the New York Times.

…I don’t think advertisers should be blinking, animating and distracting in the first place. If I’m interested in the product, I’ll read the ad. But trying to pull my focus as I’m trying to read crosses some kind of line. You know what? I would never click any ad that blinks or animates in the first place. It’s obnoxious and juvenile, and I’m not about to reward them.

Readability isn’t likely to work on all online content, and there are minor glitches depending on formatting of the page you pull. Not a tool for navigating the Web, it’s designed to remove the clutter and customize text on demand. Well worth the easy install though, even if you only use it on occasion to read an article without distractions, or to print an article that won’t otherwise cooperate.

Above all, its another small shot across the bow of old-school advertising methods and “rich media gone wild” that agencies so often foist upon the Web.

Derek Powazek posted this week on the matter of Search Engine Optimization – a brutal assessment, controversial, and I have to say, dead-on in many ways.   As a number of his commenters point out, the “obvious” elements of SEO may not be so obvious to non-developers. But the larger point is that companies should focus their time and budget on good Web design and, especially, creating good content. Do this well, and you’ll have little need for SEO ‘experts’ or one-dimensional boutique agencies.

Oh, and the part about SEO poisoning the Web? Yep, it’s sadly the root of most online evil …

SEO cockroaches employ botnets, third-world labor, and zombie computers to blanket the web with link spam. 99% of spam comments to blogs are these kind of links. The target of these links is not the blog readers, it’s Google.

Read the whole post (and the comments too, for additional perspective).  [via Daring Fireball]

Even as paid content continues to gain momentum in media boardrooms and on the news industry conference circuit (witness ridiculous posts like this one, claiming ‘consensus’ on the matter), those with practical experience play a necessary and realistic role of debunker.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball weighs in with Pay Walls, taking apart screenwriter David Simon’s call for immediate subscription-only services for the two biggest American newspaper sites. Simon’s a great writer, his HBO series The Wire ranks in my arena as one of the best ever on television. But like so many professional writers who believe the newspaper business is only about journalism , Simon falls short on discovering the more fundamental issues. Gruber’s summary hits one of those issues good and hard:

The primary problem with newspaper companies isn’t their revenue. It’s the size and scope of their operations.

Robert Ivan at Metaprinter, in concurring with Gruber…

Pre-internet, general interest newspapers made money because they were effective advertising solutions on a cheap and convenient distribution platform, not because they won Pulitzer Prizes.

Ivan also points to more viable solutions for newspapers, essentially the offering of creative services and marketing for the greater internet.

This is precisely the position I’ve begun to take in recent months, in my own business meetings with those who care to listen, or just those who get stuck in a room with me. Accepting the premise that (A) paid content will only work in very unique niches, and even then only to a certain degree, and (B) online ad placements will only cover a part of the revenue needs for even the leanest of news site staffs, then we must move along to (C) which is, other stuff to pay the bills. And in the newspaper/media setting, the best use of (C) might well be a hybrid of agency work and nimble online marketing for the many small and medium-sized businesses with whom we already have a working relationship. That’s new territory, especially in a business where we’ve traditionally given away creative production of ads as part of the placement cost. New territory, one way or another, is certainly where we’re headed.