Blogless

Nothing too revelatory for the BlogLESS regular here, but I thought I’d offer you a little story. This all happened in about ten minutes last Friday, and in those minutes, I found myself mentally reinforcing a few key maxims for web design.

Tim O’Reilly: Why Twitter is Better than Blogs

A couple of times every day, I check in over at Twitter. I did this a few days ago, and, slogging through the endless mini-conversations, half jokes, and descriptions of lunches, I came across a link posted by Tim O’Reilly. The link, provacatively labeled "Test your color IQ," just so happened to be the right bait at the right time.

Lesson One: Twitter is better than blogs for advertising. If you want someone to check out a link, and you’re popular on Twitter, you’ve got a significantly better chance of catching their interest with a pithy turn of phrase and link in a tweet. I can’t even tell you the last time I read Tim O’Reilly’s blog, whereas he has my ear every day, rain or shine, on Twitter. Of course, the trick to this is that you’ve got to be popular on Twitter. Which takes a lot of tweeting.

Color IQ: The Power of Fun (Redux)

Clicking the link, I was pleasantly surprised to find a fun, brand-apropos little Flash game. The point of the game is to try and line up all the color blocks in order of hue.

Here’s my solution. You’ll be glad to know that I have perfect color vision.

It had everything DLB likes: On-message content, simple design, fun and a little bit of challenge. I really enjoyed doing it. It was, in other words, the perfect lead-in. I had enough fun during the test that I decided to check out the rest of the website.

Lesson Two: Give the people something fun, and they’ll pay you back with interest. For the vast majority of companies out there, people aren’t going to come to your site because they want to give you money. You’ve got to give them something they want.

Hi, how are you?

Then disaster struck. I hopped over to the homepage for a quick look, and I couldn’t figure out what the company did. I knew it had something to do with color, but their homepage didn’t explain to me who they are!

Lesson Three: Wear a nametag. Let your users know who you are and what you do on every page of your site. You never know when Tim O’Reilly is going to tweet your flash app, and all of a sudden a bunch of people who aren’t looking for you are going to find you. After that, you’ve got about ten seconds worth of user interest to communicate your message.¹

^[1] I know, I know. You’re just going to have to take my word that there’s a perfectly good internal reason that our brand is currently shrouded in mystery. There really is. Feh.