By now everyone has heard the advice that it's bad practice to finish a presentation with a blank screen. Conventional wisdom says it looks poor and breaks the flow of the talk. I'm going to go one step further today and say it's also a missed opportunity -- one that many presenters don't take advantage of.

To avoid having a blank screen, presenters often have another slide that says something like "Questions?". This is better, but not by much.

The projector rarely gets turned off after a presentation, which means the audience is probably going to be staring at that slide for the next 30 minutes or so. Your last slide will be seen longer than any other slide in the deck. Moreover, people tend to remember more about the beginning and the end of things. Now, are you sure the final impression you want to leave the audience with is "Questions?".

It might be a good idea to put some more design into that last slide.

Building a better final slide

Up for discussion.

One tactic we used recently was to create a "big picture" diagram for the last slide. In our experience it's helpful to have something that people can point to when they're asking questions, rather than asking for a particular slide or speaking in abstract terms. So, for example, you could make a storyboard that recalls the main points of your talk or show them an overview of the system you're pitching. Make it a conversation piece. Ending with a visual summary not only jogs people's memories during the discussion phase, it will help them remember the talk later.

Another useful technique is to leave the audience with something actionable. This is an old marketing trick. When writing copy, they say the last sentence should tell the audience to do something, such as: "If you're concerned about water safety, write to your congressperson". You can do the same thing with your final slide. Leave your audience with a task that will supplement their understanding of your presentation or put them on the road to joining your cause.

In any case, consider what your goals are for your presentation and put yourself in your audience's shoes. Your final slide is not just a placeholder, it's an important tool in delivering your message. Take advantage of it.

I've extolled the virtues of getting fired here at BlogLESS before. I think everyone should get fired from a gig for standing up for their principles at least once, and this weekend – while you're upacking your winter sweaters – I wanted to give you something to think about with regards to the seemingly less accessible half of this equation. After all, it's easy to get fired: it's harder, though, to quit.

So get out your pencil and paper, this is going to require a little math. And listen: Don't think you can do this in your head and internalize it. You can't. You've got to see the numbers. Otherwise, its all going to seem like sound and fury, which I promise it's not. The payoff is huge. The day I really internalized this was the day my life got a lot happier. A lot.

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About a month ago, I wrote a post for BlogLESS about how to display video content from Vimeo with Valid XHTML using Drew McLellan's Flash Satay technique.

Recently, it occurred to me to make this explicit: You can do the exact same thing with videos from YouTube! So, in the interest of continued blog validation, let's take another look at what makes an embedded video invalid, and how to avoid it. We'll start with the generics, and then move on to the slightly more finicky YouTube requirements.

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Last week, I posted a video hosted on the video-sharing site Vimeo, only to be met with irritating XHTML validation errors.

The W3C XHTML Validator FAQ suggested I try Drew McLellan's famous Flash Satay method, but I just plain don't have the patience to wrap every embedded video on this blog in another Flash movie, and besides IE7 fixed the problem that motivated the Satay technique in the first place.

On top of all that, this particular error was incredibly easy to fix. (Which does make you wonder why Vimeo didn't just fix in the first place!)

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Putting an email address on a website is a lot trickier proposition than it used to be. These days, the web is populated with evil spambots, crawling the web and scraping email addresses off websites, which they can then use to solicit your interest in perverse sexual apparatus or imitation Rolex wristwatches.

But for those of us who are selling something, we have no choice but to provide a way for our readers to contact us. Now, in the past, many things have been done to accomplish this: overly elaborate or unnecessary contact forms, replacing part or all of an email address with an image, or munging an email address.

All three of these techniques are unsatisfactory. First, all of these techniques are often beatable by smart spambots. Second, and even more importantly, the bottom line from a usability perspective is quite simple: These strategies convolute things for users. The easiest interface element we can provide for our users is link that, when clicked, opens up a new email addressed to us in their email client.

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