http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress Customer-centric, not organization-centric Sun, 29 Jan 2012 11:17:36 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Links cause most problems when they overlap and audience based links are particularly problematic. Some years ago we worked with an educational website. They had links such as Teachers, Students, etc. All seemed very logical and reasonable. Until we started testing tasks. We gave teachers tasks about putting together some sort ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2012/01/29/why-audience-navigation-usually-doesn%e2%80%99t-work/ Start with the link, not the sentence. Often, all you need is a nice clear link. No summary text. The link should be the first thing you think about. You should only add surrounding text if absolutely necessary. Write links like you would write a heading. Use 8 words or less. ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2012/01/22/tips-for-writing-great-links/ Linking is the essence of the Web. Web professionals must focus primarily on links, rather than the content or technology. If you’re trained as a content professional then you’re trained to think about documents, manuals, articles, brochures. You’re focused on sentences and paragraphs. One of the latest crazes on the web ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2012/01/15/the-art-of-linking/ The Internet is helping us move towards a more educated, prosperous, healthy and wealthy world. Imagine for a moment a terrible virus was unleashed on the world that caused babies to die at birth. Imagine that this virus had been raging for 12 months and that during this period every baby ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2012/01/08/the-greatest-period-in-human-history/ SurveyMonkey is a great web brand because it is both very reliable and extremely easy to use. Over the years I have designed hundreds and hundreds of surveys. I have looked at a lot of survey tools. Some were terrible, many were okay, but SurveyMonkey is by far the best. In ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2011/12/17/great-web-brands/ When an employee is on a salary, managers don’t care about their time. They think it is elastic. This is why intranets perform so poorly. It was a hot summer evening in Houston. I was walking to the car park with John, a member of an intranet team for a large ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2011/12/11/how-to-increase-productivity-in-the-digital-workplace/ The customer is the marketer; that’s what social media is for. The customer is the advertiser; that’s what Google is for. In a world where people have lots of time and there is very little education and very little information, traditional marketing and advertising thrives. We are not living in that ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2011/12/04/the-customer-is-the-advertiser/ “This website needs a total redesign,” Bartholomew Daehria guffawed enthusiastically. “It needs to be much more interactive and visually attractive.” Tom’s heart sank. Another new manager. He’s seen it all so many times before. “What exactly do you mean by interactive,” Mr Daehria?” “Call me Bartholemew, boy! Or better still, call me ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2011/11/27/a-day-in-the-life-of-a-web-novice-manager/ Mobile is a platform. It is a tactic, not a strategy. What you need is a strategy for the connected customer. If a Norwegian man is sitting on the toilet reading the news on his iPhone, is he mobile? Well, research indicates that one of the most favored places where ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2011/11/20/you-don%e2%80%99t-need-a-mobile-strategy/ We compare in order to make the best decision. To do that we need to consider the opinion of both experts and crowds. Lulu is a musical collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica. Rarely has a new album received such extremely nasty and sustained abuse from the majority of fans and ... http://giraffeforum.com/wordpress/2011/11/13/navigating-through-crowds-and-experts/