I’m currently writing new copy for the Boost website, which will be relaunching soonish with an updated look and a lot of new information. This has got me thinking about what’s changed about writing for the web in the 5 years that I’ve been doing this, and what’s stayed the same.

[NB: This post follows on nicely from last week's advice on launching with great content]

Let’s start with what’s stayed that same. You still can’t go wrong with the long/short rules:

• long page titles
• long headings
• long link text
• short paragraphs
• short sentences.

Other rules that have become good practice include:

• the disciplined use of numbered and bulleted lists to break up long pieces of text
• following the inverted pyramid style
• delivering one idea per paragraph
• strategic use of keywords in page titles, summaries and headings (without turning into a SEO-crazed keyword monster)
• using the F-shape to stack the most important phrases in headings and the beginnings of paragraphs
• writing tightly, avoiding padding and the passive voice.

Some things I think we’ve become a bit more relaxed about. We now trust people to scroll, and fret less about page length and getting content “above the fold” – a concept in itself becoming less and less relevant as the devices people use to view websites proliferate. (I have to include here my favourite text on scrolling.)

I’ve always had a bit of a bee-in-the-bonnet about link text. Thankfully, the days of ‘Click here’ seem to have passed, and people are writing link text that indicates where you’re going to be taken when you click. Generally, I prefer to be told/shown (and tell/show people) whether the link they’re about to click will keep them within the site they’re currently on, send them off to another site, or (pet peeve) trigger a PDF to start downloading.

Much as I love the Guardian‘s website, I’m often caught out by the behaviour of their links, which sometimes take you to another article, sometimes take you to an external site, and sometimes trigger a canned search. In the example below, ‘Internet Explorer’ triggers a search, ‘high-profile vulnerabilities’ is a link to another Guardian article, and ‘Responding’ and ‘an online petition’ go to two different external sites.

Links in a Guardian article: internal page, canned search, external sites

You can help people with the way you write your link text – see the WC3 guidelines on link text. Or perhaps you’ll read Nicholas Carr’s latest book The Shallows, where he argues that “the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources”, and be inspired to corral the hyperlinks that are normally sprinkled through your text at the end of the page, as Laura Miller did on Salon.

Then again. I often feel like a hypocrite when laying down the law for link text in a blog post. Blog posts, obviously, thrive on links, and often when putting a post together you use your link text in a slightly crafty way: linking to something incongruous to make a little joke, piling up a sentence full of evidence for your argument by pointing to different pages with each word. Blog posts are – along with other forms of conversational writing driven by social media tools – part of the changes to classical/corporate web writing that I’ll come to at the end of this article.

Another rule that’s stood the test of time: avoid jargon and use of acronyms (the TLA is a recurring cause of WTF on the Internet). Don’t use a fancy word if a simple one will do. That said, I’m a fan of the New York Times‘ look-up feature: if you double click on a word, a small question mark appears, and then when you click on the question mark, a definition from the American Heritage Dictionary appears in a pop-up box. Sure, it’s a bit of an insider’s trick, but it’s simple and unobtrusive. Plus, they report back on the words that stump people the most.

New York Times article with the look-up box open

I think the moral of this blog post is that good practice has generally stayed the same when you’re writing for a website, particularly a corporate or government site. But with the introduction of social media, things have changed.

Blogging, tweeting, Facebooking: these new channels demanded new ways of talking with readers, rather than telling them stuff.  And they introduced new challenges for people who write for the web. As Wellington web writing guru Rachel McAlpine observed in a recent blog post:

Yes, it’s true: some communication professionals are still unfamiliar with the working principles of content management systems, search engines, and accessibility. Some profess ignorance or horror when you mention Twitter, Facebook, or even blogging. They still haven’t noticed the C in ICT, or the technical in technical communicators. They barely know what the phrase social media refers to.

This is understandable if retirement is close. But tragically, some of these communication nuns are young, really young—in their twenties. Can you believe it?

First came blogging. For the first time, we were told that a personal voice – one that came from an actual identifiable individual – was important. More informal, sometimes opinionated, sometimes playful; the blogs you return to over and over again are the ones where you are intrigued either by the quality of the content or the quality of the writing.

Then came Facebook and Twitter. These demanded something else again. Timeliness became a new consideration: you have minutes to respond to a tweet. Brevity is obviously even more of a concern than it was with classical web writing, but then again, a number of newbies who I’ve shown Twitter to over the past few years have been surprised to see that “it’s not all in text-speak”. A real voice is even more essential than with blogging. When I started writing for the web, I would never have envisaged I’d be publishing things like this as part of my job:

Talking to people about digital collections on Twitter

As someone who enjoys writing, these new outlets were something of a blessing. Learning to write for the web had had made my style leaner, but it was verging on the anorexic. As Madeleine Schwartz noted in a recent post on the New Yorker books blog, writing about the Yahoo! Style Guide

What room does this leave for actual writing? Stylistic flourishes do not appear to be the book’s main concern. Instead, most advice is directed at generating more page views. All the guidelines have a hypothetical reader in mind—a reader who is constantly in a hurry, would never “jump hurdles” to find a piece of information, and must be roped in at all costs.

Writing for blogs and Twitter let me play again. Sure, the basics still apply. Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and unnecessary verbiage won’t do you any favours. But you can’t learn this kind of writing from style guides, just like you can’t grow a personality from self-help books. The people who write for you on the web – scratch that, the people who speak for you on the web – are now found in your web team, your call centre, your development teams.

What interests me is when the two types of writing get mashed together. When you stream your tweets to your homepage, does one kind of writing make the other seem incongruous? Is your corporate site as fun to read as your Facebook page? Should it be? What do you think?

It’s not too late to register for the Engage Your Community unconference, being held in central Wellington this Saturday, 21 August.

The unconference is a free day-long learning and skill sharing event for people working or volunteering as webmasters in community groups, volunteer organisations and not-for-profits. Industry professionals are invited to come along as well, to share their knowledge and experience.

I attended last year’s EYC conference in Wellington, and had an absolute ball running a social media workshop. I love the informality and sparky atmosphere you get at barcamps, so I’m really looking forward to going along this weekend.

The details

Who’s it for?

• volunteer webmasters
• people communicating with member groups using the web, email or social networks
• comms professionals or webmasters in not-for-profits
• people responsible for almost everything in an office, including communications
• industry professional wanting to give back to the community by sharing knowledge and skills.

Why should I go?

• meet others with similar interests
• share and learn alongside your peers
• find ways improve your website, and explore other web tools.

Where and when is it?

9.30am-4.30pm Saturday, 21 August 2010
Rutherford House, Victoria University Wellington

What does it cost?

The EYC unconference is a free event

What’s an unconference?

An unconference is like a conference, in that it’s a gathering of people interested in a particular topic, who come together to share and learn. An unconference is unlike a conference, in that it doesn’t have a preset schedule of talks that you sit through: instead, the agenda is built on the day by the people who attend. Anyone can run a session, whether it’s to share something they’ve done, ask for help with something they’re trying to do, or just to kick some ideas around. The EYC unconference site has a list of topics people are interested in talking about on the day.

So what are you waiting for? Register now! And if you come along on Saturday, make sure you come say hi – I’m running the schedule board on the day, so I should be easy to find.

Content. It’s the red-headed stepchild of any website project. The thing that 9 times out of 10 blows the time-line out of the water. The task that only ever seems to get bigger, not smaller. Why is this?

Perhaps it’s because content development is often spread over a number of people, none of whom have it as their highest priority. Or perhaps the job is dropped on just one person, who does it on top of their regular duties. Perhaps it’s because content writing often sits outside the design and development process, or perhaps it’s because design and development both have clear and familiar processes, and these aren’t as well established for content writing, editing and loading.

Whatever the reason, there are some things you can do to get your content into line. Based on our experience, here are 7 steps and a couple of bonus pointers, designed to help you with your content project.

1. Get a content wrangler

Employ, assign or beg someone to take on the lead content role. They will:

• carry out the content audit, and use this to manage the development of content
• own the style guide, and make any style decisions
• create content templates, and train writers to use them
• decide when pieces of content are ‘finished’
• handle translations (if required)
• manage any sign-off procedure.

It may be that this person writes and edits all the content as well. It may just be that this person is you. In which case – congratulations! Having one person in charge of all the content is the ideal situation (even if it means you’ll be frantically typing for the entire duration of the project).

If you can’t achieve that, having a single content wrangler who is recognised as being in charge of all content-related decisions, and who has the authority to set deadlines for the provision of content, is the next best way of ensuring content is completed on time.

‘Content strategist’ is another word for content wrangler. A List Apart published a great series of articles on content strategy; some of my favourites:

The Discipline of Content Strategy by Kristina Halvorson

The Cure for Content-Delay Syndrome by Pepi Ronalds

The Case for Content Strategy by Margot Bloomstein

2. Get a style guide

The point of a style guide is to improve the consistency of your content. They can be a godsend when you’re dealing with a group of writers.

There are a plethora of books out there that you can buy, and I’ve found that people are often happy to share their style guides. If you work in a larger organisation, there may already be a style guide for print publications which you can adapt for the web.

If you’re having to start from scratch, some points to cover:

• the tone you’re trying to achieve, and the audience you’re writing for
• formats for dates and times, phone numbers, addresses
• conventions for how you refer to your organisation
• conventions for the use of acronyms, abbreviations, and industry or sector specific jargon
• conventions for link text
• examples of good page titles, subheadings, image and table captions
• decisions on moot words (e-mail or E-mail or email? web site or website? home page or homepage?).

If your writers are unfamiliar with writing for the web, I’d suggest running up a workshop to introduce them to the main concepts and differences from writing for print. This has the bonus of bringing everyone together and ensuring a shared understanding of the content development process.

Something to bear in mind: style guides need regular updating to stay relevant. How about setting up an annual date with yours, just to make sure it’s in good shape?

3. Carry out a content audit

The content audit is probably the most tedious and most important part of your website project. After all, the whole point of this project is (or at least, it should be) to communicate with some people, and your content is how you do that. It comes wrapped in design and sits on top of technology, but at the end of the day, it’s the words that really matter.

A content audit for a website update has three stages. The first stage is a page by page analysis of all the existing content on your site. I usually find it easiest to do this in a spreadsheet. Each page gets a row, with columns for page title, URL, description, status (keep/edit/delete) and notes.

Content audit: the inventory stage

If you’re super-keen on details, you can

• include each news item and event
• note all external links and whether they’re still working
• keep a separate worksheet for all downloadable documents on the site (where they’re linked from, what format they’re in, what date they were written).

The next stage is to add in the new content you want to develop for the site.  This is also a good stage to start assigning pages to writers, if you’re working with a team of people.

Content audit with new pages to be written and writers assigned

The final stage is where you turn the content audit into a tracking tool. Use it to record where the content is in the development process (started, drafted, copy-edited, sent for sign-off, signed off) whether the page is being translated and where it is in that process, and anything that’s blocking progress.

Using the content audit as a tracking tool

To be honest, this is usually the point where my spreadsheet sprouts a rainbow of colours, with a complicated key. You’re welcome to be more restrained, but sometimes, when you’re in the depths of the content mire, turning all the completed pages sunshine yellow can be a small but valuable psychological pick-me-up.

4. Get to grips with social media

While you’re auditing the content on your site, why not run a quick check over your social media presences? Have a look at:

• where you have accounts (Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, delicious, StumbleUpon, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo – you’ll be amazed how these things proliferate)
• when you last posted or updated
• whether you’ve become an active/valued part of the community
• whether these presences are doing what you hoped they would
• how you might want to incorporate these presences into your website.

If you haven’t set yourself up on any social media sites of services yet, this is a good time to think how this might complement your website.

5. Prioritise your content

Technically, this should happen between stages 2 and 3 in the content audit.

Once you’ve identified all the pages you need to update or create, prioritise them ruthlessly. What do you really need to launch with? What’s nice to have? What’s the most important new content you need to add? This is the way I usually approach prioritisation:

1. existing content that requires updating to move over to the new site is first priority
2. high-value new content is the second priority
3. existing content that will benefit from cleaning up is third priority
4. nice-to-have new content comes last.

6. Set up some templates

Templates that show writers how pages should be structured are very helpful. At the simplest level, they might lay out the essential elements for the page (title, summary, body copy, examples of how links should be written). Instructions on how to indicate heading and subheading levels are often useful, if people aren’t using set styles.

For an example of a highly structured content template, see Erin Kissane’s article on A List Apart.

7. Get ready to be interrupted

While you’re working away diligently, filling pout templates with your well-prioritised content, new items will creep in. Often this happens as part of the wireframing process,  but sometimes it doesn’t occur until the technical build is underway. This is when you need to start providing pieces of content that are often small but urgent, things like the ‘remind me of my password’ screen, the ‘your form has been submitted’ screen, the ‘there are no results for your search terms’ page.

This is often off-the-cuff writing, and consistency will be improved if only one person provides this content.

Bonus: Common hiccups and stumbling blocks

Translation often causes a bump at the end of the writing process. If you’re working with an external company or translator, talk to them about the size of your project, and ask them how long they think it will take them to turn a given number of words around. Check whether they have recommendations on how you should provide your content, and incorporate this into your templates if necessary. Decide whether you will provide content in one batch or stagger it. Finally, hold off translating navigation elements for as long as possible, as these often change during the design and usability testing process.

Load your content at the end of the development process. Trying to load content into a site that’s still under development can often cause irritation and delays as developers and content loaders inadvertently get under each other’s feet. If you can, wait until the site is has been tested and the bugs worked out. You might feel like you’re losing time, but a concentrated push a week before launch is the most efficient way of getting all the content into a site.

Two tiny points that will save you grief when it comes to content loading. If writers are working in Word, discourage them from making hyperlinks in the document: instead, tell them to place the link text, followed by the desired URL, inside square brackets. And tell people to never, ever embed images in a document: set up a folder where images can be saved, and use a naming convention.

Thanks for reading!

Thanks for sticking around all the way to the end of this post. Next week, we’ll be posting about the actual writing of the content, asking whether anything has changed in the past few years.

A bouquet to the government for its planned investment in ultra-fast broadband. From an education perspective, this is the most significant technology initiative in schools since, well, the introduction of pen and paper to classrooms.

I’ve written about the government’s plans and the implications for schools in the latest edition of Education Aotearoa. But there’s a few more things to say – bouquets and brickbats to award.

Has enough money been allocated to do the job? $1.5 billion – to be matched by the private sector – won’t be enough. Will this mean a further injection of funds or perhaps a revision of the initiative’s objectives? The good folks at the Ministry of Economic Development have assured me that there will be enough to go round, but their explanation of the funding model hurt my brain!

I also wonder what students will use to access ultra-fast broadband once the cables have been laid. My experience is that classrooms – at best – have a couple of ancient desktops gathering dust in the corner and maybe a pod of laptops or a computer lab that they can book. Time to get cracking on improving the ratio of students to netbooks/laptops/iPads.

New South Wales is pushing on with plans to issue netbooks to students, and recent research shows this can be a very good thing for achievement in schools. Great to see the Labour Party considering a policy position on this.

If teachers were faced with a classroom of students with computers, would they know what to do? Professional development is critical, and what’s currently available to schools could do with revision and extension. Some of my buddies are astonished at the notion of training teachers to teach with ICT. No one taught me how to use Flickr! The justification is simple – we require consistency and quality of teaching, as well as equal learning opportunities, for all our young people.

Another bouquet, though, to the government for opting for a bit of bulk buying where there are obvious efficiencies. Their announcement that Pharmac’s role will be extended to take charge of hospital medicines is an example of what is hopefully a trend towards sensible centralised procurement.

Remember that peculiar hue of paint that all school buildings used to wear? The introduction of Tomorrow’s Schools in 1989 put a stop to that. It shifted many of the financial and administrative responsibilities for managing schools from the centre to elected boards of trustees – permitting schools to choose their own colour of paint. Great for schools wanting to develop their own localised teaching and learning programmes, but crazy when applied to ICT infrastructure.

It’s crazy to have every school negotiate separately for data traffic. It would be crazy for some schools to opt in and others to opt out of joining the incipient National Education Network. The very successful laptop scheme for teachers shows how a centrally organised programme is still able to give schools a degree of choice while saving the system from the burden of every teacher researching and deciding which laptop to buy.

Making the most of ultra-fast broadband requires some big decisions elsewhere in the system. Are we up for it?

Friday 30 July is New Zealand’s National Poetry Day, a ‘celebration of this country’s unique and vibrant poetic voice’.

Just in time for the celebration, the National Library of New Zealand has released a new look website for the New Zealand Poet Laureate.

The website was set up on the Blogger platform in January 2008 and over the past two and a half years has filled up with rich content provided first by Michele Leggott (Poet Laureate 2007-2009) and now Cilla McQueen (the current Poet Laureate). During Michele’s time as Poet Laureate the site had functioned as a normal blog, with regular updates from Michele as well as the publication of pieces of poetry (such as wonderful to relate and work for the living). Cilla McQueen took a different approach to the blog, writing Serial, a poem published in many pieces, each accompanied by an item from the Library’s pictorial collection (see the chapters so far: Higgs, Hotdog, Birdie, Inflation, Pleochroic). All this activity meant the site was becoming a little difficult for visitors to understand.

The National Library wanted to stay on Blogger, but also wanted to bring the site into focus with new content and a new look. Earlier this year Blogger introduced the ability to add static pages to blogs. This meant that the Library could now set up individual pages for each of the laureates, as well as an information page about the New Zealand Poet Laureate Award itself. While staff at the Library were working on new content, at Boost we were working on a new design and template.

The Library wanted a design that was clean, elegant, and served the dual purpose of showcasing the changing content that makes up Serial, while also providing clear paths to information about each laureate and the Award. The Poet Laureate Award does not have a brand as such, so we were asked to keep the design consistent with the Library’s existing brand guidelines. In discussions with staff at the Library we discovered that intelligent use of typography was important, as well as creating a sense of space and ease for people visiting the site.

New Zealand Poet Laureate website - homepage

The resulting design hits all these notes. The navigation is treated as a frame for the main content and presented in a quiet shade of grey, enlivened with flashes of teal green for roll-over effects. A number of small tidy-ups have been put in place, such as subtle frames around images and repositioning comments and tags, to reduce the clutter on the page. Fine horizontal lines have been introduced to help separate individual pieces of content and navigation.

New Zealand Poet Laureate website - single entry

So, why not celebrate National Poetry Day by checking out the site? You can also find poetry events all over the country on this calendar on the Booksellers website.

At the end of last week I was in Westport, running a workshop on using social media tools for National Services Te Paerangi. The weather was lovely, the people were welcoming, and the lamingtons were fabulous. And I learned something interesting.

At the beginning of these workshops I ask everyone to introduce themselves, talk about where they work or volunteer, and describe the social media/online tools they use both for work and for themselves. I’ve noticed a trend in these sessions. With a small number of exceptions people are using two tools, personally and professionally: email, and Facebook. Blogs aren’t mentioned. Few people have even heard of Flickr. Twitter has more awareness, but is usually dismissed as silly or pointless at the start of the day (after more discussion, people often warm to it). But everyone has an email address, and almost everyone has a Facebook account, and has set one up (or is considering doing so) for their organisation. In particular, older participants in the workshops say that they’ve joined Facebook to stay in touch with children who have left town (or New Zealand) and to see pictures of their grandchildren.

A few years ago – say 2006/2007 – everyone in the GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) sector was getting hot under the collar about this Web 2.0 thing. The two keynotes at the 2006 National Digital Forum conference for example were Jim Spadiccini from Ideum and Toby Travis from the Victoria and Albert Museum, both talking about ways museums could harness this explosion of new, free communication and collaboration tools to reach out to online audiences. Blogs, wikis, social bookmarking sites, Flickr … we were all over it.

So I’ve been interested to see that people working in small museums who are just starting out on this social media thing are now leaping over all these options in favour of Facebook. Facebook is, of course, in some ways the new Google – for many people, it is where the internet begins. Because people often use the same tools for their organisations that they use at home, Facebook is becoming the default starting point when setting up social media presences.

Facebook is an all-purpose tool: a way to blog, share photos, schedule events, send email and post brief updates all in one place. With the spread of the ‘Like’ button, it’s all over the web. It’s great for publishing content, and for building connections with physical and online visitors. But what else might it be used for?

Earlier this year Seb Chan at the Powerhouse Museum blogged about mining Facebook data to understand what your fans are also fans of. As Seb notes:

If you can identify similarities between the fan membership of your own institution and those of others you can start to think of new partnerships and collaborative opportunities.

Seb pointed to Pete Warden’s Fan Page Analytics as an example of a lightweight tool to look for cross-fan linkages. You just drop a Facebook URL into site, and hey presto …

Auckland Museum fans analysed by Fan Page Analytics

Auckland Art Gallery fans analysed by Fan Page Analytics

Of course, you can use Facebook’s own analytics package to delve into the age, gender, location and activities of your fans. In this sense, it’s a lot like the physical visitor surveys many museums and galleries run. Or you can just ask them questions, as Brooklyn Museum did recently when they started thinking about updating their collections handbook.

To my mind, the main point of analytics is to understand how people are finding your online presence (be it your blog, website or Facebook page) and how they respond to your content. In this vein,  Beth Kanter’s (co-author of The Networked Nonprofit) blog post about ‘spreadsheet aerobics’ makes good reading. Beth uses metrics drawn out of Facebook to analyse the responses to different kinds of content she’s posting to Facebook, and tweak what she’s doing:

My Facebook page is focused on a listening and engagement objective – starting and maintaining a conversation. I view it as a focus group that offers content ideas for blog posts as well as to provide another conversation channel to share insights about social media. The target audience is people who work for nonprofits.

Here’s my description:

This is a focus group and sand box to learn more about how nonprofits can use social media effectively, especially Facebook. You are all the experts here! That statement guides how I engage and what content I share. That in turns drives my measurement strategy.

Here’s a brief list of New Zealand museums and galleries who are on Facebook – feel free to add your own in the comments!

Te Tuhi

Auckland Art Gallery

Auckland Museum

Rotorua Museum

Puke Ariki

National Army Museum

Te Papa

The New Dowse

City Gallery Wellington

Shanty Town

Air Force Museum

This is the first entry in a semi-regular series sharing things that we’ve been looking at and reading recently …

Sarah (one of our project managers)

• Broadband becomes a legal right in Finland

• Guggenheim collaborates with YouTube and invites video submissions

Sue (one of our designers, recently returned from a break in the sunny northern hemisphere)

• Eye-candy and inspiration on www.citid.net

• Great experimental fonts (also: free!)

• Lighten up your winter blues: heaps of colour and shapes on Coolhunter

Alastair (one of our developers)

• Firefox 4 introduces more HTML 5 and CSS functionality. One step further towards the death of Flash? Still in beta so one for the developers.

• Excellent! Wayne and Garth spotted in the UK. Party on!

Rachel (our office manager)

• Artist creates masterpiece on an iPad

• World Cup 2010 statistics: all the key data for each team, from the Guardian

(Rachel notes that she’s not as much of a sports fiend as the above link might suggest, and also recommends data/infographic blog Cool Infographics)

Jake (who looks after our usability testing tool IntuitionHQ)

• David Gillis on Fusing Content Strategy with Design, in UX Magazine

• The Real Life Social Network, slides from a presentation by Paul Adams, Senior User Experience Researcher at Google

• Gnarcade – Video Game Invasion: for video game fans, and geeks in general

Courtney (that’s me – project manager)

• Aaron Straup Cope’s magical slippy map showing the world as revealed by geo-tagged photos on Flickr

• Significant Objects, an investigation of art and the market through short stories and eBay

• Swallows and Amazons, the current exhibition at Robert Heald Gallery, which is close to our office – on show until 31 July.

“Return on investment for social media activities”. It’s not a sexy phrase, but it’s one I’ve been pondering hard as I prepare for a National Services Te Paerangi workshop I’m running  later this month in Westport (here are some notes on the first running workshop, held here in Wellington).

The workshops are targeted at the GLAMs sector (galleries, libraries, archives and museums) and the people attending often come from quite small or even volunteer organisations. One of the interesting discussions we had in the first workshop was around measuring ROI (return on investment) for the social media activities.

ROI is the ratio of money made or lost on an investment, relative to the amount of money invested. It’s expressed as ROI = (X – Y) / Y, where Y is the investment, and X the final value. A good ROI might look like initially investing $100 and having a final value of $150: that’s a 50% ROI (a 50% profit). A bad one might might look like this: a $100 initial investment and a $0 final value; that’s a ROI of -100% (a 100% loss). This presentation by Oliver Blanchard gives a good overview of how this formula can be applied in a meaningful way to businesses’ social media activities, especially in terms of measuring whether there’s a link between activity and increased sales revenue.

I often struggle with the applying this idea of ROI to GLAMs activities. Firstly, for these organisations it’s rarely about investing hard money. Galleries and museums and the like are not diverting cash in their marketing budget away from one form of advertising and into social media. Instead, they’re reallocating their staffs’ or volunteers’ time and energy. Secondly, benchmarks are rarely in place to make comparisons between social media activities and other promotional activities,  such as print advertising.

This is not a reason not to think about the return on effort, rather than pure cash, expended. In fact, one of the best reasons to think about measuring ROI at the start of a social media project is that it helps you clarify what you’re doing and why. I think the time of people rushing, lemming-like, towards the latest tool has passed: now when I talk to people in cultural organisations who are starting or running social media channels, they’re more reflective about who they’re trying to reach, what content they’re wanting to share, and what outcomes they’re trying to achieve. Figuring out ‘what success looks like’ is an important part of the planning process.

There are all sorts of tools out there that can help you measure some kind of ROI, beyond the simplistic follower counts and page views. This Altimeter report gives a good overview of social marketing analytics, and this Mashable post gives a good overview of tools (most better suited to large organisations, to be fair).

Of course, there are all sorts of outcomes other than making money, and different ways to measure whether what you’re doing online is benefiting your organisation. For example, looking at your Facebook stats can help you learn more about the people who are interested in you, as Seb Chan shows.  Posting collection items to Flickr might drive interest, enquiries and sales back to your website, as Paula Bray’s paper suggests. Simple tools like bit.ly help reveal how and where your content is spreading. Studying analytics can help you improve what your content and communication, as Beth Kanter blogs about her own Facebook activity. Setting up funnels in Google analytics could show if efforts to publicise exhibitions and events, or fundraising drives, are paying off.

However, after covering tools and ideas like these in my workshops, I usually end with a plea.  And that’s for people to think about a human measure – one that captures the benefit for the people who are undertaking the work, who are usually doing this social media stuff on top of already full workloads, and who aren’t being repositioned as well-paid social media managers in order to do so.

When I was at the National Library of New Zealand I worked with the Services to Schools team to set up the Create Readers blog. When we surveyed the staff who were contributing to the blog, one of the things we found was they almost unanimously felt good about was having learned a new communication skill (only one or two contributors had blogged before) and  mastered a previously foreign technology. This is still one of my favourite examples of return on investment.

There’s also a sense of pride and community that I don’t think should be undervalued. Most people don’t work in the GLAMs sector for the generous salaries and the stock options. They work in them because they believe in the social value of what they do, and often because they love the stuff they’re working with, be it books, paintings, or bird specimens. Having an opportunity to share the things you care about with other people who’re interested too? To quote Mastercard – that’s priceless. A tweet that gets re-tweeted by half a dozen people, a blog post that garners a bumper crop of comments, a photo on Flickr smothered in notes – that’s the kind of thing that makes your heart glow. As we look for new ways to motivate the people we work with – and ourselves – I think these kinds of measures have a very valid place within discussions of return on investment.

During a brief slow period on a Friday afternoon I started pondering how much work I actually do, and if it was even useful knowing. Obviously all our code is stored in a version control system (git), so in a way all of the data for finding out the quantity of work is readily available. A little investigation and I found that it’s quite easy to pull a list of commits from git showing total lines added and deleted per file:

git log --oneline --numstat

I’ve committed a lot of code that I didn’t write, such as plugins, the Rails framework etc. So a quick and dirty ruby script later I could get a list of all unique files in all repositories that I’ve committed to. It was pretty easy to go through the list and create an exclusion list. I then broke out Ruport to aggregate everything by extension. That gave me the following table:

I’ve cleaned this up a little and collapsed some alternative extensions down.

Commits per week

Just over 110,000 lines added and 50,000 deleted, of which about 100,000 are to Ruby files. Now I’m not claiming to have written all those lines myself, any part of any line changed counts towards the total. All this does is illustrate the general balance of work that I do. There have been two lines added for every line deleted. This year has seen a lot of refactoring work, so it’ll be interesting to run the same exercise next year and see if the results are similar (of course git holds historical data, but we only started using it about 18 months ago, and previously had everything stored in subversion).

It’s interesting to see that the proportion of additons to deletions is much higher in view (rhtml/haml) files than in ruby code. This could point to the way things look being changed much more than the way things work.

Now if only there was a way to measure the quality of work. (Actually there are tools; metric_fu is a good starting point and we use it a lot at Boost. However, that’s going a little too far for this post).

Another interesting bit of data I extracted from git is the number of commits I’ve done per week over the last 52 weeks.

I’ve posted my script as a github gist. You  can run it by modifying the @repositories array with a list of git repositories, @author with your email address and @excludes with a list of regular expressions for excluding files. Run the script as ruby gitcount.rb. If it is run with the argument “files” then it will list individual files, making it easier to build the exclude list.

Last week I was lucky enough to go along to Foo Camp in Sebastopol, California. ‘Foo’ stands for ‘Friends of O’Reilly’, and Foo Camp is a yearly gathering of about 250 people (largely from the web and technology fields) at the O’Reilly Media headquarters. Run unconference-style, the weekend is a chance for people and ideas to mix and mingle, in hopes of producing those magical moments of realisation and inspiration.

Foo Camp is also a terrific chance to see a whole bunch of alpha geeks in their natural environment. And one of the most interesting trends evident at the event – as Linda Stone noted – was that laptops seemed to have disappeared in favour of iPads and smartphones.

What was interesting about this, for me, was the different tone an iPad brings to a group interaction. In meetings or gatherings, laptops form walls between people. Keys clack away noisily. Whatever the person behind the laptop is doing – work or play – is hidden and solitary. In this sense, the laptop is something of a dis-connecting tool.

In contrast, the way I saw people using the iPad was more like a menu or a map or a comic – something to be freely passed around, used by a couple of people at once. iPhones are similar, but they’re still more like sharing around a work tool – a practical act. The iPad doesn’t strike me as a work tool at all. When people use it, they seem either relaxed or immersed; if the laptop is a wall, then the iPad is a pool – something to dive down into. Or as Matt Jones observes, a magic table. Writing about the experience of playing Marble Mixer on the iPad, he notes that it’s a ‘simple game, well-executed’, which ‘sings’ when your friends join in:

Beautiful. Simple. But also – amazing and transformative!

We’re all playing with a magic surface!

When we’re not concentrating on our marbles, we’re looking each other in the eye – chuckling, tutting and cursing our aim – and each other.

There’s no screen between us, there’s a magic table making us laugh. …

It shows that the iPad can be a media surface to share, rather than a proscenium to consume through alone.

When I talked about the laptop phenomenon with Rowan Simpson, he mentioned a blog post he’d written a few years back about the Amish approach to technology, based on this 1999 Wired article by Howard Rheingold. As Rheingold writes:

Amish settlements have become a cliché for refusing technology. Tens of thousands of people wear identical, plain, homemade clothing, cultivate their rich fields with horse-drawn machinery, and live in houses lacking that basic modern spirit called electricity. But the Amish do use such 20th-century consumer technologies as disposable diapers, in-line skates, and gas barbecue grills. Some might call this combination paradoxical, even contradictory. But it could also be called sophisticated, because the Amish have an elaborate system by which they evaluate the tools they use; their tentative, at times reluctant use of technology is more complex than a simple rejection or a whole-hearted embrace. What if modern Americans could possibly agree upon criteria for acceptance, as the Amish have? Might we find better ways to wield technological power, other than simply unleashing it and seeing what happens? What can we learn from a culture that habitually negotiates the rules for new tools?

When choosing whether to adopt new technology, the Amish ask: will it bring us together, or draw us apart? When someone sits down in a group and flips open a laptop, it immediately disconnects them.  At Foo Camp, the absence of laptops seemed to bring people together. At the same time, people using iPads seemed no less connected to what was going on – logically – than people using pen and paper.

Am I – once something of a doubting Thomas – now a convert? No. I still don’t think I need an iPad, unless my future holds a lot of travelling that I don’t currently know about. But I am really excited to see how iPads get used in places like classrooms and museums, and how we all exploit their ability to draw people together.

I’d like to make a small prediction. At about 4am this Sunday morning at the Wellington Convention Centre, 18 webbies will be typing frantically, laughing hysterically, sweating profusely, and possibly being forced to do star jumps.

That’s because they’ll be 16 hours into FullCodePress, an international competition that sees teams of web developers compete to build a fully functioning website for a charity in 24 hours.

The 2010 event is the third in FullCodePress history. In 2007 and 2009 it was a trans-Tasman affair, with the Kiwi Code Black team returning triumphant from Australia on both occasions. This year the event is being held in Wellington for the first time. In another first, a team from the United States will join the Code Blacks and Team Aussie.

The set-up is simple. Teams of six (a project manager, a UX advocate, a graphic designer, an HTML/CSS integrator, a programmer and a writer) from New Zealand, Australia and the States are formed. They gather on the morning of the event. At about 10am they are introduced to their clients – representatives from the charities they will be building a site for. And then from 11am on Saturday to 11am on Sunday they will work like demons to design, build and fill with content a brand new site. At 11am tools are downed, and the judges called in. After deliberations, a winner is announced (history would suggest this is the New Zealand team). Celebrations ensue.

In 2009 I was lucky enough to be part of the Code Blacks team, taking the writer role. As a competitor, the FullCodePress experience is exhilarating, exhausting and rewarding. We were blessed with awesome clients in Clint and Daniel from Rainbow Youth, and I’m still proud of the site we built for them. (I’m still not proud about whining when Darren made us do star jumps at 4am.)

The way I saw it, FullCodePress was like a massively sped-up Agile project. I don’t think I would have coped with the concept of delivering a website in 24 hours if I hadn’t been part of the Digital New Zealand project (which has been committed to the Agile project management methodology since it began two years ago).

Perhaps we didn’t have formal user stories and acceptance criteria and burn-down charts and retrospectives, although we did have a stand-up every couple of hours. In fact, Haydn Thomson, our project manager, took on a textbook Scrum Master role, keeping everyone in the team appraised of where we were at, what everyone was doing, where the dependencies were between us.

My feeling though is that the most valuable aspect of Agile is what it teaches you about communication. The more projects you’re involved in that use Agile, the better you get at talking honestly and constructively about how things are going. Agile teaches you to pay attention to what everyone in the team is doing, rather than just focusing on your component of the task. It also teaches you to work in the moment: while you learn from what happened in the past and reserve a tiny slice of your attention for the future, you get better and better at saying to yourself ‘This is what I’m here to do right now’.

So my best piece of advice to the 2010 teams is: keep talking.  I wish you the best of luck – you’re in for one hell of a ride.

To everyone else: the competition is being held at the Wellington Town Hall, and (quiet) spectators are welcome on Saturday afternoon. You can follow the action and the trash-talk on twitter using the hastag #fcp10, and follow @fullcodepress for updates. And don’t forget, there’s the mysterious FullCodeGhost to shadow.

It feels pretty appropriate that one of my first tasks at Boost is preparing for a social media workshop that we’re running for National Services Te Paerangi (NSTP) on Friday 18 June here in Wellington.

I’ve just joined Boost after four and half years at the National Library, where among other things I helped set up and/or run the Library’s social media outreach, including the LibraryTechNZ and Poet Laureate blogs, the Library’s membership of The Commons on Flickr, and (pretty awesome, if I do say so myself) @nlnz twitter account. I definitely found being out there online and talking to people about the Library’s collections one of the most exciting and satisfying aspects of my job.

The workshop for National Services is on the theme of Using and evaluating cost effective online tools. It builds on a workshop that Sarah from Boost ran for National Services in four locations last year, How to promote your museum using online tools (see Sarah’s notes on the five themes that stood out from last year’s workshops).

We’ll be covering the following topics in this year’s workshop:

• the pros and cons of different kinds of online tools
• how to identify your exact needs
• how to pick the best tool for your needs
• the time required for different kinds of activities
• how to set your project up for success
• how to evaluate and report on your performance.

I’ve run sessions like this before, and have certain favourite examples that I always trot out (Christchurch City Libraries’ blog – especially their reporting from Writers and Readers Week; the TeAra, Te Papa Collections and NZHistory Online twitter accounts; the Indianapolis Museum of Art’s Wikipedia Saves Public Art project; the Brooklyn Museum’s 1st Fans). But it’s been fun having a look at things that have happened recently.

Top of the list of shiny new things is Brooklyn Museum’s partnership with the online fashion community site Polyvore. Following their belief that they need to get their content out where the people are, rather than waiting for people to find them, Brooklyn Museum have added fashion items from their collections to the store of material on the Polyvore site that members can use to create and share collages like this one by pinkopaque22

Vintage by pinkopaque22 featuring Yves Saint Laurent shoes

Underneath my arts and culture veneer, I’m a science geek at heart (this is one of my favourite blogs). In 2009 I got all excited about the Royal Observatory Greenwich’s astrotagging project. This year I got all excited about their Solar Stormwatch project, where people can help spot explosions on the sun & track them across space to Earth. Like the astrotagging project, this is meaningful community engagement, with the bonus of real scientific benefit.

One of the areas workshop attendees have flagged their interest in is understanding how much time social media outreach can take up, and how to manage this. There are various tactics you can take to make sure that scarce staff time doesn’t get totally diverted into managing your social media presence, starting with being smart about which channels you choose to use.

Another tactic is to run short-term projects, which is the approach of My Life As An Object. A recent project commissioned by Renaissance East Midlands and delivered by Rattle, MLAAO saw items from Nottingham City Museums and Galleries telling their stories on different social media sites – Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Ebay – for a week at a time. These short, intense bursts of storytelling are quite different from the long-term presences we normally think about creating.

I’ll be posting notes from the workshop, so check back in to see how it went. NSTP also runs a range of workshops at different levels for museums, galleries and iwi: check out their online calendar to see what’s coming up.

When we release a SaaS web application, such as IntuitionHQ, it’s inevitable that there will be two parts that make it up. The main part is the application itself. The second part is the marketing site that goes with it. The marketing site includes the content, and usually a way to sign up. It normally requires some integration with the application.

We choose Radiant for our CMS when working on internal projects. The reason we like it is for it’s simplicity and power. In this post I’ll go through the different ways we’ve experimented with to integrate our SaaS applications with Radiant based websites.

1. Completely separate

The first scenario is the simplest. We just keep the website and application completely separated. When the user clicks to sign up they are taken to a form running in the application.

Example: www.sonarhq.com

Pros

• Very easy.

Cons

• We have to make a sign up form somewhere. In this scenario it’s easier to do that on the application side, but that means getting the design of that page to match with the website. Doing it this way means that you can’t really have the sign up form on the homepage.
• You can’t edit the sign up page content through the CMS.
• Having two separate administrative interfaces, one for editing the CMS and one for the SaaS application. This is okay, but it involves more work setting up. For an application where users sign up for an account it also means having that extra admin layer, which is a bit confusing.

2. Completely integrated

Radiant’s extension system is very powerful. You can actually write a whole Rails application as an extension. This makes it really easy to integrate both the public side and the administrative side of the site.

For some applications this method works very well and reduces complexity.

This recent blog post by Jim Gay, the lead developer of Radiant addresses some of the issues with integrated applications.

Example: www.smartmove.co.nz

Pros

• It’s reasonably easy to set up.
• Everything is completely integrated. You can have the sign up form anywhere you want. You can create Radiant tags to integrate with editable content. You can add tabs to Radiant’s admin interface for your own admin pages.

Cons

• You have to battle with a slightly different setup. It’s not too big a of a deal, but it does have an effect. For example, I’ve found it harder to get the specs running.
• You’re effectively tied to the version of Rails used by Radiant. You can’t upgrade Rails without updating Radiant, and you can’t update Radiant without updating Rails.
• Radiant has built in user and role models, which you have to work around to avoid conflicting with the way you want to set up models for your own application.
• You have to careful that you don’t end up customising Radiant. If that happens you might find yourself in the position of never being able to upgrade it, and being stuck with that version forever.

3. Admin API and Radiant extension

With this method your application exposes a locked down administrative API. A simple Radiant extension uses the API to allow sign ups and perform administration.

While this is a more complex solution, it really provides the best of completely separate and completely integrated. You can maintain different Rails and Radiant upgrade paths, but you can still have all of the administration happen in the Radiant backend. You can even build it out to do other interesting things. For example, having a Radiant website that administrates several applications.

Example: www.intuitionhq.com

Pros

• Separate codebases.
• Single place to administrate both applications.
• Sign up form can be placed anywhere on the marketing site.

Cons

• Complicated to setup.
• You must consider the security of your administrative API.

Conclusion

I would avoid having a completely separate website and SaaS application again – it seemed like a good idea, but ended up not working that well.

Integrating with Radiant is a really nice solution. I would consider it for any application that fits the following:

• Can and will be developed very rapidly
• User/Role system fits in with the one provided by Radiant

For all other cases I would expose an admin API and write a simple Radiant extension around it. This seems to be the most future proof, while not taking away any flexibilty. I’d be interested to hear how other people integrate a marketing site with their SaaS applications.

It’s been 5 months since we launched IntuitionHQ, our online usability testing application. We have not quite found the time to write a post about IntuitionHQ but will be writing a couple over the next few months to help you find ways to improve you design and your business with usability testing.

We have however been busy. Over the last couple of weeks we have spent some time identifying areas within IntuitionHQ where we can improve the user experience.

The first area we have focussed on is the test taking page. We evaluated the existing page and came up with a list of things we think the page needs to do in order of importance:

1. It has to be fast
2. The user must be able to clearly see the task they are being asked to perform
3. It needs to be clear where the site ends and the test page begins

Making the list from the user’s point of view was extremely valuable and gave us a clear understanding of what needed to be done.

Improving the speed of the page loads

We started by looking at each of the steps the page takes when loading. It soon became clear that the round trip to Amazon S3 where the images are stored was taking far to long. Further investigation showed that we were searching for the bucket based on the URL each time. Fixing this has brought significant speed gains.

Ensuring the task is clear

Looking at the existing page design there was a lot going on around the task text. We had the number of tasks, the instructional text and the IntuitionHQ logo all fighting for attention.

The current design of the test page - click to enlarge

After a number of iterations this is what we have come up with. The most important change we made was improving the contrast of the task text in relation to the other instructional text. We have also removed the IntuitionHQ logo. The result is a much cleaner and clear area at the top of the page. For users it is now much clearer  what is required and there is less competing for their attention enabling them to concentrate on the page being tested.

An initial mockup of the design - click to enlarge

Above is the initial mockup that we produced. We used this as a guide for the designer to demonstrate what we were looking to achieve. The designer took this and produced the final design below. The final design keeps the task on it’s own and shifts the instructional text to the right hand side. To accommodate a wide range of image sizes the layout of the page has been shifted to a center alignment.

The final design - click to enlarge

Separating the test area from the page

In the initial page the image to be tested was place straight on to the grey background. This was OK but our review suggested that it was not always clear that the test image was separate from the rest of the page. We needed to make this clear while also ensuring that the task and image were clearly related. We solved this by using a border around both the test image and the task text. The result is a clear relationship between the two and separation from the rest of the site.

We think that these changes will make a real difference to the ease with which your users can accomplish tasks within IntuitionHQ tests.

We are busy implementing these now and will be putting them into production later in the week.

Do you think the changes will improve the user experience? We would love to hear your feedback.

DrupalSouth, an annual gathering of Drupal people from around New Zealand, happened over the long weekend here in Wellington.

The venue was Mac’s Brewery; a great location on the Wellington waterfront, a good venue for a conference of this size and of course geeks love good beer, it’s a fact.

Alastair (a fellow Boost developer) and I presented a talk on beginning Drupal module development at one of two Sunday morning red-eye sessions. Our presentation focused on getting people started with Drupal module development. The intention was to give simple examples of how you can tap into Drupal hooks and other elements of the API, such as the Form API.

Pitching a technical talk to beginners is always difficult depending on the background of the audience, hopefully it’s simple enough to understand while giving enough information for those who are raring to go.

The presentation slides and our sample code are available to download.

• Presentation slides
• Sample code

Any feedback will be appreciated, please feel free to comment.