Giraffe Forum

The Microsoft Office Online content team has found poor quality content to be like weeds in a garden. Left unchecked it smothers the quality content.
If you work on the Web you live in a culture of content production. It’s all about the creation and publishing of content. The web team has the skills to create […]

Sometimes, we are fools for complexity. When we hear complex language we can’t help but be impressed, even when we don’t understand what’s being said.
In Ben Goldacre’s excellent book, Bad Science, he often gives his opinion on the human condition, best summarized by: it looks complex, it sounds complex, it must be right, and it […]

Content influences offline purchasing behavior in profound ways. Its online influence is even greater.
“People say, I don’t trust my own experience, but I trust those numbers,” Christopher Hsee told Time Magazine in December 2008, when commenting on how people can be unduly influenced by product descriptions. Hsee, a professor of behavioral sciences and marketing at […]

The Web helps us make better decisions based on us doing often very detailed research. But certain decisions don’t require any research at all.
Say you’re feeling a little hungry. Will you have a piece of chocolate or an apple? When faced with such a decision in the past, did you ever decide to Google “chocolate” […]

Of all the things that make the Web different from print, linking is the most important.
Are we tool-making animals or are we animals made by tools? It’s an old question. How much did the quill shape our minds and worlds? We invented the printing press which then invented a new society, a new way of […]

There is probably no worse strategy for an intranet or public website than content migration. It is doomed to failure from the very start.
Joe the manager picks up a jug. Inside that jug is milk that is curdled, sour and foul smelling. As Joe shakes the jug the solids and water separate and slosh about […]

The more you delete, the more you simplify. The more you simplify, the more you increase the chances of your customers succeeding on your website.
I recently worked with an organization that had managed to delete a substantial quantity of content from its website. It was not an easy process. In fact, it took years of […]

Listening to customers is not enough. You must listen to the right ones.
Is the feedback you are getting for your website truly reflective of the needs of the majority of your customers? Too often, websites get feedback that reflects the ’squeaky wheel’ syndrome. (The squeaky wheel gets oiled.)
Are the customers who give feedback […]

It often seems that the primary purpose of localization is to create unreadable English that is cheap to translate into unreadable German.
A great many organizations do not believe content has any real value. They see it is as a cost, a necessary evil. Thus, they want to produce content for the lowest possible cost.
This […]

We don’t scan a webpage. Instead, we scan a particular block or section of it.
I was working with a company who, based on research, had discovered a top intranet task. It was interesting that the web team initially had no idea what this task was about, even though there was huge demand for it in […]