Marketing mixed with IT, design and coding, all these things are part of a webmaster’s job.
At least they were.

I am not a server administrator, but 7 years ago that was still part of the webmaster job. This is impossible in todays world and most webmaster jobs nowadays focus on the communication side. Communication and marketing, usability and user experience: these are are all the hit words of 2011 and you have to have them on your CV.

One thing is very clear about what a webmaster does: handle communication between business and IT. You have to be able to talk to a programmer/sysadmin as well as talk to one of the board members.

Can you handle a sentence that consists of nothing but acronyms?
Can you say one that a business person doesn’t understand, but IT does?
Can you do the same for the IT person?

Hiring people is not my job, but I am a webmaster and I was asked to create a questionnaire to check the technical knowledge of the webmaster candidate.
The questionnaire focuses on 4 areas:

• Marketing / SEO / Communication
• Web development, client side
• Usability / Accessibility
• Web development – server side

The 4 fields are a bit crammed together, I know, but you need to limit the number of questions a bit. Below are the questions and answers with some remarks. Candidates took between 45 minutes to 1 hour to answer all of them.

The questions are both specific and open. Not everything (definitely no server setup questions anymore) is covered but it is a good start to measure the technical knowledge of you webmaster candidate.

All those results are pages about “click here, do this, do that”. Why do people still use that on a website?

“Click here” is one of those text fragments that seem to stick around. Webdesigners and usability experts recommend not using it and still, everyone does, including Adobe. Adobe Acrobat reader is the first item on Google SERPs for “click here”. Simply because it is used in plenty of links on a huge number of sites.

All I can see is that people are using it, and that there is no tendency that tells me it is dying.
So why not? Why do people still use it? Dismissing it as stupidity or lack of knowledge is too easy. There must be some reason why people still use it even though there are plenty of reasons not to.

Content-editors still use it because it’s clear. It is clear what a visitor must do. Not what the visitors will get after the click. But that really doesn’t matter because through all the noise (the internet) this person found your website, scanned it thoroughly, found what he was looking for, and followed the instruction. What’s behind the link, who knows? Does anyone care?

The text fragment works more or less like an embedded command: “When you click this link, you will know more about the subject than others do.” The link becomes more attractive: it states what you should do.

People scan for underlined blue text. The link text “click here” enforces the concept of the link and the click becomes a jump into the unknown.

To click is to believe.

I have trained around 200 editors and I repeated it a thousand times:

• that the text of the link should be an indication of the subject of the referring page,
• that it is is not good for usability/accessibility and SEO,
• that it is uninformative

“Click here” as link text is not going away in the near future even though it is disregarded as bad practice by practitioners of IA, usability and SEO. The concept is too easy to understand. It almost feels natural.

Links should be informative about where you’ll take the visitor, but it seems that using verbs as links is very powerful.

Tell them what to do

And then you get this facebook button: “like”. It’s the same thing, just better. Emotional. The link instructs. Like or die clicking!

The facebook like button instructs you to like – read click – the button. It doesn’t say “I like”, it doesn’t say “click here to like”, it’s just “like”.

Implicitly I translate it to “I like”, as must people do (disagree with me ?). But it is nothing more or less than an embedded command: like.

The simplicity of the concept “telling people what to do” is definitely the main reason why the “click here” link is not fading away. Even though the text fragment is pretty powerful, the reasons not to use it still prevail. Click here to comment.

So I looked around, found a few articles on the subject, and I bought a book.
The book “The Elements of Content Strategy” written by Erin Kissane published by A Book Apart.

I devoured the book: short and concise writing and it provides a clear picture of the relationship with other functions in the webteam (editors, IAs, designers, etc..). I was happy to discover that the section of useful resources has a list of books that I had read or own:

• Information Architecture for the World Wide Web by Lou Rosenfeld,
• Don’t make me think by Steve Krug,
• The Elements of User Experience by Jess James Garret and
• Managing Enterprise Content by Ann Rockley.

Seems I should have some idea of what content strategy is, right?

The book explains a few things about Content strategists. Basically a CS thinks about the who, what, where and why of content.

Who will publish that document?
Editors need to be trained, and the document needs to go through a process, formal or informal, to make sure it is properly published. Document life-cycle is part of what a CS does, but that is also what IA’s do, right? Designing workflows in a CMS, how to reuse content, which content to reuse, that is also part of the IA tasks.

What are you going to publish?
Data and content are pretty abundant if you know where to look for. But that doesn’t mean everything has to go online. Here the tasks of a CS and IA start to differ in that the IA does not always have a grip on the actual content.

Where are you going to publish it?
Content can be reused and rewritten for different channels. If you are posting it on twitter, Facebook, an RSS feed or a webpage, the CS considers which parts of the text goes online. Maybe even the tone and voice of the content has to be reviewed.

I think here the CS tasks start to get borderline with SEO tasks and/or journalism. One good examples of this overlap can be seen at the BBC and how they produce headlines. Most of the headlines convey the whole story in 5 words. Is that good copywriting? a content strategists defining standards? or the SEO requiring the most prominent keywords to be available in the titles? I guess journalists have been doing this already for a long long time.

Why are you going to publish this?
The strategy, the why behind the content should be become clear after stakeholder interviews and audience analyses.
The strategy should bring those 2 mindsets together. Here the idea is the same as in IA: align the mental model of the business with the mindset of the audience.

In chapter 3 the author lists a batch of deliverables (Channel strategy , CMS requirements, Communication plans , Usability tests) and I think the majority of those documents need to be shared with the IA.

Both the the IA and the CS perform user research, create content inventories, write up persona’s, the shared list of tools goes on and on. But I think the content strategists focuses more on the message behind, the voice and tone of the content and for that matter I think the CS is very close to a graphic designer. Choosing the colors and images can drastically change the messages that a website conveys. The tone and voice of the content can do the same.

A wireframe is a black and white presentation of what will be published where. But the message can be so dramatically changed by choosing the wrong words or the right ones. The wireframe can act as a reference but the if the design uses pink tones and cartoon images, or corporate blue and stock photography, the message is no longer the same.

Content strategy is nothing new, it has been done from the moment books were published, radio started to broadcast and television shows were brought into the living room. Yes, the environment has changed, so the tools and techniques need to change too but basically it is a new name for what was considered part of other professions.

Update

An excerpt of the book The Elements of Content Strategy is now online at A List Apart

Wayfinding system developer by Axel Peemoeller who has put more pictures online about this project in Melbourne

Sorting is ordering data: alphabetically, numerical, by day, week (by number again) and/or month.
All these sorting orders are based on random lists. By random I do not imply a mathemacical random list, but just the fact that we assigned an order to words, and because everyone knows the order, the list becomes a functional tool.
Most people do not have to think about whether a 4 comes before a 7, or that the month of January is the first of the year. The fact that we all have a complete image of these things in our mind, makes them so practical.

But does it make sense for the navigation of a website?

In a website the navigations is about information (that is not everything, I will get to that), which is something different then data.
I had a look at the dictionary entries:

Information: the communication or reception of knowledge or intelligence

Data: factual information (as measurements or statistics) used as a basis for reasoning, discussion, or calculation

The 2 definitions tell me that data is used to generate information. Information emanates from data, it is the basis on which we can form a decision or some reasoning.

Well, if we apply this idea to the navigation of a website, we should be putting organised information on the website and that information should be coming from the data we collected as a basis to create the website.
Sounds good, but what about the visitor? People could still argue that sorting can be applied to information to ease scanning of the list, to guide the visitor of the website.

Guidance

The argument to ease scanning is actually a valid one, though not good enough, I think. People scan pages, they tend to skip most of the things available on a website. And now it comes down to what you want as a webmaster, do you want people to see the items that start with an A first, or do you want a visitor to see things that are important first?

I guess the answer should be clear, the important things should go on top and the order should be the order of importance. Importance, of course, can be defined in different ways ( from a user perspective or from a business pespective) but it certainly is not following the order of a very famous random list. If you want to guide the visitor, you should give them the most important bits of information first.

Translations

The reason why I came up with this subject is that I had an argument with a colleague after I noticed they had sorted the list of services by alphabet. A first, B second, etc… you know :-)
Now, the thing is that the most important service started with an A, and that the manager in charge is responsible for that product. In this rare case, the alphabetical sorting order matched the order of importance (from the business point of view).

This is an exception and will not happen very often, but lets look at this example and see what might happen in the future. The service is an international service in Europe and it has to cather for the south of europe. In my experience with international websites that try to reach the public in the south of europe, you need a translation in the local language.

Ok, you already know what is going to happen to your nicely alphabetical order, right?

Once you start creating multi language websites, you have no way of ordering a list alphabetically and keeping the order of the items in the list.
I wrote about this before, as I was faced with a sorting problem of a list in Chinese

When everything else fails

When your website navigation fails, and your visitor cannot find what he/she is looking for, an alphabetical list of keywords, a sitemap where the subelements are ordered alphabetically, and/or a monthly list of posts on a blog, are valid examples of pages where you can alphabetically sort information. But that is when everything else fails …

I am sure there are other reasons why it is bad to sort you information as you do with data on a website, but for now this is what I experienced.
Please leave a message if you had similar experience with this kind of problems.

My personal favorites is generated by Lotus notes: Mail engine: no error.

Some useful guidelines for printing error messages can be found on the Cranky Users article: could you repeat that in English, or the guidelines for error messages from Norman Nielsens’ alertbox.

Alex Wright goes through several names that wrote about concepts like a keyboard, networks, terminals even before a computer was even thinkable.
If you need more stuff, here is a list of some names and their corresponding Wikipage:

• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• Charles Ammi Cutter
• H. G. Wells
• Paul Otlet
• Visions of Xanadu, by W. Boyd Rayward
• Douglas Engelbart
• Vannevar Bush
• Eugene Garfield

• Make sure you have a web governance models which supports a distributed web authoring model
• Emphasize the benefits of distributed web authoring to SMEs
• Make sure you have appropriate training and tools for new web authors
• Try out the new publishing paradigm on a few “ringer” SMEs who you know will do a good job and use them as success stories to recruit others
• Make a business case for formally distributing web authoring in your organization and present it to management
• And, if all else fails, turn off their lights.

Ask Tony — CMS Watch

The “paradox of the active user” is a paradox because users would save time in the long term by taking some initial time to optimize the system and learn more about it.

Paradox of the Active User (Alertbox Sidebar)

If I have a job to do, let’s say create a content inventory, I could go through the website, create the sitemap and content inventory by hand or …
I could learn a bit more about vbscript, excel and visio and create both in one go.

If I automate, I save time. In this case, I can make a better decision on which pages I really have to read. I don’t have to go through each and every page.

There are probably a thousand example like this:

• corporate system admins writing scripts to install PC’s,
• batch files to connect to shared drives,
• managers trying to cramp everything in an excel file and run vbscript reports on the figures,
• me trying to create a script that generates an Umbraco website package from my excel content inventory, which I can import (Anybody? please mail me :-)

Either you do it manually, or you study and automate.

I tend to go for the latter, but that is because I prefer to do new things instead of struggling through the routine of doing something over and over again.
If I calculate the time spent, I end up with the same amount or even more time spent.

Just make sure that this job is not the first or last time you have to do this and in the end you will be spending less time doing routine jobs.

I managed to go back to November 2003 and reviewed an article I wrote back then about CSS as a debugging tool for templates. This is a little theoretical, but three years later I wrote an article on how to implement this technique:

• Theory: Debugging HTML structure using CSS
• Practice: Quality control with style sheets

• Persona fill out form
• Persona examples all over the web

• Non English blogs (about IA)