Web Explorations

I often talk about my son Micah in my classes because he gives me so many real-life examples that show how the concepts I present in class are put to work out in the real world.

Micah has written an interesting resume building site named GigTide using Adobe Flex. When he first published the site he received emails from several users in Italy and Greece asking him to fix the application so they could use the special characters of their language.

Did he have to re-write the entire application? Nope. All he had to do was change the character encoding to UTF-8 (Read Tim Bray’s article if you’d like to know all the gory details about character encoding.) Now GigTide.com can be used by Americans as well as by people that use a script languages found in other parts of the world.

And, its a good thing too, because when Micah checked his Google Analytic numbers the other day he discovered a nice surge in hits from Thailand. He did a little research and discovered a Thai blogger had written about GigTide and it triggered a surge in interest with the site.

He did a little research and found the CyberBiz blog entry showing GigTide in Thai.

That’s the example. Here’s what I teach in my course:

• Keep in mind that when you put a web site up that you have the entire world as your market. Not just your town, or your state, or your country, but the potential of the whole world. (Think on how you can leverage your product/service/site to address more than the people in your own village…)
• Use Google Analytics to keep track of what your site(s) are doing
• Write your code and design your applications so they are accessible to people around the world

CopyBlogger has an interesting article, The Deceptively Simple Steps to
Persuasive Writing That Works by Sonia Simone that compares illustrates how useful it is to use subheads in your web copy: it is like adding steps to your page, helping the reader “walk” through the copy one step at a time.

This works for web pages and reports and will make your written communications much more readable and inviting.

And, if subheads are like steps, than graphic images are like light posts and neon signs along the way, catching the readers eye and giving context to the text.

Just scroll down this page and imagine if I listed all of these articles without subheads or graphics. Just one solid block of text screams “too much work!” to the user and I doubt if even you would have stayed on this site very long!