Crappy Website Traps to Avoid (and Other PR Blog Jots)

"Five Ways that Websites Suck"
Common Sense PR
Eric Eggerston lists his five pet peeves about websites, corporate websites in particular. He urges companies to settle on what exactly they want their website to be, and to assign the best, most imaginative writers to the task of writing the content. He also recommends an even flow and structure for websites, to minimize user confusion, and warns against the tendency to provide too much content; keep it simple and easy to navigate. “It’s great to be able to dig deeper, when you want to find out details about something.  But who wants to spend their entire visit to a website wading through irrelevant information in search of some information that should be easy to find?The company’s inability to narrow its focus and throw out excess verbiage is an insult to the customer or other visitor. If the company can’t be bothered to spend the time pruning repetitive or unnecessary information, why should the website visitor?”

Social Media ROI
Simonsays
Linking to a recent post from Headshift on how to best measure ROI on social web tools, Simon Collister agrees that setting up metrics or tangible deliverables from social media before launching the tool will not work, metrics must be constructed “back to front,” after the tool has been launched. He points out that the direction a website takes, for example, is determined wholly by its users—its ROI cannot be determined until after the fact. Simon also underlines a main point of the Headshift post, that social media tools aren’t a panacea to any company’s issues, and that nothing will ever be one size fits all. “And once we accept that, then we need to adjust our understanding of how to measure these sites and their relationship with users. A relationship ultimely controlled and directed by the users themselves.”

A Use for Twitter's Mobility
BL Ochman
A massive power outage in the San Francisco area yesterday brought down several major websites nationwide, including Typepad (and just as we were fixing to update the CustomScoop blog!), Craigslist, and Technorati. BL Ochman reports that many people were turning to Twitter for up to the minute information, as even those without power and Internet were able to provide updates via mobile phone. Twitter’s mobility advantage does seem to come in handy in a crisis. “Twitter, once again, proved the most up to date and credible source available, as it has last week during the New York City steam explosion. People reported from their cellphones as information became available.”

Comments

[Scott]

Great stuff. Even if I don't have time to run through the hundred something blogs in my RSS feed, I always have time to take a peek at blogjots. Keep up the good work.