Writing for the Web Module 2 Notes

  • Structure
    • how someone is going to read content
    • F scan – chunk information so people can scan more easily
    • nice heading, subheadings, shorts paras, bullet points

 

  • Relevant + Useful
    • looks at competitors
    • more research into what users want to get out of content
    • give practical advice
    • look at analytics – if people are linking to your site
    • social media if people are talking about content

 

  • Accurate + Credible
    • trusted content
    • have the expertise to be writing about that content
    • check with an expert if correct
    • research
    • David Ogilvy
    • review
    • reliable + believable

 

  • Current + Consistent
    • take things away that are out of date
    • think about when things will expire
    • is it still relevant?
    • consistent tone of voice
    • abbreviations and acronyms etc = consistent

 

  • Findable
    • how do people find your website?
      • search
      • links to your website
      • within website: navigation, internal links, website’s internal search

 

  • Scannable
    • F shaped pattern
    • chunks of content, headings, subheadings
    • summaries at the beginning
    • white space can make website more attractive to the eye = breathing room between content

 

  • Simple
    • plain english
    • short sentences + paragraphs
    • lists
    • graphics, tables, pictures
    • personal: I, us, we, you
    • match user’s knowledge, eg writing for a teen website
    • direct
    • verbs not nouns, eg ‘consider’ not ‘consideration’
    • inform don’t impress
    • examples + analogies

 

  • Interesting
    • personality
    • topical
    • present it in an interesting way, eg info graphics
    • don’t oversell, push user, have fluffy introductions or use jargon

 

  • Voice
    • personality
    • tense: present active
    • consistent across all channels

 

  • Writing Style
    • inverted pyramid
    • read content out loud to yourself – could you leave the page after one paragraph satisfied you have all the info?

Writing for the Web Module 1 Notes

  • Good quality content
    • clear headings
    • exact statements
    • nice images
    • summaries (could stop here is we wanted/needed to)
    • chunks of information
    • links
    • calls to action
    • visuals representations of products

 

  • Elements of a good website
    • user + business needs
    • information architecture (IA)
    • interactive design
    • visual design
    • brand
    • content
    • users essential
    • navigation/tree structure
      • labels + secondary navigation
    • wireframe
    • aesthetic appeal + personality
    • content is king

 

  • Web v Print Content
    • how do people read online/print?
    • printed = physical document, read front to back, don’t rely on power source, less fatigued eyes
    • online = computer, tablet, mobile, laptop, rely on power, back light results in eye fatigue
    • Jakob Nielsen 1997: how users read the web = they don’t, they scan in F shape pattern
    • snack vs feasting

 

  • Who are your users?
    • demographics
    • personas

 

  • Understanding users
    • talking to users
    • website analytics
    • surveys

 

  • Context of use
    • where are they accessing, when and with what device?
    • eg, at lunch people might have more time to read news content compared to a 10 – 15 minute commute
    • what pieces and pages of content are people looking at at certain time?
    • if we know what devices people are accessing we can change the content that we deliver on those devices
    • all different screen sizes, etc

 

  • Understanding the business objectives
    • stakeholders
      • marketing
      • financial
      • customer service
      • subject matter experts
      • anyone with vested interest in website
    • sometimes a mobile optimized site is going to meet the user’s needs more than an app

 

  • Purpose of content
    • persuade
    • inform
    • educate
    • entertain
    • change behaviour
    • enforce compliance, esp govt websites

 

  • Accessible content
    • disabilities:
      • vision impairment
      • hearing impairment
      • motor impairment
      • dyslexia
      • colour blindness
    • don’t use content as images
    • captions on audio + video
    • transcripts
    • Microsoft Word accessibility checker
    • product descriptions

 

  • SEO
    • page title – in the browser/tab bar
    • page heading
    • keywords
    • links
    • natural language
    • topical content
    • unique content
    • URL
    • the last thing we want is to optimise for search engines but not optimise for our users

Open2Study Online Advertising Module 1 notes

  • Evolution of the web:
  • the web simplified what was complicated into a standard protocol
  • 1993 – Tim Berners-Lee – made access of info available to everyone
  • mobile now primary access –> what does this mean then for online advertising?
  • Hyper Text Markup Language
  • Commercialisation of the internet
  • advertisers sought to monetise consumers
  • WIRED magazine – how technology was affecting culture – first web ad for AT&T “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? You will.”
  • portals, eg netscape
  • opportunities for commercialisation of search
  • online ad banners generate high volumes of interest displayed by high percentages of user click-through rates
  • Digital industry players
  • marketers have more choice than ever in terms of where they can advertise and run their marketing messages
  • digital has exponentially increased choices
  • advertisers have to sift through and ask: where is the best place to spend my money?
  • buyers: agencies primary buyers
  • issue that there is no standard structure for the way advertising is bought and sold
  • sellers:
  • pure play = a media company that has no legacy property (eg TV network, newspaper), it is online only, eg Amazon, Yahoo
  • traditional = eg, print publishers having websites
  • creatives: more interested in allure of TV than small postage-sized ads online
  • technology companies – SEO etc
  • New players and traditional outlets repurposing themselves
  • How digital complements print media
  • magazines with apps with additional content in editorial and advertising – can bring print to life – online enhances print
  • not competing medias but complementing
  • channel isn’t as important as the content
  • not tied to physical product anymore
  • How digital complements broadcast media
  • TV expensive, so video online may be more feasible
  • TiVo etc, fast forwarding ads is a major challenge to industry
  • tablet use in front of TVs offers opportunities for networks to connect with these audiences
  • TV show shareability over social channels
  • ads with Shazam embedded at the bottom for us to use over phones while watching TV
  • Online audience measurement
  • every medium has an agreed standard audience currency, eg TV ratings and viewershio, radio listenership, print readership and circulation
  • difficult for online to settle on a particular standard currency
  • Australia one of the first countries to establish the standard
  • Nielsen had a couple of different methodologies:
  • site centric = based around code to measure activity counting browsers as people – challenges because often more than one person uses a computer, and people often use more than one device
  • based on panel = track activity of panel members – challenge as may under represent
  • every measuring metric has inherent flaws, the importance is that the industry agrees on a methodology
  • Nielsen combined both to create UA – Unique Audience
  • Still not all websites use this system when reporting audience members to agencies/advertisers, may use Google Analytics
  • Digital jargon
  • hits = one of the first measurement metrics on the web
  • outdated and irrelevant
  • it doesn’t mean visitors but the load on the webpage, ie each element that needs to load (this means nothing to advertisers)
  • be confident enough to ask what someone means by hits, eg visitors, pageviews, etc
  • SEO = Search Engine Optimisation
  • updating content, unique content, appropriate keywords, external links
  • things that make search engines things this is a valuable, content-rich site
  • cookies = piece of code that a website uses to determine browsers
  • they are identifiers
  • when sites remember usernames that is because the cookies recognise you

 

 

Sofia Coppola

Since watching The Virgin Suicides in high school I’ve been a total sucker for Sofia Coppola movies – she’s one of those would-follow-to-the-ends-of-the-earth, can-do-no-wrong people for me. I’ve had a mini-marathon today under the breeze of the air con as Valencia is a stifling 35 degrees even at 9pm.

Some of my favourite things:

Music – where on earth does she uncover these perfect matches? (Sidenote: just found an interview with her music supervisor Brian Reitzell here)

This single shot:

… that theme of wanting to get in without ever actually getting in (figuratively speaking) is translated to the visual style of the movie as well. Blauvelt and Savides never really pull the camera close to the actors, and even in the occasional close-up, the framing looks very stylized. … We, as an audience, are constantly gazing at the action from a non-participatory position, in a sense becoming voyeurs of the voyeurs (the kids). We gaze at them with a slow, deliberate stare, as they gaze slow and deliberately at the lifestyle of the celebrities. It’s a nice droste-effect that elevates the movie and turns it into a sort of mirror for the audience. … [In this long shot, the] camera remains outside at a distance, completely stationary, save for a slow zoom-in. The shot lasts close to 2 minutes and is almost completely silent.

Light:

How Ira Works

I really enjoyed by Radio courses during my degree, and as a radio student I hold This American Life on an incredibly tall pedestal. I really enjoyed a recent interview with Ira Glass on LifeHacker, particularly his general practice and advice to aspiring journalists/writers:

“I learned my technique from a great print editor named Paul Tough, who was at the New York Times Magazine and Harper’s, and worked with our show a lot in the early years. It’s so basic I worry it doesn’t bear going into here, but just in case it’s handy to another writer or editor, here we go:

When I come out of an interview, I jot down the things I remember as being my favorite moments. For an hour-long interview usually it’s just four or five moments, but if out I’m reporting all day, I’ll spend over an hour at night typing out every favorite thing that happened. This is handier than you might think. Often this short list of favorite things will provide the backbone to the structure to my story.

Then I transcribe the tape or have it transcribed by someone. Getting every word right isn’t as important as having something on paper for each sentence that’s been said, because to make radio stories, you edit by the sentence. For some reason in the radio biz we don’t call these transcripts, we call them tape logs.

Then I print out the log and mark it up. Every possible quote I might use, I write a letter next to, A, B, C, etc. As I do this, on a single piece of paper, I make a list for myself of the quotes. So when I’m done, there’s not just the tape log, there’s a piece of paper with tiny handwriting on it, listing the quotes “A – he describes the old house, B – what it was like the moment he came home, C – his sister warned him,” etc. Any quote that’s especially promising gets an asterisk. Any quote I’m sure I cannot tell the story without gets two asterisks.

I'm Ira Glass, Host of This American Life, and This Is How I Work

The point of this is that it gets all this inchoate material—the sound you’ve gathered—into a form where you can see it all on one page. You see all your options. It’s in a form where your brain can start to organize it. Also, writing the list sort of inserts all the quotes into quick-access RAM memory in your head in a helpful way. I find that the important first step to writing anything or editing anything (half of my day each day is editing) is just getting the possible building blocks of the story into your head so you can start thinking about how to manipulate it and cut it and move it.

Listing the quotes this way is also important because a radio story, unlike other kinds of writing and even other kinds of journalism, is usually structured around the quotes. You organize the beats of your plot around the most compelling moments you have on tape. (Though I learned this from a print journalist so I guess it’s applicable there too.)

Next I stare at my one-page list and think about what would be a fun or compelling beginning. (Okay, I’ve been thinking about that since I decided to do the story but now it’s down to brass tacks: what actually works on tape and what are the many things that I tried that failed?) Usually there are two or three decent options for the beginning of the story and one or two obvious possibilities for how to end it. Then I think about what really are my very favorite moments and what doesn’t need to be in the story. And then I sketch a structure based on my letter code: okay, F is the opening beat, then do C and D and then jump to M and N and end on G. And then I write. Usually my list will include a few extra beats that I’m not sure if pacing will permit. When I get to that spot in the writing, I’ll know whether to include them or cut them.

This technique lets you go from many hours of interview tape to a concise, workable structure very quickly. It’s hard to imagine how you could do it more efficiently.2

I'm Ira Glass, Host of This American Life, and This Is How I Work

I’d just say to aspiring journalists or writers—who I meet a lot of—do it now. Don’t wait for permission to make something that’s interesting or amusing to you. Just do it now. Don’t wait. Find a story idea, start making it, give yourself a deadline, show it to people who’ll give you notes to make it better. Don’t wait till you’re older, or in some better job than you have now. Don’t wait for anything. Don’t wait till some magical story idea drops into your lap. That’s not where ideas come from. Go looking for an idea and it’ll show up. Begin now. Be a fucking soldier about it and be tough.”

Possibilities rather than realities

Anyone with any experience of mental illness knows it’s not the romantic well of creativity that literature and pop culture can make it out to be, but I would like to think through creativity and success in regards to depression.

What makes pop culture represent depression in such an idealised/idolised and romantic manner anyway? I know in high school I used to say I wanted to die before I got old – to go out with potential before I inevitably disappointed everyone. But romanticized? Is it because Ernest Hemingway shot himself and Virginia Woolf drowned herself? Are those really the standards of literary creative genius? To me, there is nothing #pale about suicide no matter how many soft grunge Tumblr posts you look at.

If depression affects so many diverse groups of people, why are creative types singled out? What’s the link between the two?

While the possible solutions are many (the mind is a very complicated subject, after all), countless psychologists and psychiatrists tend to agree that major depression is amplified in those who tend to ruminate on their thoughts.

… Creatives naturally tend to think more, and think about their very thoughts too. … Creative thinkers tend to [replay] events over and over again to better understand them.

In this sense, it’s not the romantic notion of depression that leads to creativity, but that those more inclined to intensely think and re-think (and therefore tend to be creative types) are more likely to experience depression more intensely.

Another theory for the link so widely discussed between depression and creativity is that while creative types experience depression, they also experience higher rises due to motivation after “coming out of” the depression. I have trouble accepting this simply for the relative ease given to “coming out of” depression, it does help to displace the false idea that depression fuels creativity. Perhaps it is a more plausible explanation for creativity in bipolar disorder:

Professor Kay Redfield Jamison, who wrote the landmark Scientific American article, is an international authority on the subject, both as a psychiatrist and as a person with bipolar.  She observes that manic-depressives in their high or manic state think faster and associate more freely. When manic, people need less sleep, have unusual energy and focus and an inflated self-belief, all of which may allow the production of original work.

On the other hand, the creative professions themselves can tend to be a perfect combination of factors that may contribute to depression:

Here, again, I’m speaking mostly about writers. Our work tends to be done alone. We spend long hours in front of a computer screen trying to make our words make sense. We edit relentlessly. We socialize, yes, but infrequently and on a different frequency than most. Our creativity sets us apart, and it often makes it difficult to connect with people who don’t share that background and outlook.

We don’t tend to sleep as well. We have less consistent hours. We often go sleep deprived or collapse for long nights after going without for too long. We feel driven by ideas that won’t let us sleep. We are often night owls.

But consistent sleep and waking early help improve stability and happiness.The number one predictor of happiness is the number and strength of one’s social connections.And this doesn’t even touch on being sedentary, having the high stress of deadlines, how constantly we face rejection. The traditional lifestyle of the writer is in many ways the perfect storm of depression risk factors.

Correlation, of course, does not equal causation.

We know depression and creativity co-exist, but … well … it’s like this: If you have severe depression, you have to get pretty damn creative to survive it.

Sometimes the black hole of depression can be so life-engulfing it’s impossible to see through to when it will be light again. And, while it’s cliched and embarrassing, for those times here is a list of people who have made something of themselves despite/in spite of the struggle:

Buzz Aldrin

Sheryl Crow

Ellen Degeneres

Owen Wilson

Abraham Lincoln

Charles Darwin

 

Picked up the wrong book

I just found this article from The New Yorker about comprehension with online reading and training to read deeply on the internet. An interesting market: digital apps to train students in the tools of deep reading.

We read more quickly when lines are longer, but only to a point. When lines are too long, it becomes taxing to move your eyes from the end of one to the start of the next. We read more efficiently when text is arranged in a single column rather than multiple columns or sections. The font, color, and size of text can all act in tandem to make our reading experience easier or more difficult. And while these variables surely exist on paper just as they do on-screen, the range of formats and layouts online is far greater than it is in print. Online, you can find yourself transitioning to entirely new layouts from moment to moment, and, each time you do so, your eyes and your reading approach need to adjust. Each adjustment, in turn, takes mental and physical energy.

Julie Coiro, who studies digital reading comprehension in elementary- and middle-school students at the University of Rhode Island, has found that good reading in print doesn’t necessarily translate to good reading on-screen. The students do not only differ in their abilities and preferences; they also need different sorts of training to excel at each medium. The online world, she argues, may require students to exercise much greater self-control than a physical book. “In reading on paper, you may have to monitor yourself once, to actually pick up the book,” she says. “On the Internet, that monitoring and self-regulation cycle happens again and again. And if you’re the kind of person who’s naturally good at self-monitoring, you don’t have a problem. But if you’re a reader who hasn’t been trained to pay attention, each time you click a link, you’re constructing your own text. And when you’re asked comprehension questions, it’s like you picked up the wrong book.”