Le parole dei guru (dovere di cronaca).
Nella settimana che si chiude, ben due guru si occupano del ruolo delle parole nel web, senza aggiungere molto di nuovo a dire il vero.
Gerry McGovern nella sua newsletter appena arrivata:
"One word can make a big difference. I have seen links where one word was changed, resulting in three-times more people clicking on them. Every word that you use should be carefully thought about. Every single word. From your classifications to your headings and summaries.
Most websites still don't treat their content seriously. They often give the role of "putting up" content to junior staff. If they do hire content professionals, they rarely give them the appropriate support and authority. These professionals often end up in needless and counterproductive conversations with egoistic authors.
It's time to put content professionals (editors) in charge of running websites. The dictatorship of the author leads to vanity publishing and filler content. The organizations that succeed on the Web will be those who recognize that quality writing and editing are specialist skills."
Jakob Nielsen, nella sua ultima Alertbox Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First:
"Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don't use things they don't understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users. The same goes for photos: On countless sites, product images are too small, fuzzy, or murky, or they're simply shot from a bad angle, making the product hard to see. These same sites lavish pixels on big glamour illustrations that our eyetracking studies show attract no fixations. Go figure.
Generally, all you need are plainspoken words and clean photos. Nonetheless, these two design elements get almost no coverage in the trade press. Every month, there seems to be a new article in a leading publication about 3D spinning views, even though 3D is nearly useless in most cases. But you never see an article about how to write better headlines or take a clearer product photo."