You’re all nerds and geeks! (otherwise known as ‘how to insult your clients and customers in a press release’)

We got an interesting press release from the University of the West of England (UWE) last week. (Emphasis added by me)

Subject line: Employers flock to support UWE’s geeks

First paragraph: Regional technology firms are queuing up to offer support to students on the University of the West of England’s BSc Computer Systems Integration course. The course which by admission of Directors, Dr Rob Williams and Craig Duffy, is suited to ‘techno nerds’, is a popular springboard into lucrative and fulfilling work in the technology and computing industries.

Firstly, geek. I know a lot of web designers and developers who have reclaimed ‘geek’, taking it away from the ‘generic insults for kid with glasses’ context and moved it into the ‘I work with computers, and therefore I’m cleverer and better paid than you’ context. But it only really works in a strictly wry, self-referential way; don’t you have to be a geek to be able to call geek?

As for techno nerd – well, since there have been no attempts to rescue ‘nerd’ from its derogatory connotations of obsessive friendless losers, that just seems plain rude to me. And it’s all a bit too 80s. Seriously, who says ‘techno’? ‘Computer nerd’ ‘IT nerd’ ‘Web nerd’ or even ‘Technology nerd’ would have been more appropriate, surely. It’s not that the course directors have to be cool with the kids’ new street slang, daddio, it’s just that I’d expect them to be aware of how their industry is currently described.

The PR team that wrote this press release have insulted the students, they’ve insulted the companies that want to work with those students (as presumably they’re full of geeks and techno nerds too), and they’ve insulted the course, by stereotyping it as the kind of course that only losers would do.

What a bunch of dweebs.

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.