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helping organizations thrive
web integration • web maintenance • web marketing

• Writing for the Web •

How to create online presentations

ReadWriteWeb presents 4+ Ways to Quickly Create Excellent Presentations Online in which they offer an annotated list of free Web-based presentation software - 7 in all including…

Link: 4+ Ways to Quickly Create Excellent Presentations Online

What do people want from your site?

Chris Brogan, a wonderful and prolific writer about social media & networks, lists three things he thinks users want from websites:

  1. information
  2. simple
  3. connection

Read his post for more on what he meant by each: What Do YOU Think People Want From Your Site

Read this book first

Before you develop or redesign your site, I highly recommend this easy-to-read book. It will help you visualize your site from the visitors’ point of view.

Design guidelines for email

As web designers, we’ve grown pretty good at understanding how to create a modern, semantic, accessible website using XHTML and CSS. We understand what makes a good website, and how to make it happen.

When it comes time to design emails though, do all the same rules apply? Are there things we should be doing specifically for email that don’t make sense on a website? In this article we’ll discuss the technical, design and information elements that make up a successful HTML email.

Link: 2008 Email Design Guidelines

Writing tools on the web

With the popularity of blogging and online journals, writers working in the online realm have a growing number of opportunities all the time to practice and refine their craft, and maybe even get paid for it. And if you’re working online, why not take advantage of all the opportunities to get great free and open source resources that can help you to write, edit and organize your work? Here’s a list of fifty open source tools that you can use to make your writing even better.

Link: 50 Awesome Open Source Resources for Online Writers

Visitors are likely to read only 28% of the info on a page

On the average Web page, users have time to read at most 28% of the words during an average visit; 20% is more likely.

This sounds about right in my experience. Follow the link for more numbers how Jakob Nielsen came up with these figures.

Link: How Little Do Users Read?

Get started with Twitter

The best contacts and resources to help you get it done.

Link: Guide to Twitter for Business

10 Steps to Being Found on Search Engines

Does your organization show up on the first page of results in search engines like Google or Yahoo? The content and structure of your website can have a dramatic effect on how easily potential constituents can find you via search engines. This article explains how.

Link: 10 Steps to Being Found on Search Engines

Check out Idealware’s great “Consumer-Reports-style” articles on databases, websites, email and advocacy, and office productivity. They also offer for a very reasonable price online seminars on how to select software for your organization.