Lose the Hero Shot

This is a great article by Gerry McGovern explaining how you will gain more trust and your visitors will put more faith in your website and your content if you remove any hero shots of smiling people.

Also avoid large buttons that look like banners or else fall prey to banner poisoning.

Your copy competes with the large images
Lots of times you see a large image across the top of the webpage and this just causes more work for your customers having to scroll down each time they visit a page to get at the actual content.

So, lose the hero shot and you have an effective and meaningful website that helps your clients get answers and take action.

Contact me for a comprehensive review of your website that includes Information Architecture, Online Content, Website Navigation, and Usability.

Crap In; Crap Out

Again Gerry McGovern points out that content management should be about professionally managing web content, not about the content management software:
What do you get when you personalize crap content? Personalized
crap content. What do you get when you distribute publishing
rights to people who can't write, don't care about what they
write, think metadata is a country bordering Outer Mongolia, and
will never, ever review or remove what they publish? You get the
website you deserve.
"I don't want to waste 30 minutes observing someone," Gerry quotes one engineer who participated in a workshop explaining the essential need to understand your customers by observing their behavior.

If this engineer were to waste 30 minutes observing his audience he would save 10 to 100 times that by not having to go back and fix what he should have done the first time.

Gerry McGovern

I've mentioned Gerry McGovern in a couple posts before, but just wanted to reiterate what great ideas he has for web design.

His philosophy is to focus on the client (not the organizational structure) when designing a website. And he's a big proponent of continuous web improvement, not a total site redesign every couple of years.

Sign up for his free weekly e-mail from his website, www.gerrymcgovern.com.

The Collective Mind

Gerry McGovern makes an interesting case in his post, Web facilitates wisdom of crowds.

He argues that the collective intelligence is perhaps more reliable than that of an expert.

An expert's advice could be skewed to the expert's own views and experiences, and therefore could be biased. Also, statistical research is only the analysis of the limited population surveyed. There is always a degree of error.

Mass collaboration, by definition will be free of any one person's particular biases. And all the skepticism of Wikipedia could be unwarranted. Most people want to take credit for putting in accurate information and not be blacklisted for putting up bad data.

And that's why The Borg was such a formidable enemy. :)

Second-world country

I wrote a post awhile ago about government interference with tariffs and red tape hindering growth.

Here's some more interesting facts that make you wonder what these people are thinking:

• In Lima, Peru, to legally establish a one-person garment workshop takes 289 days of bureaucratic toil, costing $1,231, 31 times the monthly minimum wage.
  
• In the Philippines, purchasing land can involve up to 168 steps, interacting with 53 public and private agencies, and take from 13 to 25 years.
  
• In Egypt, buying land can involve more than 77 procedures at 31 public and private agencies, and can take from 5 to 14 years.
  
• In Haiti, to buy land you need to jump over 111 bureaucratic hurdles, and
  wait for at least 12 years.
  

These governments are hindering growth and I'm sure their people and economy would be a lot better if some all of the red tape were cut.

"The more sophisticated a society and its economy becomes, the easier it is for its citizens to do what they need to do." - Gerry McGovern

(The above are just a few examples from Hernando De Soto's groundbreaking book,
The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.)