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Silas Notes

Setting up a booth can be shocking.

Or, another reason this aircast is annoying me so much.
Posted by Jeff on February 18, 2007
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(Saturday Afternoon) I made it back to the hospitality suite after my Creating an Integrated Web Strategy to find Fedor and Silas Man (and everyone else.) We needed to get the booth set up in the few hours I had available before my session prep with the panel for the ‘Is your site a bust or a must; website critiques‘ or something like that. Our booth location is great on the exhibit hall floor (I believe it is 1131 for those of you reading this while at NRB…please stop by and say hello and pick up some marketing materials and case studies – or get them online.)We have a prime corner spot across from our friends and client ADRA, and next to Gospel for Asia (a MASSIVE display.) Just seeing so many people setting up their booths put this NRB into perspective for me. It is HUGE. I’m sure there are towns in America that are not even half this size and use only a fraction of the electricity.

Our booth has power this year, and I found out the hard way. I got a tiny bit of a shock walking across the carpeting, but though nothing of it- the air is dry in here and I have this elephant foot that I am nearly dragging at this point. Then again, a few minutes later I got a serious jolt of energy (and not from the carbs the night before) and reached out and grabbed Fedor and she was shocked as well. I guess that in addition to healing my injured ankle my aircast is a great conduit for electricity or I now have genetically enhanced powers. (Am I on ‘the list’??)

I’m glad I got to participate on the panel with Cathy Allen – another client – from Love Worth Finding, as well as Mary Calvin from our west coast Trinet team, and Rachel from Salem Web.

First off, Cathy is a great presenter and got the meeting started off on the right note and the room of about 40 or so was immediately interested in the session. Generally, in my 12+ years of experience I dread and avoid the ‘what do you think of my website’ question, but put a microphone in my hand and I won’t shut up.

We started by talking about the NRB award winning sites in Ministry and Broadcast categories. For ministries, it was Walk Thru the Bible (www.walkthru.org) and for broadcast Oneplace.com (www.oneplace.com) – I won’t critique on this blog but will say that I think the Calvary Chapel Ft Lauderdale (www.calvaryftl.org) was robbed. My major complaint with the Walk Thru site was that they have about 70% of the homepage as a big flash movie that isn’t clickable to an action and with the Calvary site the white text on black is a general no-no. Tsk tsk.

We were also able to look at sites that were provided in ‘real-time’ by many of the attendees and included:

For the sake boring everyone reading this with my comments, I ask that you provide your comments about these sites and i’ll chime in. There are some glaring mistakes – can YOU find them?

But, for those of you unable or not interested in looking at these sites, but still want something, I’ll provide some general comments that applied to many of these:

  1. Know who is visiting your site and design for them.
  2. Think about navigation
  3. Do not use the middle area of your site – generally the content area – as navigation
  4. never, EVER, make something spin. Seriously.
  5. To ‘click here’ or not to ‘click here’ If you use ‘click here’ you must establish some sort of user expectation as to where they are going. As a stand-alone, click here doesn’t really mean anything unless there is some call to action that it anchors or leads.
  6. Do not use bells and whistles just to use them. Some audiences are not interested, BUT some are…use technology wisely
  7. Generally, your homepage shouldn’t scroll too much – make it a starting point for your visitor to begin to explore your site – trying to give them everything all at once is overwhelming.

I could go on and on, but won’t.

The session ended with loud applause and we continued discussions with many attendees. Thank you all, it was great.

At this point I was nearly comatose with cold and aches – but still had time to help Fedor get some last minute printing at Kinkos and a Five Guys burger. Yum.

Back at the hotel, Duncan was finishing up his presentation for the next day on Web Analytics. For those of you who know Duncan, this may come as a shocker. He used clip art in his powerpoint. And it looks good. He was walking around the room claiming to be the next great graphic designer. The presentation is pretty amazing, clip art aside. And also for some of you, he finished before midnight. Another first from what I was told.

With a bottle of Nyquil and a straw I went to bed

  1. Jeff was sad I didn’t pick up on his Heroes reference to the “The List” above.

    Don’t worry while 24 has taken the top spot on Mondays I still love me some Heroes.

    Posted by Jacob Feb 19

  2. Evaluating websites without knowledge of audience or site objectives is always a difficult one because you tend to only have subjective comments left to talk about. With saying that however, there is the user experience… no spinning stuff is a great comment Jeff. There is no audience that spinning stuff will attract or a site objective that it will solve. Please, world prove me wrong. I’m dying to know if someone has an example of good spinning stuff.

    Posted by Michael Feb 19

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