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.

The Basics

1. A page for each merchant
2. A picture for each merchant
3. Descriptive text for each merchant (more than just a phone number and an outside link)

It is surprising how few big developments have reached this level of information. See our collection of links for malls and mixed-use developments on Delicious (and please feel free to add links to other sites in the category).

The Finer Points

1. Interactive Map
2. Continuing Content Stream
3. Ad Platform

(1) The interactive map is a challenging bit of engineering and UI. We’ll write more about it soon. (2) In most cases, developing a rich content stream requires cultural change for clients. Training and continued support are mandatory to advance evolutionary adoption of web 2.0 tools like blogs and twitter. (3) Big developments like North Hills have the potential to draw big traffic. Why settle for pennies on the dollar when you could have it all with your own ad platform? Tune in again for a discussion about implementing your own ad server.

Best Practices

To boost the performance of a site in this category as measured by key stats like Time On Site and Page Views, here are a few best practices we can recommend:

1. Minimize outside links
2. Run outside content in an iframe within your site
3. Drive traffic to niches with CPC advertising
4. Pay attention to what Analytics tells you about your audience

The Last, Most Important Point

Like all other advertising and marketing ventures, success is rooted in a good agency-client relationship. We are deeply grateful to Kane Realty Corporation for their vision and their patience throughout this project.

Special thanks to:

• Anna Smith
• Mike Smith
• Bonner Gaylord
• Jon Masterson
• Katherine Knott
• Angela Slater
• Paul Newcomer
• Walt Stewart
• North Hills Security

For Goodtree & Company:

• George Gumpert, master programmer
• David Holt, design
• John Dixon, flash
• Leslie Huffman, merchant database and blogging diva
• Hal Goodtree, precious little

Thanks also to Allen Weiss, Michael Kimsal, Lindsey Chester, Paul Harnett, Dorothea Bitler, Jill Harris, Fiquet, Kevin and Stacey Jennings, Wick Morgan and Jason Peck. And thanks to Jake St. Peter and Mike McTaggart for their generous time.

Please contact us for more information about mall, shopping center and mixed-use development websites.

Sure, the blogosphere gets bigger every year. The pool of experts continues to expand (you know you’re one if you read ProBlogger). But even more key, the pool of non-experts is really taking off.

Two things are widening the audience for blogs:

1. Better options for integrating blogs into web pages and social sites
2. “Subscribe by email”

Better Options

Back in the day (last year), you could re-publish your blog as html, allowing you to place it on a web page. Now, you can click a box and syndicate your stuff so it automatically appears on Facebook and Twitter.

Over at WidgetBox, you can build a shiny widget with a few clicks that others can easily use to re-publish your content. About a third of our traffic is coming from off-site syndication.

Bottom line: more people have more places to see your stuff and it doesn’t look like a “blog.”

Subscribe by Email

Feedburner and others give publishers an option to include a “subscribe by email” link. It’s easy to enable - just a few clicks and embed a piece of code.

Feedburner’s email service (free) provides a really clean, professional, business-grade product to the inbox of subscribers. People who “don’t read blogs” are signing up in droves.

Check it out for yourself: Subscribe to our blog by email :)

Call it Anything Else

Call it a Journal or a Notebook or News. Take inspiration from The Sartorialist, Make the Logo Bigger and Slashdot.

Why do we call ours a blog? Cause it’s for experts ;)

After all, mixed-use development is a marketing phrase. It’s used to sell big projects to government officials, private buyers and the public at large. But, like many of the phrases coined by developers, this one rests a little uneasy on the ear.

Mixed-use community is better, more about people and less about cement, but it’s too academic. It tries too hard.

How about urban village? The best mixed-use developments turn into real civic places on their own merit. They exhibit the density we normally associate with urban environments but embody it on a smaller scale. Hence, urban village.

Builders and planners everywhere are invited to use urban village. But, please, don’t add the word development after it.

Here are the Top 4 Rules for writing blog headlines:

1. Be clear (not cute or obscure)

Generally, we’re talking about a noun, in this case “headlines.” An example of a far weaker headline would be “Top 4 Ingredients in My Secret Sauce.”

2. Use a question

Every headline can’t employ every rhetorical device, but a viable option in this case might have been “Want to Write Better Headlines?”

3. Numbers create interest

Tried and true attention-getter. Works in email subject lines, direct mail and good old television advertising, as in “99 44/100% Pure” for Ivory Soap.

4. Keep it brief - 50 characters or less including spaces

Work your headline down to it’s shortest possible length. For some great headline writing, check out the New York Daily News or this from todays New York Post:

Pray Ball

Yanks Honor VA Tech Victims

There are two main rules:

1. Don’t use all caps (FREE)
2. Don’t use multiple exclamation points (FREE!!!)

Anecdotal evidence suggests that exclamation points in general trigger some filters. As well, using “Free” as the first word in the subject line may also be vulnerable.

Thanks to Nick Usborne and others for sharing their wisdom.

See also: Great email subject line!

Copyright inherently belongs to the author of a work in any medium. You assert your copyright by including the text:

©2007 [your name]. All rights reserved.

Licensing is what other people do to use your copyrighted content. They pay you a fee for the right to use the content under specific circumstances (in N. America, on the web, etc).

You can also investigate a “Creative Commons License” which offers some helpful Web 2.0 tools.

Work for Hire

If you have been hired to create content for someone else, the content belongs to them unless some limitation on teh rights have been negotiated in advance.

Google and other purveyors of search are notoriously secretive about how they crawl the web. But the basic parameters are well known.

1. When you first post your website, you can expect the search engines to find and index you within 4-6 weeks.
2. At the time of your initial indexing, the search engine tells itself to crawl your site again, say in another six weeks.
3. If nothing has changed, the ‘bot may instruct itself not to revisit your site for a greater period of time, say 12 weeks.

Static (unchanging) websites invite a self-fulfilling decline in search ranking.

If nothing’s changed in 12 weeks, when will the ‘bots return? 20 weeks? 24?

We offer no examples here, but one needn’t look far.

Dynamic websites (call them evolutionary or organic if you like) change and grow over time. In the B2B space, look at OR-Live, a web portal for physicians. In the B2C market, look at Gayout, an international travel & leisure site by Andre Gayout (he coined the term “nouvelle cuisine” back in the early 1970’s).

Thanks again to our friend Gary for hipping us to one more reason why all small-to-medium enterprises need to have a dynamic, Web 2.0 site.

As usual, Gino offers sound advice, summarized here:

1. Start with a strong headline.
2. Write about what you know. If it’s a gig for a corporate blog, educate yourself.
3. Keep in mind the interests of your audience and how they might find you with a Google search.
4. Include calls to actions too – think “nothing asked, nothing done.”
5. Good copywriting style means writing for “lower-literacy users.” [Hilarious, but true. We always say “Write how regular people talk.”]
6. Write in an “inverted pyramid style” with your most important content in the first one or two paragraphs.
7. Split long posts into shorter chunks. Use bullets, numbering and breakouts whenever it’s apppropriate..
8. Use strong page titles.
9. Put your main points at the beginning of sentences. This helps with scanning and saves time. [We also advocate the use of subheads to aid scanning. Face it - that’s how people read stuff on the web]
10. Use Links

Read the complete article here.

1. Why a Privacy Policy is important

Here are three reasons why a privacy policy on your website is important:

a. INCREASED REVENUE POTENTIAL - Some people won’t give you any personal information or buy products and services from you if you do not have a stated privacy policy on your website.

b. BENEFITS THE COMMON WEAL - The organizations that adopt a privacy policy, the more the cyber-anarchists are marginalized. A privacy policy is real - if you have one on your website, you can’t tell a judge “you didn’t know.”

c. IT’S THE RIGHT THING TO DO - Nobody likes spam, snooping, phishing or trafficking in personal information.

2. How to write a Privacy Policy

We only have one piece of advice about writing a privacy policy:

Write in plain English

This will not make the lawyers happy, but a privacy policy is meaningless if it’s written in legalese. The concept of a privacy policy is to protect the rights of the viewer. Stuff in legalese seems to protect the rights of the website owners. It kind of defeats the purpose.

State your principles in broad terms. Keep it short. If the attorneys are really crawling up your kilt, include a link to a downloadable pdf that lists the “full privacy policy.”

3. Privacy Policy Generator and other resources

If you search for “privacy policy,” you’ll see a lot of links to companies that sell cyber-encryption programs and secure email software, etc. The best site that we found which addressed the needs of online copywriters in crafting privacy policies was at the Direct Marketing Association.

The DMA’s free online Privacy Policy Generator lets you enter some data and check off a few boxes to create an html web page for you to view or email to yourself. You can edit the text and post it on your website.

For more info on privacy issues, follow these links:

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003

Wikipedia: Privacy policy

BBB online Sample Privacy Notice

We got to thinking about this because, once again, Florida is in the news for bungling an election. This time, 10,000 votes weren’t counted in an election decided by a margin of 369. The reason? The ballot was confusing and apparently a high margin of voters skipped the contest in question.

Good grief.

Online copywriters and designers are well-versed in the tradecraft of creaing registration paths, sign-ups, polls, eCommerce and all manner of interactive content. Not too hard to imagine that any competant design shop could create, test and polish a friction-free ballot with very low user drop-off. Naturally, the language would be beaten into shape by a qualified online copywriter (don’t you designers even think of horning in on our patch).

Other issues most certainly surround electronic voting - security, paper printouts - even a national standard is uncertain.

Yes, our taxpayer dollars, hard at work.

But it’s 2007. We have the technology to address all of the above concerns.

So, dear election officials: outsource it. Hire Hewlett Packard, NCR and Online Copywriter (or anybody else you like as long as they are not related or a love interest). Hire Google or Paypal or eBay or Amazon. Hire Online Copywriter (did we mention that already?).

Creating an effective national electronic ballot is well-within our scope of knowledge as a nation and long overdue.

The consensus seems to be that verbs are okay in many instances as link text, even advisable in some circumstances. We officially volunteer to help update the W3C specs on the language of links.

However, our endorsement of verbs has some limitations. For example, we noticed this week that gerunds don’t seem advisable. What’s a gerund? Here’s what dictionary.com had to say:

The English -ing form of a verb when functioning as a noun, as writing in Writing is easy.

This presents some challenges for the online copywriter. We find ourselves often re-working sentences to avoid the gerund form. For example:

You can find out more by contacting us.

Not so good. This is better:

Contact us to find out more.

To sum it up about using verbs for link text:

• Verbs are fine as link text
• Avoid the gerund (-ing) form.

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.

For example, in our last post (Capitalizing Internet), the MSW dictionary didn’t recognize the following as legit words in the English language:

• Google
• Permissivist

How about this one?

• Blogged

Sure, we can all customize our own dictionaries, but that’s really just an invitation to chaos.

To be fair, dictionaries embedded in word processing programs have always been weak. But just because it’s been a chronic problem for two decades doesn’t mean we have to endure it forever.

In our Web 2.0 world, why can’t MSW’s dictionary link to a reputable online source? User-generated dictionaries could still be an adjunct to the main, authoritative source.

As personal publishing explodes, online writers everywhere need the proper tools to create credible content. The alternative is an increasing babelization of the English language.

We suggest the good folks in Redmond do all writers everywhere a big favor and fix their dictionary once and for all by hooking up with the Oxford English Dictionary or another recognized authority.

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.

Internet is not associated with the name of a person (like pasteurization or Darwinism) or a trademarked brand name (like Kodak and Kleenex). It’s not even a singular entity – I get mine from Earthlink. Maybe you get yours from Time Warner.

Furthermore, Internet has become the commonest of common words, reflecting its importance in contemporary society. Its rising usage parallels the decline of words including hi-fi, pager and fax.

All the major reference sources show Internet with a capital “I.” These include:

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1)
American Heritage Dictionary
Merriam-Webster

Microsoft Word always underlines in green our attempts to use internet instead of Internet. Interestingly, many dictionaries allow Google in lower case, as in “I googled it.”

So what’s up with the Internet? Maybe it’s the word “the” that sometimes precedes it. Makes the Internet feel all special and important. But even that’s fading away. We could correctly say (or write):

Kids today have always had the Internet.

Or:

Kids today have always had internet.

Here at Online-Copywriter, we think the Internet should get off its high horse and admit its commonness. Call it the price of popularity. The sainted William Safire would probably call us permissivists.

Other online copywriters are invited to weigh-in with their own heavy thinking about Internet.

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.

Mr. Pogue goes on to do an amusing “installation audit,” detailing where the installation process runs off the tracks (just about everywhere it turns out).

The real problem here is that manufacturers spend untold millions developing high-tech products and bringing them to market, but then let Bob the engineer write the installation process.

Online copywriters, designers and UI architects are skilled at lowering friction and raising the conversion rate in interactive processes. These are precisely the skills that are needed for successful installation design.

Or you could let Bob the engineer do it. I’m sure Mr. Pogue has more columns coming up.

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.

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.

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.

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.