Beantin

The Beantin Manifesto

Digital communication is a gathering point for pretty much everything we’ve ever learnt. There is a never-ending list of different specialities that need to be utilised to produce the seemingly mythical perfect web presence.

Those of us working with digital communication (or, if you want, “the web”) work in a rapidly changing sector. Yes, we’re maturing as a profession, but the sheer vastness of what we are trying to learn, understand, and manipulate - combined with the speed of change, means that maturity isn’t something that will arrive over-night.

Silos

Human beings love compartmentalising things. So do organisations. Unfortunately that doesn’t work with web communication. You can’t work in silos. Each speciality can’t sit in it’s silo and produce the optimal result without genuine co-operation and co-ordination with other specialities.

Ignorance is bliss

One of the biggest problems is that many of these silos don’t realise that the other silos exist. That’s understandable. A specialist programmer isn’t going to be a specialist copywriter. Your marketing department isn’t your finance department. You aren’t expected to know the details of how the other professional/department/silo goes about it’s business.

Until we stop arguing about which discipline lies at the top (or bottom) of the pyramid (“xxx is king”), until we start linking these skills horizontally, until we stop boxing ourselves in and closing the lid, our organisations and clients will fail to get the best out of this fantastic medium.

Principles

Here is my 5 point manifesto that I will follow to help join the dots, get specialities working together, and ultimately make a better web:

1. Share: Don’t hoard knowledge. Distribute and educate.
2. Honest feedback: Always speak my mind. Never hold back from sharing an opinion.
3. Good enough: Never aim for good enough. Aim for best.
4. Your best interests: Do things that are in the client’s best interests, not in the interests of add-on sales.
5. Web standards: As much as possible follow (and even create) web standards and best practices.

9 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 39-41, 2010)

Implementing Yammer within Your Organization Using Twitter Best Practices

The featured tool in this article is Yammer, but the tactics and principles described are valid for whatever intranet collaboration tool you are rolling out. Three critical tactics according to Hanesbrands: Gain leadership support, Partner early with IT, Help employees use the platform & see value.

Should intranet links open in a new window?

James at Step Two Designs has written a blog post based on a lively discussion on the Intranet Professionals LinkedIn group. I’m in agreement with James on this one - try having opening links in the same window whenever possible (or practical). Let the user choose.

Culture, Contribute, Confidence – The Gateway to Intranet Success

Some concrete advice & ideas by Carolyn on how to initiate a shift in company culture towards a collaborative and sharing organisation - a social intranet.

Information flow overview

In the first of a series of blog posts, Kristian has sketched the intranet information flow at Västra Götaland Regional Council. Understanding how all the information inter-links and flows around helps you maintain the information quality and ensure users are obtaining the correct information when and where they need it.

How to measure the effectiveness of web content

Website owners generally don’t do anywhere near enough testing, and testing of content in particular is almost non-existent. This article describes a three-pronged approach for measuring the effectiveness of your content. It’s a pipe-dream, and not really practical for a major re-write; but the theory is good and useful for more contained content changes.

How to find bloggers relevant to your business

Taking the time to find, nurture, and reward relationships with bloggers is a key task in marketing (and SEO, branding, PR, etc). Not only is it effective, it can be really cost effective too.

Nokia upsets blogger due to marathon PR failure

Nokia’s PR company Mission shows you how not to engage the blogging community. They have subsequently apologised (in the blog comments of the original post). But still. Smells of time-pressure & poor project management at the very least.

SEO starter guide updated

Two years after releasing their first SEO Starter Guide, Google have updated it and released an updated version. A great handbook for web managers - it explains many best practices and recommendations for websites - but it’s not an ultimate guide to SEO (and doesn’t claim to be!)

Is hiding text with CSS to improve accessibility bad for SEO?

Will you get into trouble with Google if you do the right thing accessability wise? Basically, no. If you create valid code, your SERPs are safe…

8 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 37-38, 2010)

Children’s Websites: Usability Issues in Designing for Kids

9 years on from their first survey, Nielsen have produced a new study into the usability of Children’s websites. “It’s now common for a 7-year-old kid to be a seasoned Internet user with several years’ experience.” - If we think that the millennials are the internet generation - in 10-15 years this wave of 7 year olds will be in the marketplace.

No more writing for the web?

The conversation is in response to this blog post: Why it might be time to stop writing for the web by Tamsin Hemingray at iCrosing.

Interesting post, and I agree with aspects of it - but ultimately I disagree. Yes you should write for your target audience, but when writing for digital channels you have to understand as a writer that your target audience includes the machines that process, index & re-use your carefully written content.

5 Articles worth reading… (Spotted: Week 26, 2010)

Why I Still Blog

Hans Kullin asked and answered Why do I still blog? last week on his blog, this week, John Cass gives his answer. Both provide some interesting insights into the ever-evolving blogosphere.

Yahoo Style Guide

July 6th Yahoo will launch their book, which will cover grammar, punctuation, web accessibility and writing copy that helps SEO. The companion web site has some useful articles too.

10 Reasons Why Your Analytics Are Failing & 13 Tools To Help

The reasons listed here are quite a nice analytics “basics” overview. Covers a lot of things that are all too often overlooked.

Serving Static Content from a Cookieless Domain

You are all (as you’re clever, web-savvy people who read this blog), already serving your static content from a seperate domain. This is a good explaination of why (and how) you should make sure that your media domain doesn’t serve up cookies with all the media requests.

Sitemaps: One file, many content types

Now all specialized sitemap formats can be rolled into one file. Sitemaps, and how Google are enhancing them, is a “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours” situation. Google want to serve accurate, useful, search results - and we all want our pages, images, videos, etc to be included. Get scratching.