Category: Content design tools

Making your website more searchable

 

Photograph of a laptop showing Google search results

One of the most popular questions I am asked is ‘how do I make my website more searchable?’. With so much of our traffic coming from search engines like Google, Bing and Baidu (other search engines are available!), Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is really important. So what can you do as an editor to improve how your web pages appear in search results? In this post I will share some tips. (more…)

Interpreting your Google Analytics data

Dog behind a laptop showing Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very powerful tool which tracks how people interact with the pages they visit, this includes:

  • which pages they go to
  • how long they spend on them
  • where they came from i.e. did they use a search, type a web address in directly, click on a link in a newsletter etc.
  • what type of device they used
  • where in the world they were

and much much more.

Google Analytics records hundreds and hundreds of types of information that you can combine to build a picture of how people use our websites. Having access to all this data can be overwhelming and most of you won’t have the time (or patience) to trawl through it all.  We just need a few pieces of information to help us understand how our site is performing.

In this post I’ll explain some of main metrics to look out for and how you should interpret these to inform your content decisions. (more…)

NN/g UX Conference and tips for writing great digital copy

A day at the UX Conference in London

Lanyard for the UX conference in NovemberLast week, I attended the UX (User Experience) Conference in London. The conference brought together people from different industries across Europe, all with a shared interest in user experience. 

There were the usual networking opportunities, but the main focus of the conference was the wide range of training courses covering topics like:

  • Managing UX strategy
  • Information Architecture
  • Content strategy
  • Customer journey mapping
  • User testing
  • Writing for the web

(more…)

Tools for collaborative writing

In my last post I talked about pair writing. This is a really great technique for creating effective content, but there is one potential challenge – it can be difficult to find a slot in the diary when you are both free, and even if you do, you’ve then got to find an available room. This is true of any collaborative working, but once again technology saves the day.

There are many different tools that you can use to collaborate on a writing project in real time, and in this post I will talk about some of the ones I have used over the last couple of years. I will also go through some of the pros and cons of each. This is not a comprehensive study of all the tools available; it’s based on my experiences, so I would encourage you to do some further research and try out the tools yourself. (more…)

Tools for card sorting and tree testing

After reading my last post on card sorting you may be thinking about running a workshop, but you are put off because it will be difficult to organise. Worry not, as with so many things these days there is an online solution. In this post I will introduce a couple of tools to consider, you could even save a few innocent trees! (more…)