Titles, metadata’s #1 superhero ability

Titles are the hardest working pieces of writing on your site, and demonstrate perfectly why metadata deserves the title of superhero of the Internet.

The title is inevitably going to be seen many more times than the page itself. It will be seen by people who read the page, as well as those who don’t. Many readers will see the page title as a link, either on your own site or somewhere else. It’s essential that page titles make sense when used outside the context of the original page.
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Should you write for the web?

It’s easy to overlook the simple fact that as a web writer, you’re also a web reader. Consider for a moment some of the last sites you visited. What format did they use to get their message across?

Were they all text only? Or did they include news feeds, videos, podcasts, photo essays, or even 140 character tweets?

As a reader, which do you find easier to use? As a writer, how many of these methods are you using to make life easy for your reader to get at your content?

Measuring dissatisfaction

Gerry McGovern recently hosted an excellent webinar looking at the work of the Microsoft Office Online team, The Need to Weed: Microsoft Office Online. A video of the webinar and the PowerPoint slides are available to download.

Microsoft realised that measuring satisfaction alone was not giving a complete picture of how well their website was performing. They started to measure the dissatisfaction of customers using their site, instigating radical changes in how they managed their site. Read the full post…

Ignore your visitors

Visitor counts and page views do not provide useful information when analysing visitors to your site when not used alongside other details. Statistical reporting needs to involve analysis, not copy & paste.

It’s not that page view counts are not useful. But using only the page views to judge your site performance is a mistake.
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Metadata, superhero of the Internet

Wearing their underwear on the outside gives superheroes special powers. Everybody knows this to be true. Just as Superman keeps Metropolis safe and Batman watches over Gotham City, Metadata is busy fighting crime and saving the Internet.

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Create action, measure success

Every web page should incite an action from your reader. A strong call to action makes broswing simple and keeps objectives in focus. For each page you create, ask yourself:

• What is the purpose of the page?
• What do I want the reader to do next?
• How can I measure the success?

If you can’t answer these questions then you can’t measure the quality or success of your page. The objective of the page should be the first specification you define. After all, if the page doesn’t have a purpose, why are you planning a page at all?

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