How the BBC has discouraged me from ever filling in a website feedback form again

I went to the BBC news website this afternoon, to be greeted by this chipper message:

“Wow!” I thought. “The BBC need me to help them keep their finger on the pulse! Of course I have 5 minutes for them. Although I do want to know what the Queen and Jordan (aka Katie Price, not the country) have in common.*” Exactly whose pulse the Beeb are trying to check wasn’t clear, but could it maybe perhaps maybe have anything to do with selling their soul to advertisers? In any case, I emphatically click ‘yes’.

What is the contry of my residence? I click on the UK.

Oh noes! Only international visitors can waste time filling in the survey. Game over. And yet, I still need to click the ‘finish’ button. Where might that take me?

…to another useless screen. My input has been greatly appreciated. Oh that’s nice. Of course it would’ve been nicer to have a link back to the news website which I was trying to visit in the first place, or even – gosh, this is crazytalk mind – to be told that I wasn’t eligible to fill in the survey four screens ago.

*Turns out they’re both considered extremely glamorous, but in very different ways.

Click here! Click here! Click here!

Everyone knows that you shouldn’t ever hyperlink the words ‘click here’, right? Well that’s all wrong, believes Brian Clark of Copyblogger. As he explains,

“I’ve always been a big proponent of having actionable anchor text for links when I really want someone to click. From a copywriting standpoint, it’s a no brainer—it’s been proven time and time again that if you want someone to do something, you’ll get better results if you tell them exactly what to do.”

But although that attitude implies that Brian thinks his readers are thick, in his opinion it’s actually the desire to hyperlink with anything other than ‘click here’ that demonstrates stupidity:

“Another reader once chastised me for wasting anchor text with the words “click here,” even though my primary goal for the link was to get people to click (shocking, I know). This is when I first realized that Google is truly making people retarded. Somehow, this person no longer saw links as navigation for actual people to use; they only exist to pass on “juice” according to an algorithm that no one fully understands.”

Brian quotes some statistics from an experiment on a marketing newsletter which tested different click words. It seems to back up his theory: linking the words ‘Click to continue’ improved the click-through rate by 8.53%, ‘Continue to article’ improved the rate by 3.3%, and ‘Read more’ decreased the rate by 1.8%.

However, there are three major flaws in his argument.

Firstly, the statistics quoted are meaningless are we have no idea how many people took part in the experiment, how many times it was conducted or what kind of control they used. And 87% of scientists agree that without this information your stats are useless.

Secondly, the purpose of links is not simply to lead people to somewhere else. Readers scan pages online, looking for keywords. Since links are almost invariably highlighted in a different colour and/or underlined, making key phrases and words links helps readers find what they need.

Thirdly, as Brian acknowledges, links make Googlejuice. And what, exactly, is so wrong with writing copy that benefits both readers and search engines? So what if your click-through rate to another page on your website is down by 1.8% because you don’t link with the phrase ‘click here’. Boo hoo. Your Google rank for that page will be higher, and your readers will find it much faster. I think that’s more than a fair trade-off.

In conclusion, the only time you should really have to link the word ‘click’ is if your design is so utterly confusing that you have a button that doesn’t look like it will link anywhere, and you need to actually tell people to use it. Copywriters don’t work in a vacuum. It’s not crazy to think that we should work with rather than against web designers and web developers to produce readable, effective websites.

If you’re going to write your own damn copy, at least do it right

Bad web writing hurts your readers’ eyes and your website’s credibility.

A website – nay, the entire internet – is nothing without good solid content. And even counting Youtube and iTunes, the vast majority of the content on the net is written. So why is the copy always at the end of the queue when it comes to building a website?

You can have the most beautifully designed website in the world, complete with the fanciest of applications and gizmos, but if it reads like it’s been written by a sugar-stuffed chimp then wave goodbye to your sales, search rankings and bottom line.

You want me to give you a juicy example, right? Try alteredstatesuk.com. The homepage copy is made up of 86 words. This includes two spelling mistakes, five punctuation errors and 10 faults concerning capital letters. And that’s not even counting some really nasty formatting and sentence formation.

At this point I should say that I’m not trying to kick down a small business out of sheer malicious pleasure. Neither am I touting for business. Yes, of course I could polish it up into sparkling, elegant copy, but that’s not the point. (I do, of course, believe that hiring a good web copywriter is the single most useful thing you can do when you need a website, but I’ll leave that particular topic for another day.)

Maybe you think you’re some webby hotshot and have built your own site. Maybe you’ve already spent all your website money on some fancypants designer. Maybe you’re just cheap. Whatever the reason, if you insist on writing your own damn copy, consider these five tips my gift to you. Together we can make the internet a less painful place.

5 tips for writing good web copy

1. Don’t write as you talk. A friendly, chatty tone is surprisingly difficult to get right. Get it wrong and you sound flippant and sarcastic. But don’t be getting all fancy either. Long words when short ones would do fine make you look arrogant, not clever.

2. Keep it short. Short words, short sentences, short paragraphs. Reading web pages is a lot slower than reading printed pages, so your website visitors will get impatient faster.

3. Give us what we want. This is a pretty big point, but it basically boils down to this: people come to your website for info, not waffle. Don’t write what you want to say, write what they want to read. Don’t know what that is? Well ask them, stupid!

4. Spelling, grammar, punctuation. These three guys are your new best buddies who will instantly make you look a whole lot smarter and more professional. If you’re not sure who they are, then maybe it’s time you were reacquainted.

5. Proofread. Print out what you’ve written, and give it to someone else to check. Don’t do it yourself, as your brain will ignore the mistakes it made the first time round. Don’t let your friend check your copy on a screen, as I guarantee they will miss something. Give them a big red pen so they feel all official too.

So there you have it. You too can be a copywriter. Of course, if you really write like a chimp or you just can’t be bothered, I am (ahem) available for hire…

Access all areas

Nothing makes me seethe with anger quite as much as reading something like this on a website:

“This site is best viewed using Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 6, or later versions”

If I’m visiting your website, I’m the customer. So why should I have to go out of my way simply to have the dubious pleasure of using your site? Why should I be forced to use a substandard and irritating browser just because you’re too lazy and/or incompetent to make an accessible website? (I use Firefox for most things, by the way – hardly the most radical and unusual of browsers).

Just as bad, if not worse, is how a surprising amount of sites don’t work properly for Mac users. They seem to work fine, but then as soon as I try to do something slightly more complicated – fill in a form, maybe – the site panics and has a breakdown.

Accessibility needs to become more than just a buzzword.

Why designers should get some god damn grammar (aka ‘when signs go bad #4′)

Some of my best friends are graphic designers. Of course, some of what they do is gross, and I wish they would do it in the privacy of their own homes. But I’m glad that we live in tolerant society where they can flaunt their ideas, even though what they do is by no means comparable to real work.

I’m not designaphobic, no siree. I even went to one of those awful ‘design gatherings’ once. Of course I left as soon as I realised where I was, in case I caught ‘design’ and got some unnatural cravings for crayons.

But however wonderfully open minded I am, there is one thing that I cannot accept.

Listen up, designers of the world – you might be the life and soul of the genepool, but this world is not yours, and you are living here thanks to non-designer generosity. So there are some things you must accept and adapt to in order to fit into our neat, grey world. And the first and most important of these is grammar.

Today’s lesson: its.

Its means ‘belonging to it‘. “My dog likes cats. Its favourites are lolcats.”

It’s means ‘it is‘. “Have you seen my cat? Oh, it’s in the dog.”

Now look at the picture below, taken on a street near my house in Newcastle, and notice the mistake. Seriously, I cannot believe that this estate agent board was designed, approved, printed and then plastered around the north of England and nobody noticed the glaring error.

I can (and do) blame the designer who created it, but of course everyone else down the line also has to take responsibility for allowing something so stupid to get through.

World’s politest graffiti

Found by the Ouseburn Valley in Newcastle.

In praise of good customer service and pretty websites

This is a follow-up to a previous post in which I rant about a horrible outdoorsy website.

No that company didn’t reply to my email, not that I thought they would. But the shop I went with in the end, Active8.com, were so lovely I thought I should tell the world. I bought a rucksack from them, (a Berghaus Jalan 65+15, in case you’re interested) and there were problems with the delivery company – the problem being that they didn’t deliver it.

I phoned up the shop I bought the bag from, who were really friendly and told me they would sort it and phone me back. Five minutes later the phone rings, they’ve sorted it. And it arrived the next day, with a complementary bar of highland toffee no less. (The company is based in Edinburgh)

Needless to say the website is pretty good looking too, which as you’ll know from my previous post is disproportionally important to me…)

When signs go bad #3

(Maybe not so much bad, as true)

Thanks to the delightfully-named Floater in the Memepool blog for the pic.

Zopa, zo good

God bless the internet. Matthew Stibbe of Bad Language blog noticed a patch of clumsy copy on the Zopa website, mentioned it on his blog, and within the hour the Zopa copywriter had read the blog and fixed the problem.

It’s so refreshing to see people take such a proactive approach to improving their websites! When I used to work at a web design company sometimes it would take weeks of constant nagging to get something simple fixed – and this to someone who sat mere metres away from me.

I know that the Zopa example is slightly different due to the very public nature of this particular error, but still – an hour is pretty good going.

Huzzah for user-feedback-web2.0-ness and all that gubbins!

CheatNeutral.com

“Do you cheat on your partner? Offset that guilt with cheatneutral.com!”

If you’re a bit of a Jack the Lad or Little Miss Naughty then good news – you can stop worrying about how you’re going to explain those hotel bills or that new STD to your other half.

Calmly tell your long-suffering partner that yes you’ve cheated, but it’s ok – you’ve paid a small amount to a website which will reinvest that money into virtuous people who will pledge to do no cheating, on your behalf. The amount of cheating in the world equalises, and everything is ok.

Cheatneutral is obviously a satire on carbon offsetting, and it does it very well. They’ve had coverage on BBC 24, countless radio and press features and even got a mention in Parliament. To see all that and to understand what it’s all about watch the video.

At this point I should mention that one of the guys behind the scheme – Alex – is a really good mate of mine, and I’m trying to support him as well as promote something which I genuinely think is very funny and thought-provoking. Also the film they did is in a competition which could win them £5k, and to be frank they deserve every penny. So if you like the video, register and vote for it!

Happy guilt-free cheating.