Giraffe Forum

Press releases are a form of propaganda. Publishing them on your website shows your customers how you are attempting to spin the media.
The Web is where we go because we don’t believe the hype, because we don’t like being spun. The Web is the land of the thinking customer. So, why do so many […]

Words are the building blocks of every website. But then, words are the building blocks of modern civilization.
Presidential candidate, Barack Obama, was recently accused of being all words and no action, of being lots of rhetoric and little substance. Here’s how he replied:
“Don’t tell me words don’t matter. ‘I have a dream.’ Just words? ‘We […]

The words people use when searching are not always a true reflection of what they’re really looking for.
Millions of people search for cheap hotels but are they really looking for a cheap hotel? Or are many of them in search of a five star hotel at a cheap price? And even if they are looking […]

Sears Roebuck was one of the very first large corporations. It was in the mail-order business. It used content to make the sale.
In 1906, Sears Roebuck opened a mail-order plant in Chicago. It was the largest business building in the world. The Sears catalogue stated that the plant was using “every known mechanical appliance for […]

Out of 18 choices, why does one piece of content get 49 percent of the vote while another gets 0 percent?
Over the last six years, I have tested a range of headings and summaries. The tests were carried out in 14 countries with almost 3,000 people. People were asked to scan 31 headings and 18 […]

Senior managers don’t take content seriously because people who write content don’t come across as being serious. If content professionals want more respect, they need to present content as a science, not an art.
I have spent most of my adult life writing content, or else advising people on how best to write and manage it. […]

In the design of physical products, the use of words is often seen as a sign of a flaw of the design. On the contrary, in web design, without words, there is no design.
“If a design depends upon labels [words], it may be faulty,” Donald Norman writes in his book, The Design of Everyday Things. […]

Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, writing for Time:
Perhaps Internet actions speak louder than survey answers. Take the cost of gasoline. Despite gasoline prices reaching an all-time high this month, searches for “gas prices” during September 2005, when gas prices breached the $3/gallon mark, were six times greater than last week when […]

Being customer-centric is about understanding the language of your customers. But language is changing at a dizzying pace on the Web. A Business Week article takes an interesting look at the phenomenon:
Making judgments about terms related to new Web technologies and activities is particularly difficult. Online, tech industry, and marketing jargon easily spreads from the […]

The most surprising finding of upcoming Eyetrack 2007 is this, according to the researchers: A much larger percentage of story text was read, on average, online than in print.

77 % online
62 % in broadsheet
57 % in tabloid

These findings could of course be used as an excuse by lazy editors (or their managers) for not writing […]