Creating And Distributing Presentations On The Web - Smashing Magazine. Copywriting 101: An Introduction to Effective Copy. Headings. 1. In the FCC study of rules for radios on pleasure boats, people were able to find information much faster in the version that had questions as headings than in the version that had nouns or noun phrases as headings. That says that questions are easier for people than just nouns. It doesn't say that questions are always the best heading. 2. In a study that Veda Charrow and I did of headings in warranties, we compared two versions of several warranties. Who is covered? People read one or the other version of each warranty and then answered 12 questions using the warranty.
That study says that even in a very short document like a half-page warranty, people find headings useful. 3. 4. Verb phrases like Filling out the Application sentences like You Must Get a Permit to Operate a Center and even phrases that have pronouns and verbs What You Must Do First All of these help users connect to the text and cue the user better than nouns do. 5. 6. Do I need a permit? Do I need a permit? 5 Ways to Show Off Your Content. By anthony on 07/16/10 at 9:08 am Organization is a beautiful thing, especially when you make it work to your advantage. There are a lot of websites out there that offer great content.
The only problem is that most are not organized in a way that shows off their great content. Most sites organize their page content by how their content is categorized. However, if you want users to get the most out of your content you have to organize it in a way that goes beyond that. People want the best of what you have to offer, but they won’t be able to find that if you don’t make it easy for them. Here are a few ways you can show off your content to make it more attractive and enticing: 1) Show off what’s MOST RECENT and NEW – People’s interest in what’s new will never get old. 2) Show off what’s HOT and POPULAR – People like what other people like. 3) Show what’s FREE! 4) Show any SPECIAL or LIMITED TIME OFFERS you have – People like discounts and deals. The 5 Es of content usability | 4 Syllables. I’ve long been a fan of Whitney Quesenbery’s 5 Es of usability: effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant and easy to learn. They’re a great way to explain what usability is — to make ‘easy to use’ or ‘user friendly’ more meaningful to clients, designers, developers.
I think the 5 Es can also be helpful for understanding content usability. And given the state of content on many websites, we can do with a little more understanding! So here’s my version of the 5 Es applied to content. Effective Effective content is: Relevant. Efficient Efficient content is: Fast to find via navigation or search.Easy to read. Engaging Engaging content is: Presented well on screen. Error tolerant Error tolerant content is: Clear and unambiguous. Easy to learn Easy to learn content is: Written using familiar terms. Duplicate Content: Block, Redirect or Canonical. Duplicate content in SEO has been around for quite some time and even if Google has been saying they have been getting smarter and smarter in figuring out the best page to display in the SERPS from a list of duplicate content pages. They claim that it is something less to worry about today, than before. But knowing this issue exist, they give advice from various places, also in support threads, employee blogs, webmaster help videos, and many other places on how we should fix this issue.
Some say simply block your duplicate content pages, some say redirect them. Maybe there is no 1 rule that best fits all situations, so I decided to enumerate the various ways to fix duplicate content issues, the differences so you can draw you own advantages and disadvantages to help you judge which method is the best to use for your specific situation. So let's go ahead and review each one. Blocking in Robots.txt This would work in eliminating duplicate content. Using the Meta Robots: NoIndex/Follow tag. Writing useful page titles. In Title Junk, John Gruber brings up the usability problems that poorly designed web page titles can cause. He makes many good points – I posted similar thoughts in Document titles and title separators back in 2004. Writing good titles for web pages (or web applications, for that matter) is far from a new subject. A little reminder every now and then doesn’t hurt though, so here are a few simple guidelines: Reverse the order of the title, i.e. put the document title first and the site name last.
This makes the document title appear first in bookmark lists, browser tabs, and search results. Use a plain separator character that doesn’t cause confusion. Just a few rules of thumb to keep in mind when constructing page titles.