Clicking Here is Detrimental to Design December 13, 2008
Posted by airyrae in New Media Effectiveness.Tags: click here, descriptive links, text links and web design
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“Indecision may or may not be my problem”
Jimmy Buffett
So you’re designing a Web site: making decisions left and right that will effect how consumers perceive your company and use its Web site. If you’ve been working relentlessly to design the perfect Web site click here. But what are you ‘clicking here’ for? - Tips on designing the perfect Web site? An award for relentless web designer of the year? – Where a ‘click here’ link is going to take you is oftentimes a grey area because ‘click here’ can be taken in several contexts depending on the sentence it appears with.
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Click here’ links can ruin an otherwise great Web site because they are not self-explanatory and are oftentimes difficult, if not impossible, to use. While some historically believed that ‘click here’ links are beneficial to a Web site and increase traffic to a given link, they were wrong. While the copy of a Web site is oftentimes someone else’s responsibility other than the web designer: don’t let a silly thing like a job description ruin your hard work. Many designers stress over the visual design of a Web site, nitpicking over every little detail, striving for perfection: and then ruin all of their hard word by allowing ‘click here’ links to be used throughout the copy on the site.
‘Click here’ links harm the indexing of your pages by making them unsearchable. Some of the major search engines use the terms in link text to assist with indexing web pages. Using “click here” to identify related pages linked from pages on your site will harm the indexing of your pages and make it harder if not impossible for people to find your Web site. On the other hand, using descriptive link text will help users find your page.
‘Click here’ as link text is also self defeating because it makes it difficult for viewers to use your web pages. Ultimately, you should rewrite ‘click here’ to give users a good idea of where the link will lead them.
Furthermore, people generally don’t read online, they scan. There are a range of reasons for this: People are busy and just want to find the information they were looking for – Now. There is a lot of information competing for the attention of web viewers. Furthermore, many users have difficulty reading online because of poor screen resolution, glare, tiny font sizes, poor contrast and so on.
Link text stands out during a visual scan of a web page, provided the designer sticks to the norm of underlining links and using a different color from other text. Using meaningful or descriptive text links rather than ‘click here’ makes it easy for users to easily find links on your site that might be of interest to them.
Furthermore, ‘click here’ links can be detrimental to users with disabilities. Many web users that are blind or have difficulty seeing use screen readers (like JAWS or Window Eyes) to read web pages. Just as sighted uses scan a page to see what’s available, screen reader users can scan a page for the links it provides to other resources. Oftentimes the screen reader programs read out just the hyperlinks on the page; and click here, click here, click here is not very helpful to anyone especially the overall design of a Web site.
Internet for All December 4, 2008
Posted by airyrae in New Media Effectiveness.Tags: internet for all, translate internet
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“Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about”
Benjamin Lee Whorf
English, Chinese and Spanish are the top three languages used on the Internet. Minorities are more inclined to utilize new media, possibly because new media enables easier access to variety of content that is easily translated of published in a person’s language of choice. But to enable more people to have access to the Internet, it has been argued that a larger range of languages be supported via the Internet.
According to Internet World Stats the majority of Internet users use English (29.4%), followed by Chinese (18.9%) and Spanish (8.5%). After that the usage drops off with the tenth most used language, Italian, at just 2.4% of all Internet users. But ‘just 2.4% of Internet users still accounts for over thirty four million users. Consider the following chart of the top ten Internet languages and Internet usages statistics by language.
“Internet for all” means going beyond those who speak English and should encompass content, hardware, software and internationalized domain names. Search engines, in particular, should support multiple languages as it is the way most people navigate the Internet. Google launched a Maori version of their search engine, a language spoken by just 150,000 or so people living mainly in New Zealand. Coinciding with Maori Language Week, Google Aotearoa caters specially to people who speak the language of New Zealand’s indigenous people. Aotearoa is a Maori word often translated as Land of the Long White Cloud, and commonly used by North Island Maori as the word for New Zealand.
However, some doubt as to whether there is a high enough demand for using the Internet in local languages. For example, higher education in India is predominately in English and a language people are aspiring to. But before millions of dollars in invested in integrating the content of the Internet across all languages, one must first consider illiteracy levels among speakers of these languages to insure that resources aren’t being wasted. Take for example, Latin, which is said to be a dead language. While there are a few people that can read Latin and even fewer people who can actually speak it: would it really be worth translating the Internet into this language.
Vlogs: The Most Engaging Vehicle? November 26, 2008
Posted by airyrae in New Media Effectiveness.Tags: media involvement, video ads, viewer engagement, vlogs
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“Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?”
Chuck Palahniuk
A consumer’s engagement and participation level make mediums more or less involving than other mediums. Television is considered a low-involvement medium because commercials are animate while the viewer is inanimate, and because the pace of viewing is out of the viewer’s control and there is little opportunity for reflection and making connections. As such, newspapers and magazines are high involvement media because the advertising is inanimate while the reader is animate.
The primary aspect of consumer participation that determines the involvement of a medium is whether or not the consumer controls their pace of exposure. For example, when watching television consumers have less control over how much time they spend or don’t spend watching commercials. On the other hand, with magazines and newspapers the consumer has more control over how much time they spend reading each advertisement. However, streaming video allows the animate qualities of television and the control of magazines and newspapers: making vlogs, marketing shorts, and other online videos a very effective marketing tactic.
Engagement is being defined as the new currency for advertising return on investment. Consumer engagement is similar to the concept of high and low involvement media in the sense that highly engaging media lends itself more to complex advertising content. The industry has finally moved beyond simply measuring the number of people that see an ad, to understanding how viewers are actually interacting with it. Vlogs have merged the benefits of traditional low and high involvement mediums.
Consumers have the power to control their interaction with vlogs, and re-experience them based on their individual whims. As such, vlogs also can disseminate more information to consumers, which use to only be appropriate for high-involvement mediums. Vlogs allow consumers to experience and reflect on the information that is being provided to them on their own terms. Furthermore, streaming videos allows consumers to experience vlogs and video virtually on demand. Video encompassing forms of engaging new media seem to be the future of both affective and effective integrated communications.
Arin
Blissful Ignorance and Rude Awakenings October 26, 2008
Posted by airyrae in New Media Effectiveness.Tags: new media, Web sites
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“Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance”
Will Durant
I’ve come to the realization this week that new media is just as effective as traditional media. I’ll be the first to admit that I had a predisposition towards traditional media. I was of the mind set that new media was a cheaper alternative to traditional media placements but could never serve as the principal in company’s media buy. Never being a creature of change, I’ve been reluctant to learn about the attributes that new media brings to the world of marketing. Ignorance is bliss…right? Well in all actuality, ignorance is just ignorance. Drawing conclusions about new media without knowing anything about it was simply juvenile of my part.
Blogs, in-game advertising, and Web site are all considered to be new media. You may be wondering how new media could possibly entail Web sites, since they have become almost a necessity for any business. I had trouble wrapping my head around the concept of new media, especially in regards to Web sites. So keep in mind throughout this and future discussions that the term new media is simply used to define and medium that is both digital and interactive: hence, the inclusion of Web sites.
In fact Web sites are one of the new mediums I’d like to further discuss as a result of a rude awakening I’ve had this week. In terms of new media and the market I’m definitely behind the curve. While I heavily rely on the Web sites of businesses to carry out my professional and personal tasks; I assumed that businesses targeting elderly markets need not worry so much their online presence. But as it turns out, Web sites are effective at reaching the elderly market. Internet users over the age of 60 heavily log onto Web sites to get information about health, travel, and to e-mail. While older users are definitely more cautious about their online activities they still rely on Web sites to get information that is important to them.
As such, the effectiveness of new media can be seen when considering the markets that are being targeted with individual placements. Keep in mind that there is no medium that can effectively reach everyone. But marketers are not trying to reach everyone; they’re trying to reach their customers. For example, I doubted the effectiveness of in-game advertising. In-game advertising seemed like it would be more annoying than effective. However, gamers like the in-game advertising saying it makes games more realistic and influences their purchasing decisions. This example shows that there is a tendency to doubt the effectiveness of media when we do not use the media ourselves. So keep in mind throughout our exploration that, like traditional media, the effectiveness of new media is heavily correlated to the target market.
Until next time,
Arin
