online words

Malls, mixed-use developments, shopping centers - call them what you will, they dot the landscape of America.

Many of the larger developments have websites. For the most part, they’re pretty awful. So, when we were asked to produce a new website for North Hills, a mixed-use development in Raleigh, NC, our goal was to help bring the category into a Web 2.0 world.

Two months after the launch, we have every reason to feel we’ve achieved. Stats are great, everything works, and best of all, a continuing content stream is beginning to bloom. It’s interesting stuff, too - stories, bios, pictures and video.

So here’s a checklist of things we think a contemporary mall or mixed-use website needs. Read the rest of this entry »

We continue to install WordPress for clients at an ever increasing pace. But we stopped calling it a Blog. Read the rest of this entry »

We have several real estate and development clients. A common term in their parlance, mixed-use development, has always discomforted me a bit. Read the rest of this entry »

Every post needs to start with a catchy headline. More than anything else, a headline determines whether or not a viewer will read your post. Read the rest of this entry »

“Free” is a powerful motivator in a subject line, but care must be taken to avoid being snared in the spam filter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes we get asked about copyright. Here are the basic facts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Our colleague Gary recently pointed out another reason why dynamic websites perform better in search than static websites. Read the rest of this entry »

Gino Cosme has pulled together 10 Tips for the Online Copywriters in a recent article for South Africa’s Bizcommunity.com.

As usual, Gino offers sound advice, summarized here: Read the rest of this entry »

We sometimes get asked to write a privacy policy. This post will cover why a privacy policy is important, how to write one and list some online resources to make the task easier. Read the rest of this entry »

Memo to election officials across the US: Please let online copywriters and designers create a simple to use, friction-free electronic ballot.

We got to thinking about this because, once again, Florida is in the news for bungling an election. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a follow-up to our earlier post about using verbs for links on websites. Thanks to everyone for their comments.

The consensus seems to be that Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve blogged about this before, but because keywords are so important, we thought we’d go into a little more detail.

Keywords are nothing more than the most common terms people use to describe something. But choosing the right keyword can mean this difference between success or failure for your website.

For example, we almost called our website “interactive copywriter.” But a keyword search revealed that “interactive copywriter” was not anywhere near as popular a search string as “online copywriter.” Whew! Good thing we looked.

Keywords can be single terms or multi-word phrases (like “online copywriter”). Using a keyword tool gives you objective data about different words and phrases, an easy way to compare their popularity, helps you discover alternatives and gives you more surety about the words or phrase you choose.

We recommend the Google keyword tool for all online copywriting which involves the creation of keywords and phrases.

Why is Microsoft Word’s built-in dictionary so lame? Everybody has known this for years and remarks about it anecdotally. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you capitalize the word “Internet?” And when does a proper name become a common noun?

This is an issue of some importance to all online copywriters. It’s bothered us for some time that Internet remains a proper noun – after all, we don’t capitalize Cable or Water or Electricity. But, like the Internet, they are all piped to the house by a utility. Read the rest of this entry »

We all have our own nightmare stories of installation gone wrong. I’m not talking carpeting or kitchen cabinets. I’m talking about installing software.

David Pogue, the technology guru for the New York Times, talks about trying to install software for some new fancy 802n routers - article here. Bottom line: the UI is so confusing, opaque and legalistic that Mr. Pogue never gets the routers to run correctly. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

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.