Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

The Text100 Sydney team recently launched a brand new design to its blog.

...Text100 Sydney team decided to move from our old blog to something new. We hired a web development team and gave them our specifications; they both created the new blog’s current design and offered to host it on their servers (an offer we gladly accepted). Since we were using WordPress on both our sites, importing all our posts and pages to the new design was only slightly more complex than a cut-and-paste job. No coding, no tinkering with firewalls, and no stress.

In 2002, creating a basic website took around four to five weeks and a fair amount of technical savvy. In 2012, you can set up a professional blog within a day, without any specialist technical knowledge. Even complex web portals like e-commerce sites are cheaper and faster to set up than ever before. And with more businesses investing in their social media and digital presence than ever before, having a solid website to tie everything together is a must.

I’ve built up a few habits on which I tend to rely when working on both personal and professional websites....

[Good blogging case study ~ Jeff]

...Jakob Nielsen was a household name in web development teams – and "Information Architect" and "Usability Expert" were considered careers for the future. Then one day usability started to fade into the background. It became more of an afterthought. When is the last time you saw any job with "usability" in the title on any sort of list of jobs for the future?

The irony is that usability never became less important – it was just that marketing people moved on to promoting sexier things … like social media and focused on buzzwords like "engagement" and creating "conversations." The after effect of this focus is still evident all around us:

United Airlines has a website that is a towering monument to what happens when no one listens to the usability experts. Tasks are impossible to complete without too many clicks, the interface is completely non-intuitive, and your logged in profile is inconveniently forgotten before any transaction....

[Rethink & a social media reminder - JD]