Hello, meet the cobbler’s kids, who always need shoes. That is… I’m so busy working on everything else, my own site never gets any attention. About once a month I get fed up, make a token post, resolve to fix the place up… then promptly go back to working on other things, so I can repeat the process in another month or so. So, perhaps I won’t do that this time. Err, exactly.

I spend every day creating content. Producing tons of emails, IMs, reports, lists, task notes, designs, plans, maps… more than I can list, really. Most of it is low value, if you ask me – but this particular post really isn’t about the value of different kinds of communications, so I’ll leave that can of worms closed.

This is actually about thinking I engineer a smarter publishing platform – something that makes it easy to share what’s on my mind, rather than creating more publishing work. Something that becomes a place to capture the content I create that doesn’t seem superfluous – rather than another reason to create content.

It’s a simple idea, really – and the more I thought about it today, the more I began to think about how that might benefit my clients too.  Every time we do a new site, that’s always the hurdle – where will the content come from? “We’ll have to create content for the website.” Well, will we? Really? Or do we need to distill our ideas about what we need to share with people and create that, then just make the small efforts needed to share that over multiple mediums? It’s not a new idea, exactly – but it’s definitely one whose time has come.

The idea that producing content equals producing value is a fallacy – most of the time, producing content is about producing noise. And we, the same people who think we’re creating value that way, complain about it in others. Complain about how people could have just said what they meant, complain about the ‘thoughtless’ email forwards we just delete, complain about people who answer our email but not our question, complain complain complain. (Okay, maybe this post will have a little to do with the value of communications.)

Well, we can’t change them – but we can change ourselves, right?

So you’ve seen the barefoot. Here’s where the pregnant comes in – because this time around, I plan to spend my month away giving birth to something better. Something that’s leaner – and more robust because of it. Something that takes less time – and so has more value. Something that means writing less – and offering more because of it. How will I do that? I’m not 100% sure yet – it’s going to involve a little honest review of what really has value and what doesn’t first.

Maybe you’d like to join me – and when we do your website, we won’t have to wonder where the content will come from.

Recently, we were helping a client review a boxed software solution for handling appointment scheduling. Part of what the company selling the software offered in the bundle is ‘marketing tools.’ In the same vein, another client recently purchased large-scale fundraising software – and again, bundled in with the core component, were these ‘marketing tools.’ In fact, the availability of an email marketing component is a significant part of what drove the company’s decision to buy the product. The reasoning: Now we’ll finally be able to do some of our own marketing.

Many companies are lured by the same promise – not realizing that buying an email marketing tool doesn’t make you a competent email marketer, any more than buying a band saw would make you a competent carpenter.

And soon after purchasing this email marketing tool, the problems begin…

[Read more...]

How many times has it happened to you? You’re using a piece of software or a website, performing whatever task you need or want to perform, and suddenly there’s a useless error message. It tells you that something has gone wrong well enough, but it doesn’t tell you what to do now. It doesn’t say how you can fix it, or what your next step should be, or who you can contact for help.

How do otherwise savvy marketing firms miss this critical part of the user experience? Hours are spent contemplating a user’s experience when everything is going well: how users will find the needed starting point on the homepage, the help text and instructions that will make sure they’re able to follow an easy process, and clear messages about what’s happening all the way. That is, until the user makes a mistake or the software suffers some small problem – and then the user is suddenly cast into uncertainty. In the worst cases, they receive some server-generated error message, citing numeric codes they don’t understand and containing alarming code snippets they have no hope of comprehending. Certainly many users know what a 404 error is – but what about the ’500 Internal Server Error’ that likely runs a close second in frequency? Or the even more ominous ’502 Bad Gateway’ error? For the user, all of these messages seem much more like error 417: expectation failed. The process they were trying to follow has brought them to a confusing dead end, and the website they were trusting to guide them to success has let them down.

[Read more...]