Copy Tip 23: Online Usability
Did you enjoy your celebration welcoming in 2009? We had a ball — a 360-degree view of the city of Melbourne, from a high vantage point around 5km north of the CBD. Not only did we see the main fireworks over the city and the Docklands area, but dozens and dozens of fireworks in every direction at private homes — some going on for a couple of hours into 2009!
So after a long night (this pic above is from flickr by Vermin Inc, from the earlier 9:15pm fireworks over the Docklands), it’s a late day today!
One of the things I’m doing today is related to copy — but isn’t directly “copy”.
It’s about online usability.
I have a tip to share about a mistake I’ve been making myself!
How does this relate to copy?
It’s all about USABILITY … making it EASY for your readers to keep reading.
As you’ll see later in the Copy Tips series, formatting and design, and things like online navigation all contribute to the effectiveness of your message to do the job you want it to do.
In my case, when I launched my 101 Copy Tips last month, one of things I forgot to do was think about navigating through the tips once there got to be quite a few of them.
Mea culpa!
Even when I’m only in the 20′s in terms of the number of tips, I’ve already noticed that there’s no easy way to read through them all.
The last handful appear in my “sidebar” on the right — and there’s a list under the 101 Copy Tips in the “Blog Categories” in the sidebar, but that’s it.
And even that list isn’t very user-friendly — it just shows 4 posts per page, with a very hard-to-find “Next Page” link at the bottom of the page to the next four tips.
I can’t expect readers to find that easy to use!
On this website I use the WordPress platform, which is an open source blog platform (also good for non-blog sites). WordPress has improved since its first launch as a “Content Management System” — a way to manage your site online (and in technical terms separate the content from the design/structure).
Now the internet has come a LONG WAY since I first got online in 1994 … 15 years ago!
Back then, my first web browser was Lynx — completely text based, nothing graphical. Internet Explorer didn’t even exist back then! (Well, only as Mosaic, the graphical browser I first saw when I was using Lynx).
I remember advancing to Netscape Navigator in 1995 — not even at version 1.0 — and wow, it was a huge change (I think it was version 1.1 where backgrounds of web pages could finally be colours other than gray!). Now of course, that all looks virtually prehistoric compared to the current web, as it looks in Firefox or Internet Explorer or one of the other modern browsers.
One little story before I continue …
It used to be really exciting going to a website like http://www.whitehouse.gov (one of the first sites I visited after Nasa’s image library) … and seeing a picture of the White House either to be daytime or night-time, and a message that reflected the time of day (either “good morning”, “good afternoon” or “good evening”, welcome to The White House). That was about as exciting as it got. I went there of course as I was involved in political marketing and campaigning at the time, so it was pretty exciting to see a site like that (for me, anyway).
But I digress. The point I’m making is that it is NOW a LOT easier to add in the usability improvements to make the Copy Tips easier to navigate.
And that’s what I’ll be doing over the next day or so while it’s a quiet time of the year.
Here’s what I’ll be adding and customising:
- Under the “Blog Categories” there’s be lots more Copy Tips per page, using the “excerpt” of the tip (my hand-written mini summary), plus a link to the full article, rather than the full article on the actual category page. This makes it easier to scan through the tips than having 4 full articles per page.
- When a 101 Copy Tips article is displayed in full, there will be additional navigation surrounding the article to make it easier to find the previous tip, the next tip and the list of tips in the series.
I’m also making other general navigation improvements that are more relevant now there are a lot of articles on this site.
Now, back in the “prehistoric” internet days, this would have been more time-consuming than it is today. All of the navigation was added manually, and had to be manually updated when new content was added.
That wastes a lot of time (and in turn money) — time you can’t afford to waste!
Now, with something like WordPress, I get to add the changes quickly and easily to “templates” — so that when the articles are displayed, the template performs its technical magic to make sure the navigation is always up to date.
Best of all, the code I used was pretty easy for me to find and adapt from the WordPress documentation (although I’m a direct response copywriter and designer, and marketing strategist, I do have quite a few website skills built up since 1994).
If you’re a non-technical person, you can skip this next paragraph!
In this case, I used a page navigation plugin, a drop-down category post list and a template using the in_category variable template tag to add the navigation just for the 101 Copy Tips articles.
Now back to the article!
So that should make the readability and usability of these Copy Tip articles much more effective … and it should improve the number of Copy Tips that each website visitor views.
That helps build my relationship with my website visitors, which is a good thing (one of my objectives in my website MOOVE-based strategy).
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