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It’s easy to overlook the simple fact that as a web writer, you’re also a web reader. Consider for a moment some of the last sites you visited. What format did they use to get their message across?

Were they all text only? Or did they include news feeds, videos, podcasts, photo essays, or even 140 character tweets?

As a reader, which do you find easier to use? As a writer, how many of these methods are you using to make life easy for your reader to get at your content?

Gerry McGovern recently hosted an excellent webinar looking at the work of the Microsoft Office Online team, The Need to Weed: Microsoft Office Online. A video of the webinar and the PowerPoint slides are available to download.

Microsoft realised that measuring satisfaction alone was not giving a complete picture of how well their website was performing. They started to measure the dissatisfaction of customers using their site, instigating radical changes in how they managed their site. (more…)

Visitor counts and page views do not provide useful information when analysing visitors to your site when not used alongside other details. Statistical reporting needs to involve analysis, not copy & paste.

It’s not that page view counts are not useful. But using only the page views to judge your site performance is a mistake.
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Wearing their underwear on the outside gives superheroes special powers. Everybody knows this to be true. Just as Superman keeps Metropolis safe and Batman watches over Gotham City, Metadata is busy fighting crime and saving the Internet.

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Every web page should incite an action from your reader. A strong call to action makes broswing simple and keeps objectives in focus. For each page you create, ask yourself:

• What is the purpose of the page?
• What do I want the reader to do next?
• How can I measure the success?

If you can’t answer these questions then you can’t measure the quality or success of your page. The objective of the page should be the first specification you define. After all, if the page doesn’t have a purpose, why are you planning a page at all?

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