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A website is a strange beast — it is your reception area, your office, your shop, your brochure, your catalogue... And all without being able to walk into it, sit down in it, touch it. But just as you wouldn't want your customers to get lost on the way to a sales meeting in your offices, or to leave your shop in frustration because they can't find the goods they're looking for, so it is crucial that the visitors to your website can find their way around your website and get to where they want to go as easily as they can follow a sign, open a door, reach onto a shelf. The science of designing sites that work for visitors is known as usability.
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The word said has an elegant, indispensable simplicity. It's a mainstay of the journalist's art: "Five out of five editors find the noun form of the word 'overwhelm,' currently in vogue among the nation's life coaches, completely unacceptable," said Dr. Carla Ridge, founder of SSOUON (the Society to Stamp Out the Use of Overwhelm as a Noun). And in that context, exclusive use of "said" is appropriate and welcome.
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"Don't use big words."
Despite the well-meaning attempts of our teachers to help us develop a thorough grasp of English, we are constantly discouraged from venturing outside the narrow bounds of ordinary language.
Use a "vocabulary word" in class and feel the withering mockery of your classmates; drop a few sophisticated phrases into your presentation and watch someone accuse you of being pretentious or deliberately aiming to confuse. Oooh, using big words.
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"Taglines" are the slogans that copywriters and marketers devise to make a brand more memorable. New contributor Sarah Williams, founder of the copywriting company Wordsmith, sheds some light on what makes a winning tagline.
Short quiz — which products match these taglines? "Don't leave home without it," "It's the Real Thing," "Think Different." (Answers at the end of the article.)
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Continuing our political theme this week, columnist Nancy Friedman takes a look at the buzzwords of the current campaign season. Her background in developing names and brands gives her a unique perspective into how new political coinages bubble to the surface.
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As an SEO copywriter and marketing consultant, I look at a lot of Websites. When I'm asked to assess a company's site, the first question that often crosses my mind when I review it is, "Hmmm... what exactly do you do?"
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With this column, we introduce the Visual Thesaurus' newest columnists, Simon Glickman and Julia Rubiner of Editorial Emergency! Read our recent interview with Simon here.
We brand ourselves. It's what human beings do. Whether we wish to conform to some social or cultural norm (the traditional blue button-down worn by generations of IBM programmers) or stand out as rugged individualists (the prescription bottle in the earlobe hole of a kid I saw on a Los Angeles sidewalk), we are forever distinguishing ourselves.
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July 2, 2008
