Do you have any other points you’d add to this chart? Let me know and I’ll credit your ideas on this blog if you want.

Download PDF (72 Kb): Usability Differences Between Web and Print Media

1. Create a Google Gadget.
   You can create Google Gadgets such as a countdown timer (to an event), a list (of ideas, suggestions, products, etc), a microblog (what you’re doing or working on) or a YouTube channel (videos about your company, service or product), then publish it on the Google network for other people to add to their customized iGoogle page. You can also email the Gadget link to a list of people.  
2. Post comments on related articles.
   Many news sites or ezines include an option to leave comments at the end of articles. Some like CNN even track backlinks from blogs that link to the article. Search for articles related to your company’s business, then post an intelligent response or comment on the article, including your company’s name, URL and/or email address, if possible. 
3. Write a press release.
   Your press release can be about anything, but should be tied to something timely such as a recent event or announcement. Many sites such as the ones cited here offer a free press release service. 
4. Create a Facebook app.
   Facebook makes it relatively easy to develop an application that Facebook users can add to their profiles and pages. Facebook still has some buzz in traditional media channels, so sometimes you might even get some earned media (an editorial article written about your company) because of the interest in your new Facebook app.
5. Piggyback on someone else’s email subscriber database.
   Wouldn’t it be great to get a plug for your company in someone else’s mailing list? If you know of a company or an individual (such as a blogger) with a sizeable mailing list, offer to barter some services or products in exchange for a mention in their next email newsletter or notification. If you do have your own mailing list, you can ask another list owner to include a link to your sign-up form, or offer to add their sign-up form to your page if it seems that subscribers on each site may be interested in the other site’s content as well.   

Got more freebs? Share the wealth…let us know about your tips by posting them here. 

Email: Garth@DigitalPractices.com

* Services cited in the list above were free at the time this list was published, and have been published here as a service to readers. Some of these sites may offer fee-based options as well.

1. The Web Strategy doesn’t follow the Business Strategy.

Whether you’re designing for a Fortune 1000 corporation, a SOHO business, a government agency or a non-profit, your organization has a direction and a purpose, and your Web strategy must reflect and support that purpose. Read The Chemistry of Web Strategy.

2. The Web Design doesn’t follow the Web Strategy.

Assuming your organization has taken the time and effort to develop a documented Web Strategy, your entire Web Design (or redesign) project must be aligned with the objectives of this strategy as it is aligned with your organization’s Business Strategy (see #1 above).

3. No one has developed a content strategy.

Among all the discussions about the site’s presentation design (graphic design), its tools and applications, and its navigational structure, has your Web Design team given any thought to developing a Content Strategy? If your team cannot clearly answers questions such as “How is all the site content being prioritized?” or “What is this content supposed to achieve for us? ” or “Who are the 2-3 target audiences for this content?” then you need to write a Content Strategy or a Content Requirements Plan.

4. Users are not consulted in advance about the Web Design.

Web analytics, surveys, focus groups, use cases, heuristic reviews — these are some of the tools of usability analysis. Often organizations will undertake a major Web Design or redesign project, then afterwards consult their users to try to confirm whether they did a good job designing the site. You can’t please everyone, but once you know how people want to use your site (task flow) and what content and applications are important to them, then you MUST consider these when developing your prototype Web Design.

5. Users are consulted too much about the Web Design.

Don’t be held hostage by user feedback or usability studies, either. When you continue to over-research what people want on your site, you can set up expectations on the part of your users that cannot be reasonably met. As well, you cannot possibly offer everything on your site that users want because the site has to align with your Web Strategy, which has to align with your Business Strategy. (See #1 again)

6. The Web Design is confused with “look and feel”, “colors” and “branding”.

Too often, early discussions about Web Design and redesign centre around “look and feel”. “How will our content fit the new design?” asks the marketing and communications staff. “Let’s not talk about Web Design yet,” say the developers. “Give us a few possible designs,” say the senior executives. If you are leading a Web Design project, one of your first tasks should be making the entire organization know that Web Design is not just about what the site will look like, but also how it will be constructed, how it will be used, and how it will be managed. Yes, branding is a part of Web Design, but it’s not all about branding, either.

7. The Web Design has no muscle.

Web sites that perform tasks for their users must have muscle to do it. That means not just search engines, payment processing, and other applications and databases that make the site work, but also the static content and how its information design helps users with the task of scanning, reading and interacting with content. Sites should be designed based on task analysis and task flow rather than by gathering heaps of content (focus on how it will be used to tell you what will be used).

8. The Web Design has no brain.

Web sites with muscle also have to have a brain that controls the muscle. The brain is the documented site architecture and interaction design — making the site logical and intuitive to most people through the application of best Web practices as well as a by thoroughly following how people want to use the site. The site’s critical navigation design has to be based on task flow so it will make sense to users.

9. The Web Design has no soul.

The soul of Web Design is the collective mass of human beings behind it that may hide behind the “Browser wall”, but nevertheless must imbue the site with humanity and human qualities. A Web Design has no soul if it doesn’t use the language of the marketplace. It will also have no soul if it does not provide ample means for users to contact the Web site’s owners and administrators. And a good Web Design also should have some images of the people who are behind that browser wall.

10. The Web Design is not scalable.

If a single generation of a Web Design cannot be sustained because it cannot accommodate new content and applications without distorting or mangling the original design, then it’s not scalable enough. A Web Design should allow for continuous improvement of the site, a kind of progressive evolution that allows for change as the rule, not the exception. While it’s common to implement minor site design changes through small variations, and to conduct major site redesign every couple of years or so, Web Designers should always be designing for the unforeseeable, the Black Swans, and should always design two years into the future. Not “what we are now,” but “what we will become.”

For more information on Web Design Strategy, contact Garth@DigitalPractices.com.

However, most people use more than one navigation choice during a single session search for content, and each choice during that session is determined, more often than not, by a specific task flow. For example, if you know what you’re looking for on a retail site, you’ll want to navigate by the product or service categories, but if you encounter problems, you’ll want to navigate by organizational structure (e.g. finding which part of the organization is responsible for a product or service) to seek help.

So in the first case, your navigation is driven by a scenario where you are purchasing something, and in the second case it is driven by a scenario where you are wanting to contact someone or some area of responsibility.  

The chart below outlines some general reasons users make navigation choices, although a more refined analysis can be done when one is looking at specific case studies or organizations. Keep in mind that at any stage of the search, depending on the user’ previous experiences, they may give up and abandon their navigation efforts altogether.

Rather than feeling that their own search/navigation methods failed, or are lacking the necessary skills, most people will instead feel frustration, resentment and even anger, and blame the site design or site administrators for their lack of success.

You take your car into the shop every couple of years to get its front end aligned every couple of years, so why not do the same for your Web? In large organizations where departments and divisions develop and manage Web content on their own subsites, some of the greatest challenges are:

1. How to maintain compliance with a consistent look-and-feel across the entire corporate Internet presence

2. How to ensure that users coming into the front end of the site (the homepage or topsite) can find a consistent navigation model, even though each subsite may have very different content and navigation models, and

3. How to periodically undertake design and navigational changes/improvements without having to force the entire organization into a costly and resource-intensive redesign cycle.

As a corporate Web presence grows, all the content management technology in the world isn’t going to save you from content growth issues (“content cramming”) if you don’t have a sound content strategy to govern standards and development of the site.

What do users care that you have new bells and whistles to streamlined content management and document management? Without a content strategy developed by a team consisting of business leaders, communications managers, Web managers and IT managers, your Internet presence can sometimes become a large, confusing cluster of content.

It happens innocently enough. Each subsite continues to develop new content and publish it to their own homepage with little or no governance from a content strategy to tell them how to align with the front end of their site. Pretty soon the entire corporate site starts to look like a home renovation disaster — you know, where someone keeps adding new rooms and wings and features to their home haphazardly until it becomes a monstrosity. You can improve the whole by looking only at one part of the whole.

On the other hand, each subsite within an organization’s Internet presence has to have autonomy to develop and publish content based on its own business drivers and its own content objects. Your shipping division might not be able to use the same kind of navigational cues for its subsite that, say, the accounting department would want to use. Even some aspects of the look and feel need to be different for each to reflect their different functions and makeup within the organization. If you try to universalize everything within the corporate Web site, you’ll have to bring everything down to the lowest, blandest common denominator, and that won’t help your end users. At all.

As many organizations and usability experts are learning, the key is a corporate content strategy with strong executive support, “front end alignment” to make your homepage and other topsite pages consistent for the end user, and a centralized/decentralized content management model that allows content control and scalability, both corporately and departmentally.

If the homepage and other topsite pages are managed centrally by a corporate Web team, these pages can provide a kind of sitemap or guide or index of content to the end users (who usually start with the homepage anyway), while allowing the departmental and divisional subsites to manage their own content in their own way based on their own business drivers. That way, if users can do their wayfinding at the front end or topsite level, they don’t have to worry about knowing how to navigate the many different subsites to find what they want. This also allows you to create a user navigation model that takes a more “outside-in” rather than “inside-out” view.

As well, maintaining key global navigational panels that are applied globally through server-side includes, for example, can help ensure that all pages throughout the site show consistent navigational labeling. This also helps with partial redesigns or refreshes to the site — you can change these panels (such as a header row) centrally and apply them globally without having to require any effort from the departmental subsites.

The front end or homepage is the most important page in terms of its function as a gateway and a guide to all content within the site. It also serves as our visual paradigm for everything else we expect to see beyond that point. While periodic redesigns and revised content strategies are essential as our business evolves, our technology changes and our content expands, sometimes all you need to do is re-align the front end to make sure your corporate Web vehicle is sailing down the highway and not pulling you off the road.

A new IBM research report suggests that the best analogies for businesses in the future may no longer be the command structures of the military but the self-organising networks found in nature: schools of fish, flocks of birds and swarms of insects. This research, contained in The IBM Global Innovation Outlook 2.0 Report, reinforces Bioteam rule 10: Self-Organising Networks.
~ IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook

Imagine if core business skills and practices such as “time management” became professions unto themselves. You’d pay dues to the Time Management Institute, where you’d be credentialed as a Certified Time Manager; you’d be hired for your Time Management skills as a Level 4 Time Manager, and use only company-approved Time Management forms and templates. On every team there would have to be a designated Time Manager (certified and experienced, of course), and you would attend large “TM” conferences around the world.

Maybe Time Management is a skills and practice that is deserving of professional status give the fast pace of corporate life, but you get a sense from the example above that there is a tinge of absurdity to it. Time management, you might say, is certainly one of the core skills we use in business and government, but somehow having a formalized Time Management department and role is overkill. Why use a specialist for a skill that all business generalists should be practicing? There’s no question that someone whose profession is all about time management might have a better grasp of the issues, challenges and solutions around  it, but do we really need someone who’s only real function is to be an advisor, consultant and documentation-keeper?

I have similar questions around the formalization of Project Management over the last 20 years or so. Disclaimer: I’m a member of the Project Management Institute, and I’ve had to use project management techniques in my work as a Web manager and Web strategist. Note that I said I’ve used project management techniques, not Project Management. I’m not a certified Project Manager, though I have taken Project Management courses. In other words, I’m not one of the clergy, I’m just a layman who occasionally dons the robes to help the priests carry out the ritual liturgy.

Project Management was originally developed by people like Henry Gantt, and used by the Army Corps of Engineers in the first half of the 20th century for wartime and peacetime projects, such as building ships, dams, bridges and other structures. Engineers being the breed they are, project management as a discipline was carried into the world of technology and computer software, where it became widely popularized in the ’70s through ’90s as the role of technology became more and more essential to the world of business.  The Project Management Institute itself was only formed in 1969, even though something like “Project Management” had been around since the first World War.   

As an experienced Web architect and Web manager, I’ve seen how project management skills can provide an excellent framework for a Web design project, while Project Management proper can sometimes be a stifling, counter-intuitive nemesis to achieving effective results in usability and design. In many ways, Project Management, the discipline, has evolved into Project Management, the orthodoxy. The kind of dogma that Project Management professionals try to impose upon Web and other technology projects can result in Webs and Web services that are out of touch with the fast-paced Web 2.0 and 3.0 world we live in. Sometimes more effort is expended in documentation of project steps in overly-detailed MS Project charts and sundry PM templates than what the end product is worth in usability and creative design.

The fact is that the people who pay for expensive Web and other technology projects, the business stakeholders, owners, executives and investors, don’t really care about how you get there, but rather, what you’ve achieved when you finally get there. While some business executives pay lip service to the importance of “process” and “project discipline”, most of them also demand the right to circumvent those same sacrosanct processes and disciplines, not just occasionally but frequently, and this veto process often happens informally down the chain of command as well, as stakeholders in management positions lobby their executives to command changes to their projects. Project scope, timelines, even work breakdown structure — everything held in order with command-and-control protocols by PMs — are routinely tossed aside by the often subjective requirements of executives.

That’s okay. It’s just the way things are, and always have been. But the disciples of Project Management live in a fantasy command-and-control universe where scope creep is blasphemy, changes are “managed” (if only we lived in a universe where changes could be managed!) and dates on an MS Project Gannt chart are as constant to Project Managers as the constellations in the sky are to ocean navigators. Like litigators or medieval theologians, fastidiously detailed volumes of documentation are poured out, digitally and printerly, even though most “resources” assigned to a project and the project sponsors themselves never have time to read more than 5% of it because they’re too busy doing the actual work.

Actual work. If you’re someone who’s doing the actual work (that stuff they try to itemize line by painstaking line in the Work Breakdown Structures), you’ll find you don’t really have time to do a lot of the onerous documentation work that constitutes almost 50% of everything Project Managers do. The other 50% is mostly taken up by frequent meetings with people who are either doing the project or making the decisions about the project. Purely speaking, a real Project Manager doesn’t also act as a “resource”; their sole function is to manage the flow and output of project details,  timelines and deliverables.

Now we come to the mythical Ouroboros seen in the above woodcut, and explained in this verse from Plato’s Timaeus:  

“It had no need of eyes, for there was nothing outside it to be seen; nor of ears, for there was nothing outside to be heard. There was no surrounding air to be breathed, nor was it in need of any organ by which to supply itself with food or to get rid of it when digested. Nothing went out from or came into it anywhere, for there was nothing. Of design it was made thus, its own waste providing its own food, acting and being acted upon entirely with and by itself, because its designer considered that a being which was sufficient unto itself would be far more excellent than one which depended upon anything.”    

Has Project Management become a 21st century Ouroboros — a self-contained, self-referential and self-serving demi-profession whose practitioners have a vested interest in promoting PM mystique, building Project Management Office kingdoms, and harnessing business operations to their processes like oxen harnessed to a wagon? IMO, those who are creating Web services and building Web sites are well aware that projects have to be defined, resources have to be allotted, milestones have to be achieved, and deliverables have to be delivered. In the “old world”, before the Internet was popularized and digital technology was dominant, creative agencies such as ad firms, television production companies and record producers also had to channel creative projects through business requirements, and did so quite successfully through their own fluid processes without having a “Project Manager” in-house.

Back to my own experience…I use some Project Management techniques in my work, but usually in unorthodox ways. I don’t like Microsoft Project, for example, which is just a glorified spreadsheet with a few graphical enhancements. And I like some Project Management tools and templates, but only if I can customize them for specific projects. As for things like scope, it’s always easy to illustrate to project sponsors that they can expand scope all they want, as long as they can also expand budget and resources accordingly. As for deliverables, that’s often more a product of good communications and technical writing skills than “Project Management” rigor. If you’re working on a creative project, be it software or Webware, why spend all your time and effort documenting and tracking a project rather than allowing project dynamics to evolve and project “bioteams” to self-organize through hard work, good communications and creative thinking?

But that’s another topic for another day. Those who want to break out of the 20th century Project Management mold into a new way of managing projects in the 21st century would do well to investigate some of the principles behind self-organization, such as the Chaordic concept pioneered by Visa founder Dee Hock in the 1960s and 1970s when he was head of Visa International (visit the Chaordic Initiatives site or the Chaordic Commons site for more information). Or you can enlighten yourself and your organization with the ideas found in The Bioteaming Manifesto or in Ken Thompson’s fascinating blog on bioteaming, The Bumble Bee. 

Email Garth A. Buchholz

I have been developing unified content strategies for about 15 years and working with content management systems for about the same period of time. The unified content strategy came about as I realized that there was no clear strategy for creating multiple documents or learning materials for products and services for a company. They were often created by different individuals and inconsistent. Often I was asked to create multiple documents on a very tight budget and short timeframe. The only way to do this time and cost effectively was to develop a unified content strategy then develop the materials to support the strategy.

My experience with content management began when clients had more and more information to manage (ranging from 10,000 pages to more than 100,000 pages) and as I began to develop materials in SGML. SGML databases enabled me to manage elements of content, not just documents. It was a perfect fit to use content management to support the unified content strategy.Managing Enterprise Content: A Unified Content Strategy came about as a result of our work with our clients. The book answers the questions that each client asked as they started to work with us. Now when we start to work with a new client the client already understands the basic concepts and process so we can “hit the ground running”. The Rockley Group works on each project as a team, drawing on different skill sets at different times to most effectively address the client’s requirements. It was a logical step to draw on two of our senior consultants to develop the content of the book. The book also answers the many questions we get from participants in our conference presentations, webinars and workshops. The book provides a solid foundation for anyone hoping to improve the way they create, manage, and deliver content.  Many companies tend to leave the content strategy to the IT developers, and many IT developers tend to shy away from serious discussions about content.

In your opinion, how can companies ensure that a unified content strategy will be developed?

A business case for a unified content strategy should always be presented from the business perspective. That is, issues surrounding content are not merely technology problems. Rather, they are complex business challenges that affect a company’s bottom line, and should be addressed as such. The IT and the business side should be partners in a unified content project, with both sides responsible and accountable for process and quality improvements, reduced costs and ultimately, greater customer satisfaction.

In your book, you talk about separating form and content. It’s one thing doing that for structured content, but is there any risk in doing that with unstructured content?

The goal of a unified content strategy is to define structure for previously unstructured content. So, once you’ve analyzed and modeled your materials, the content is no longer unstructured. With content that is left unstructured, for example documents that are not broken down further than a title, subheadings and document body, you can still separate the form from the content.

The content is in fact structured, just to a very high level of granularity. If your authors create content using stylesheets or templates, the style tags can still be “mapped” to different formats for different media. However, if authors do not use styles or adhere to a template, you cannot easily separate format from content.

As you’ve written, creating metadata can be difficult and time-consuming. How can organizations learn to consistently create metadata across the enterprise for retrieval, tracking and assembling for re-use? Should there be a set of Internet standards for creating controlled vocabularies, etc?

Internet standards for creating controlled vocabularies would be helpful, but individual organizations don’t need to wait for these types of standards to go ahead and create their own guidelines and controlled vocabularies internally. Many sectors and industries already have terminology standards that can be adapted and used to create metadata guidelines.

To be successful, a unified content strategy should be considered as an enterprise-level endeavor right from the start, even if not all areas in an organization are participating right away. Participating departments should define their own metadata with the entire organization in mind. They should solicit information from, and share it with, other departments to make sure that the metadata can be universally applied when the time comes.

Can you tell us about some of the content-related issues and challenges you’ve seen many organizations face, either on the development or the management side of things?

The most common content-related issue, and often the indicator that drives organizations to seek help in defining a unified content strategy, is the inability of either internal users of the content, or customers, to find the information they need. This manifests in many ways, including redundant content creation, increased costs due to inefficient content creation processes, and lost revenue due to customer dissatisfaction or content inconsistencies.

Organizations sometimes have a hard time getting buy-in from management, which is why they need to present a business case that demonstrates how these issues are affecting the company’s bottom line. IT and business need to work together to build a strong business case for a unified content strategy, and to select and implement the proper tools to support the solution. Too often, organizations have already committed to a particular tool or technology, without properly analyzing content-related business requirements ahead of time. It’s like going out and having a suit made without first taking your measurements.

In the near future, what kind of technology solutions do you see as having a powerful impact on content management in large organizations?

The move to adopt XML by many vendors has been the most significant breakthrough to date affecting content management, and will continue to benefit the content management industry moving forward, as new ways to apply its versatility to content-related issues are developed. In future, better native integration between authoring tools, content management systems and delivery systems are likely to emerge, as content management vendors gain a greater understanding of the issues and requirements of authors and publishers. Industry-specific content management solutions for areas such as health sciences and other regulated industries are being developed now.

Another area that vendors are beginning to address is the translation of content, and the integration of authoring, translation memory, content management and globalization management tools.

How do you see the Internet changing? Do you think it’s becoming a more proprietary and less open-source environment in terms of information, culture, commerce?

The Internet has been moving towards more proprietary and less open-source for years as vendors have created tools to assist people in creating and managing content on the web. As these tools have gained acceptance their proprietary focus has been overlaid on the Internet. I don’t see this changing though there will always be a role for open-source.

The Internet moved very rapidly from a tool for the academic and scientific community to the primary marketing and sales vehicle for many companies. This has dramatically changed the orientation of the Internet. However, it has continued to grow and support knowledge in more effective ways than traditional libraries and this will continue. Education, learning, knowledge, and knowledge sharing have changed for the good and it can only continue to grow.

Finally, do you have any other interesting books in progress or other projects you’d like to tell us about?

The Rockley Group is currently focusing on content/information modeling and metadata design for content reuse and management. Little or no literature exists on this topic and it is critical to the effective design of a unified content strategy. We are developing methodologies, techniques, and strategies in this area to optimize reuse, content structure and optimize the support for the models in authoring, content management, and delivery tools. We have recently developed workshops for our clients and the public on this topic. At some point in the future this may become a book.