March 2007

We all know when see a website that looks a wee bit “1999.” Lots of tables and no CSS; a relic of the bad-old dial-up days.

Design firms are going to have a very good next couple of years updating all those static Web 1.0 silos. Here at OCDC, we were recently discussing just such a project and someone asked “exactly what is the Web 2.0 look?”

Turns out a lot of us had been bookmarking examples for several months. Here are a few sites we think epitomize mainstream Web 2.0 visual design:

Open Ads

Zoom Info

Last FM

Flickr

Springwidgets

So, after careful consideration, here are a few Web 2.0 design principles we pulled together:

1. Lots of white space.
2. Tightly controlled color palettes, with just one or two highlight colors and many shades of gray.
3. Subtly is a major trend in Web 2.0 design. We’ve seen rollovers so subtle you’re not sure if it’s a link or if your monitor is pulsing.
4. Navigation is across the top; subnav drops down a line in Web 2.0 sites. Left nav is pretty much dead.
5. Links often call attention to themselves with color instead of an underline. Most links feature rollover formatting using the :hover pseudoclass.
6. Gratuitous flash has become extinct (thank heavens).

“Damn hard to get away from tabs,” one of our designers lamented. True that. Interestingly, our friends at Womble Carlyle (see yesterday’s post) have a pretty interesting navigational design (sans tabs).

Finally, hats off to Ben Hunt of Scratchmedia in the UK for his thorough and thoughtful survey of current style in web design. Brilliant!

Mid-cap regional businesses would do well to look at law firm Womble Carlyle as a positive example of effective 21st century marketing.

WCSR has an elegant, content-rich Web 2.0 portal. They create awareness through intelligent use of media including radio. They even supports 9 (!) separate blogs, each tailored toward a particular niche. We came across their feed covering a 2 week trade trip to China with former NC Gov Jim Hunt.

That’s some quality corporate blogging.

Turns out Espen Skoland was thinking the same thing we were last week. His feed, Blogcampaigning, is a fascinating and thorough study of how blogs influence politics.

Once again, though, we’re struck by how narrow a bandwidth blogging really has with the public. It’s all early-adopters and specialists. “Real” people still need the mainstream media to become of aware of important commentary in the blogosphere.

What’s needed is some seminal event that galvanizes the general public to change habits and start looking at Bloglines for their news.

Who knows? Maybe the looming US Presidential campaign will turn ordinary Americans on to blogging.

Let’s put it this way: when Moms at my daughter’s Cheer gym start talking about blogs, the Golden Age will have arrived.

Maurice Saatchi’s essay last year in the Financial Times of London about The Strange Death of Modern Advertising was a seminal event to all of here at OCDC.

To everyone in the blogocracy, it was probably like “dude, you just catching up with this?” But to those of us who got our start in the era of traditional advertising, it ain’t so ’til Lord Saatchi says it is.

Briefly, his thesis is this:

If you are under 25, your brain is actually wired differently then those of us who grew up prior to the digital age.

…the digital native’s brain is physically different as a result of the digital input it received growing up. It has rewired itself. It responds faster. It sifts out. It recalls less.

Saatchi’s essay pulled together scientific research from psychologists, physiologists and other really smart people.

“This, apparently, is what makes it possible for a modern teenager, in the 30 seconds of a normal television commercial, to take a telephone call, send a text, receive a photograph, play a game, download a music track, read a magazine and watch commercials at x6 speed. They call it “CPA”: continuous partial attention.”

Turns out that those of us who lugged a Smith Corona to college are Digital Immigrants. We’ll find a way to get along in the new world, but we’ll always speak with a thick accent.

Wow - what a gestalt moment! No wonder we didn’t know what was going on half the time. We thought it was creeping Alzheimers, but it turns out we’re living in a foreign country. The land had shifted beneath our feet and we didn’t even notice. When did Ozzie become an actor?

Quickly, we paid a 14 year old to teach us HTML and stole a book from the library on Dreamweaver. The rest is history.

Lord Saatchi helped shape a part of our mission - to bring over friends and kin from the Old Country. Give them a bridge to the New Land. Show them that the New Land is cool and that they can Digg it.

Congratulations to Peter Meyer, Director of Marketing and Business Development at Over There Interactive in Manhattan for correctly identifying the location of this picture of Hal Goodtree:

Peter guessed Stuyvesant Town on the eastside of lower Manhattan. Right you are, Peter!

Peter has received an iTunes Gift Card from all of us here at Online Copywriter for his correct response.

Stay tuned for more pointless contests and meaningless self-promotion.

Friends ask: “aren’t blogs just the domain of geeks, nerds and people with a need to rant publicly?”

Hell no! Well, maybe yes just a little bit, but blogs are truly a great source of grass roots info about anything and everything. Here’s an example:

I’m going to Paris with my wife & kids next week. I learned that the Louvre is free to all on Friday evenings from a post by Melanie Clatanoff on EuroCheapo. Merci beaucoup, Melanie!

Here at Online Copywriter, we think a paradigm shift is necessary to expand the blogosphere from the early adopters, digital natives and cognoscente to ordinary Moms, Dads and others over 30. In other words, people like us :)

T. Keung Hui writes in the N&O Blogs about “Intersessing at year-rounds.”

Sorry, T. No such word. There is no gerund form of “intersession,” a noun meaning “the time between two academic sessions or semesters.”

On the positive side, this story generated active debate with 36 posts in just 5 hours. On the negative side, the mistaken usage in the headline lead to further confusion in the comments. One blogger asked “WHERE will these intercessions be held?” That’s a different word meaning “pleading on behalf of another.”

Here at Online Copywriter, we’re as willing to make up words as anyone else. Just this week, we wrote with joy about “astroturfing.”

But “intersessing?” No. That’s just ugly.

The N&O needs to set some minimum standards for online writing by it’s staff. Start with “use real words.”

When we first installed WordPress, it came with some links pre-loaded in the blogroll.

The first link was for a gent named Alex King, a software developer who co-founded Feedlounge. Turns out there’s lots of great info on this site; we especially liked Alex’s favorite utilities and add-ons for Mac & Windows.

Lots of people make lists of stuff, but Alex’s utilities are really the cream of the crop. You probably have a few of these already, but check out the list for more really good stuff that’s free or shareware.

Here’s a couple more utilities (mostly for Mac) that we find useful in our work as online writers:

Transmit - Easy FTP and secure FTP. User friendly enough for noobie writers.
MacLorem (thanks to David Holt) - need Latin text (ipsum lorem stuff)? MacLorem generates latin text, Greek, Celtic… everything but Klingon.
Calendar Clock - Handy little pull down calendar that resides in your menu bar
Gmail Notifier - another menu bar app - this one notifies you when you have gmail.
SyncTwoFolders - one of the better utilities of this type. Even worked syncing two dreaded iTunes libraries.
Wiretap records any sound that is playing through your computer. We use it to record interviews conducted on Skype. Also good to record radio streams like our favorite KCRW.

Thanks again, Alex! If anybody else has a cool app, send it along and we’ll give it a try.

Oy vay.

Heard this on TV this morning at the gym:

“Cingular is now the new AT&T”

I had my back to the TV and thought to myself “what does that mean? Which brand died?”

It reminds me of the evergreen pitch from the fashionistas:

“Brown is the new black.”

Every season, a new variation on the same tired admonition: “gray is the new black,” “green is the new black,” “blue is the new black.” Translation:

Brown has replaced black.

So if Cingular is now the new AT&T, has Cingular replaced AT&T?

Au contraire. AT&T has replaced Cingular.

How can such a big company full of smart people make such a silly mistake? Answer: navel gazing. We’re guessing the original line was “Cingular is now AT&T.” Simple, functional, communicative.

But then some genius said “add the word new, Bob. We want people to know we’re the new AT&T. Not that stodgy old company we used to be.”

So Cingular is now the new AT&T. Red is the new black. And we miss the old Ma Bell.

The good folks at W3C offer lots of web tips and recommended practices.

Recently, we came across a QA Tip on the language of links. Naturally, as this relates to online copywriting, we thought we’d weigh in with some heavy thinking of our own.

In a nutshell, the advice regarding links is to:

• Provide some info if the link is read out of context (i.e. scanned by the reader)
• Explain what the link offers
• Don’t talk about mechanics
• Avoid verb phrases

Most of this seems like good advice. For example, it’s recommended that you say:

Get Amaya

instead of

To download W3C’s editor/browser Amaya, click here.

This is sensible. To a reader who is scanning the page, “click here” is pretty meaningless. And likewise, “Get Amaya” is just plain more concise and better copywriting that the second phrase.

But what about the advice to avoid verbs? For instance, on a page written in the first person, how should one handle Contact Me? Is it:

Contact Me?

or

Contact Me?

Here’s one more example: when we want to download something, we noticed that our usual habit is to scan the page for the word “download” in the body text (if there isn’t a big honking download button). So, we’d recommend:

Download Amaya

as opposed to:

Download Amaya

Our reasoning is that on a page that may have many “Amaya” links, the word “Download” will stand out and draw the viewers attention.In all fairness, this QA Tip from W3C was written in 2001 by Aaron Schwartz and descended from thinking by Tim Berners Lee back in 1992. Much respect to both!

Here at Online Copywriter, we’re sensing a sea change when it comes to links using verbs. Are verbs still verboten?

Tell us what you think. Or tell us what you think. Whatever.

Jeff Bernoff writes in Groundswell about a new series of short documentaries from DuPont appearing across the internet.

The post talks about how DuPont took the high road - they paid for media space to run their shorts on places like Boing Boing instead of just uploading it to YouTube and pretending it was viral. He uses an interesting phrase: “they were smart enough not to take the astroturf route.”

We’d never heard that term before (being hideous Luddites), but it makes perfect sense. Astroturf is kind of the metaphoric opposite of home grown or grass roots - it’s a plastic, lifeless product, not something organic and natural.

Jeff’s story took us over to the New PR AntiAstroturfing homepage. Where have we been? This stuff is great reading for any online copywriter.

Mary Bellis at About.com informs us that Astroturf was rolled out in 1966 at the Astrodome, the new ballpark of the Houston Astros. Clever, huh? For a while, Astroturf was all the rage. But over the last decade, there has been a backlash in favor of natural turf. Newer stadiums like the re-furbished Camden Yards and the Durham Bulls Athletic Park have real grass on the playing field.

Turns out nobody like Astroturf.

Thanks, Jeff, for updating our vocabulary.

Ted Vaden, the Public Editor of the News & Observer, blogged last week about a Do-Not-Deliver registry for (junk) phone books akin to the Do-Not-Call registry for Spam Phone Calls.

How about junk email? The Washington Post estimated in 2003 that junk email cost U.S. businesses over $10 billion in wasted time, server space and bandwidth.

For every business that has a website, this problem is particularly acute. You want to post your email address so people can contact you. But if you do, the spambots will find you, harvest the address and sell it to data miners. You can expect an ever-increasing flow of junk to the listed email address.

We’ve just released a short, downloadable QA Tip “How to Hide your Email Address from Spambots” as it relates to business and personal websites.

Hiding your email address from spambots is quick, easy and doesn’t require any advanced web skills. Viewers won’t notice any difference - they’ll be able to see your address and contact you freely. But you’ll be invisible to the data harvesters.

We’ve also included a link to Enigma’s Email Obfuscator, a free tool that can help you baffle the ‘bots.

Now if only we could figure out what to do with those phone books.

Download the whitepaper:
How to hide your Email Address from Spambots

Word-maven William Safire writes today on the subject of woman vs. female in contemporary usage.

We’re longtime Lexicographic Irregulars, but this column seems particularly important for copywriters. Not sure why, just a vague alarm bell going off somwhere that usually signals an impending trip to the couch with a blanket and pillow.

Safire’s always been a troublemaker.

Here’s a great tip from All About Google Adsense that tells you how to quickly and easily get your blog indexed by Yahoo.

No code, no programming - here at Online Copywriter, we love that!

Basically, you just need a My Yahoo account. Then you configure your homepage content to include your own feed. Presto! Yahoo is now indexing your blog.

Before we get too far along with this blogging thing, we need to thank Andy Beal, Marketing Pilgrim and blogging guru.

Andy generously spent the better part of an afternoon last autumn talking with our writer Hal Goodtree and others about the nuances and techniques of writing a successful blog.

It’s taken us a while to gestate the information. But, as Ann Landers used to say, it’s never too late to say thanks.

Jim Shea of the Hartford Courant is one of our favorite writers here at Online Copywriter.

Check out this article (printed in Saturday’s News & Observer) in which he handicaps the presidential contenders in the voice of sports announcer Dick Vitale.