Quick post on home page design analysis
Warning for the unwary: I have just read the rest of Swales for class so I am not quite sure I am coherent.
Comparing SPCA and Union Carbide is easy at first go. The SPCA's mission is to save pets, which must be helped if you can be convinced to feel sympathy for the plight of their animals. The pages have a very "home page" feel, the logo has a line drawing of pets that evokes child-like whimsy, and the pet bios are written anthropomorphically (if that's a word), as if the pet was speaking in his own voice. This has to work, because I talk to my own cats as if they were children and have conversations (to me, anyway) with them in which they respond in perfectly understandable ways (to me, of course. My husband thinks I'm mentally affected when I talk to my cats as if they understand me. However, if they don't understand me, why do they cock their head as if they are listening? Just to placate me? I think not. However, as always, I digress).
In contrast, the Union Carbide page seeks to disassociate itself from itself. By this, I mean the site is very sparse and offers very little information about what it is that Union Carbide does other than make a connection between its "products" and the everyday things of our common lives. Union Carbide's site is impersonal, which it needs to be so that no one will remember things like its plants blowing up, its raping of the third world, and the dangerous chemicals it cooks up in its Satanic labs. (Gee, I'm not biased am I?) Visually it really slices the world into disassociated pieces - grapes and pills in mid-air, completely out of context in its every day situation so we can consider them as simple objects. I love the company history here - a master of PR certainly was behind this. The history is cut down into out-of-context chronological bullets. I suppose Union Carbide couldn't possibly put in any historical markers such as pictures of historical events because they could also remind the viewer of the historical events the company has been involved in, usually on the losing side of history. Interesting.
NCSU's websites on the other hand . . . they mostly seem of a piece, as if they were designed by the same person. The 97 and 04 sites are almost identical except for the breaking up of the navigation into a different layout. The 2001 site seems to be some attempt at branding the university and the Wolfpack, with that picture of a wolf pack among snowdrifts (yeah, we get tons of that in Raleigh) that's on a lot of their current advertising. I would say the 04 site does the best branding job, because the pictures and the bell tower pic tie in the different goings-on of the university in a very uncomplicated, uncluttered way that suggests a wide variety of departments and activities, suggestive of such a large university. You get the sense of the broadness of it all without feeling overwhelmed. Graduate school is a different experience than college, I know; having gone to a very small college I can only imagine the cultural shock and freshman fears that newbies endure when they first come to a place with 30,000 students. Yikes. I'm only there at night so I see a very, very small portion of it, but I remember clearly the first Sunday I went into the library and couldn't believe the noise level in the building. Every seat and empty corner in the place was occupied with someone with a book bag. Nine floors of traffic. Pretty intense. The site manages to make all that a bit easier to handle and makes it seem more exciting than intimidating, but I can't really articulate how the design does that exactly. I really lack a language to explain visual rhetoric. I need to learn one, obviously.
Engin Has His Big Game . . .
. . . the one I knew he was heading towards all year. Now he is going to get
the attention he deserves . . . if we continue to win.
Dear Wolfpack,
You'll all be fine if you just all play like
Engin:
Sophomore guard Engin Atsur has committed only 6 turnovers all season in ACC games. In his last 77 minutes of action, the sophomore guard has turned the ball over only one time. He's also played some tough defense, holding Duke's J.J. Redick to 8 points, Georgia Tech's Jarrett Jack to 16 and Maryland's John Gilchrist to 13 points. -- Gary Hahn, Gopack.com.
Political Action if you are up for it
I don't mean to make this a class issue, but I do mean to say something about it. So if talking about gay marriage offends you, please read someone else's blog post today . . .
Equality NC is enabling email letters via their website to protest any anti-LBGT legislation that may be introduced in the NC General Assembly that would specifically ban marriage rights to gays, lesbians and trans-gendered people. I have friends who have been discriminated against because of their sexual orientation, including one of my very best friends who lost two jobs in the church because she was outed. I find it disgusting that any state legislature would take action to deny anyone the right to marry and enjoy the legal privileges that I and my husband enjoy, such as the right to take action on his wishes should he become incapacitated, the right to gain each other's inheritance or property upon their death, and much more, no matter how they feel about homosexuality or any other sexual-gender issue. The bible has nothing to do with the constitution - if it did, we could lock up the ministers we don't like. Which isn't such a bad idea in some extreme cases (no, I'm just kidding), but I'd rather live with Jerry Falwell in my country than give it the power to throw him in a cell just because some people don't agree with him.
NC doesn't exactly have a history of standing up for this kind of issue, so every letter to your legislature COUNTS. Don't let fear stand in the way of being a human being and granting the same rights to everyone. If I die, I know my husband will take care of my wishes. If I was gay I would want the same rights. I don't know the whole series of issues around this, or what the actual legal rights in NC are right now, but I want to stop even the hint of denying of what I consider to be a basic right in a free society. I'm going to educate myself on this issue, after I go tell my legislators to listen to me.
Visit Equality NC and click on Say "No" to Discrimination in our Constitution.
Company histories as a genre
From Jason's notes on genre:
Genres are classes of communicative events that are related to one another in that they share a common communicative purpose. Variations that one would recognize among members of this genre class reflect more the idiosyncrasies of the situations in which their communicative purpose is enacted (see Miller, 1984, p. 164).
What is the common communicative purpose of the company histories we're looking at?
I can't help but think like a marketer here and immediately ponder that in marketing communications, the first thing you learn is that no one reads your writing, so you are not necessarily communicating through good writing. A lot of times the visual look of the piece/website and/or the feel of the print, catalog, or book makes more of an impression than how the writing swings. It's a hard lesson to learn but it immediately came to mind when I read these. These are all similarly awfully written in my opinion. But moving right along . . .
Companies are notorious for not paying attention to their actual customers in these situations, and only paying attention to what they think the customer wants to hear; in my mind almost every company exhibits blinders when they talk about themselves, in the first place because they assume people want to know about them, when in a business-to-customer relationship, all the customer wants to know is what you will do for me (them) and couldn't probably give a single care whether or not the founder of the company was a straight-shooting, smart guy, and in the second place they purposefully gloss over the bad stuff in a mis-guided attempt to "face the truth head on" by "naming it" and then "controlling the conversation" by glossing it over. This is especially obvious in the Cargill history, which is a company that literally has been in the courtroom more than just about any large agricultural products company, except maybe ADM, formerly Archer Daniels Midland, the worldwide leader in putting corn syrup in every known food product, thus making us all obese, and price-fixing in third-world countries.
If you haven't noticed I've been a little anti-marketing talk, mostly because I've been the victim of a lot of BS sales and marketing talk recently. But there I go, digressing again. Ahem.
In all three of these company histories, the focus is on making the company look 1) stable by exhibiting a chronological history that can be evidenced by some kind of "factual" data; 2) customer-friendly by personalizing the founders of the company as "real people" and 3) successful by emphasizing volume of sales or profit dollars.
One other convention that characterize these three histories are unprovable hyperbole:
- Prudential Financial's distinctive rock logo and Prudential's name are among the most enduring brands in U.S. corporate history.
- Houghton Mifflin has built a reputation as one of the premier U.S. publishing houses for more than 150 years.
- Cargill intends to be the global leader in nourishing people, and its employees will do it by being trustworthy, creative and enterprising - as they have done for over 135 years.
Is this a genre? Do company histories speak to a discourse community? Probably only the community of companies, but I don't believe others really READ, DISCUSS and LEARN from these texts. They are conventional, but do they serve a community? I would argue they only serve to enhance the company's own good feeling about themselves, but I don't think other companies buy any of the garbage these histories sell. I'm not sure there's a community being served here. I can agree that there is a "prototypical" company history, but the discourse community part seems lacking. Perhaps Jason will enlighten me further on this.
Thottbot: Online Information Management
I don't play MMORPG games because they are too involving. The way I see it, you can either get into a massive multi-player online role-playing game, or you can have a life. They are another example of an online information space one has to
commit to; I suppose it could be argued that it might force you to commit, if you get all the way involved. But anyway - from a blog called
Discourse.net I found another blog posting about an
online database called
Thottbott for a game called "World of Warcraft" that has serious implications for online information management. Apparently the way this database works is by automatically tracking the exploits of players via a bot, and so aggregates their expertise automatically for the database. In a word, the database creates meta-knowledge.
Aside: I have metas everywhere in my life now. Meta-data, meta-knowledge, and metaverses. I think I've come across a meta in my reading every day for about a week. Which may be some strange cosmic coincidence leading me to finally developing a theory of everything, or just YHWH having a laugh at my expense. One never knows.
This would be a massive tool for just about any kind of large content management system or knowledge network, especially technical writing. Imagine if, while you were working, your content management system or information tool offered you real, helpful tips to do your job more efficiently, or pointed you to the knowledge base to pull in data for you. Wait, that might just annoy you to death. It would kind of be like having either the most helpful librarian or the most annoying at your constant side. Either way, it makes me go
hmmm.
Great List Apart article on building websites . . .
that I must link to so I won't forget it.
Genres and the web
Web innovation and technology is moving so fast that marketing cannot keep up. Blogs, the very thing we are experimenting with in class, have hit marketing in a huge way and now everyone is talking about blogging for their business. The problem is, it's being touted as the next new thing at the same time that experienced bloggers are already starting to say that blogging is "old hat." It's lost its "purity" by going commercial. I think the reality is that now that marketers have a hold of it, it will become old hat, commercialized, and stale. Like pop-ups and banner ads.
Blog communities take a hell of a long time and a hell of a lot of effort to take hold. I think the most successful blog I read is Wil Wheaton's, and he's been doing it for a few years now. He drew attention because of his connection to Trekkies and movie buffs, but the quality and quantity of his writing and his sheer uniqueness keep people coming back to his site. Neil Gaiman's site is another one I read, but it is a commitment on his part and on mine. He blogs just about every day, and it has to be work. The sheer quantity of information he puts on it keeps me running after him. If I don't read his posts that day, the next day I'll be three or four posts behind. It can't be making him much money, though, not for the time he's putting in. Maybe only non-commercial blogs have any hope of being real instances of communication.
I changed the design -- again
I found this template this morning at Noipo.org and I really liked the colors and the clean feel, so I linked it to my blog. I'm much happier now that red is back on my site.
Design
As I look at my blog with a more critical eye, I'm liking this template. It's clean and has a lot of white space. It may be too muted, but I don't like the other free options. I think I'm going to check out Karisyma's site and find a blogger template I like better, but there are a lot of things to like about this design. What is it about white space that is visually pleasing? I think it's that it gives the eye a break, and helps create a feeling of openness, where one's thoughts can spread out. My company's site is just the opposite. It's small and crowded and hard to navigate. I hope Jake can fix it, I really do. I think I have a website strategy in my head now; if he can really do what I think he can do, it just might work out. Things don't seem so jumbled, confused, and hopeless in my mind, and I think I can sell it to my boss. I got really mad at him for his micro-mangement today, but after venting to Richard at dinner, I looked at my blog template and things seemed to go click in my mind, and I realized I know now what I want to do. It's a good feeling after being full of self-doubt, dread and fear these last few weeks. Now on to a boatload of reading for next week's classes and building up positivity for Sunday's game.
My Nerd Score
Another one-point loss is not the end of the Wolfpack as we know it
The fungi are at it again! Sadly, I have to admit that this morning I was there with them. I pondered it, I even said it outloud:
What is going wrong? But all it took to get me back into positivity mode was to spend some quality time among the fungi, and boy are they full of
shit. The offense is working, the guys have nothing but hustle, and my hero,
Engin Atsur, is a warrior for the ages. When the officials put 1.6 seconds back on the clock, Engin's facial expression was the same as it was at the start of the game. He never gets rattled, he never gets upset, and he never looks like he expects to lose. The shots just didn't fall when they needed to, and since I can't hit the broad side of the barn unless I'm driving toward it in a car, I have no advice to give other than don't ever give up, ever. There is still a lot of basketball left to play. From now on, I'm only visiting the message boards to find out if
Gene Gallin has posted more pictures. Go Pack!
The morning after my last frustrating day
How do I recount yesterday? It started out so well. I spoke with the vendor who will most likely be my next website host/SEO provider/php guru and got some really positive news about my site--that it can actually be fixed so that it's usable, readable, navigable, and indexable (wait, that's not a real word, is it? Oh well) within my existing budget. Then I spoke with a Yellow Pages sales weenie and that vendor accepted our repayment terms (long story, I won't recount it except to say, there is a good reason why he's been relegated to the sales weenie category). I had lunch, and managed not to burn my soup this time. I sat down at my worktable and began to fold the last 500 campaign letters going out to announce our new lawyer, the NC State Senator from the 7th district. And then I looked out the window. . .
Taking a break from folding, I go to check my email and find out that Peg posted to my blog. I visit my blog to find out that someone hacked into it, changed the design, changed the url, and left the posts alone. I could scratch my head and try to figure out why, but then I recalled that hackers do things for absolutely nothing more than self-amusement.
I didn't get to leave work until 4:30. Rather than recount which is probably a familiar story to anyone who tried to get home last night, I'll just tell you that we arrived home at half-time (we were up eleven points!) after navigating a wrecked bus and about seven subsequently-stranded cars before becoming stranded ourselves, but at least on our street, annoyed, hungry, hypoglycemic, and beyond frustrated. I stuffed a peanut butter sandwich into my stomach and watched us lose by one point! I visit course reserves to see that the Wysocki article is finally up, and I resolve to read it. Five pages in, my toner dies. And did it annoy anyone else that the article was scanned in so badly? My toner might have made it if I didn't have to navigate huge blocks of black. My husband's toner made it through the rest of the first section of the article before it died. So now I have to read this crappy pdf on the pc (no offense Jason, but e-reserves do not make for pleasant screen reading). There was nothing for it but to take a pill and hope for sleep (the only way I get to sleep is with the help of pharmaceuticals. More on that later). Stuck at home this morning, at least for several hours, all of my work is living in the real world (no files I can go download, no online access to my work today) and so I am already behind. Joy, rapture, and warm cookies.
Welcome to my new blog at a new home. I apologize that it is not glowing with positivity today. Poor Ilian. His free throws didn't fall and they always fall. Imagine getting back on the bus in the freezing cold after losing by one point to come back to . . . Raleigh paralyzed by ice.
Criticize Away, Class
I have an interesting situation at work that I hope this class can help me address. You may be able to save
my company's face in the online information space. If you've read the other posts on my blog you may sense that I have a search engine optimization/website marketing problem. I do. My personal injury law firm is currently trying to determine the following things concerning our internet marketing efforts:
Why is our website not working? Is it a design problem or a content problem?
To explain, "working" in this instance means "bringing in leads that turn into cases." In April of 2004, the Firm hired someone who built a home-grown website in Microsoft Front Page and a Search Engine Optimization agency to optimize it for the web and also do some pay-per-click (PPC) and banner advertising to begin to pull in traffic to the new site. When I came on board to replace her, I felt the website as it stood was not in any way corporate ready or expandable to include the content and other items we need. I convinced the Firm that the SEO strategy was still a good one but they needed a more powerful site with significantly more consumer content than it had at the time, hopefully built on a database with a design built to web standards with fewer Flash elements and more relevant keywords and linking. I found and hired the agency Keyword Ranking to build us a new website/content management system and then optimize it for the web. We have been with this agency for four months. Since our site went live, I have had numerous service problems, been very unhappy with the design, and have not seen any more leads or cases than we did when we had a poorly built and optimized site even though they claim to be optimizing it on a daily basis by doing keyword research, adding relevent content keywords to meta-tags and title tags, and a bunch of other fancy internet marketing stuff.
So what did they do wrong? Do you have any suggestions? Do you have advanced weaponry systems I can aim in their direction? (Nah, just kidding. Well, just kidding today. I might change my mind on Tuesday when I meet with them again.) As my Firm seeks a solution I am sure this class is going to change my thinking about a lot of things, and especially about our corporate website. Fire away!
Introduction for ENG 519
Bonjour, la classe. When I was a sophomore in high school I took my first French class, and it was an immersive class where the professor forbid us to speak English. Which was a bit hard, considering it was French 101. I'm still not great at French, but I know how to say hello, goodbye, and "how do you say that word in French?" I thought of that experience today when I was thinking about introducing myself to you. What to say? Well, "Hello, Class," seems like a place to start.I am one of those people that are hard to get to know because I am reticent around new people. This is a personal tick I have because I suffered abuse in my childhood. No offense to anyone new I meet, but I am just not inclined to trust anyone or reveal details about myself on first go. So this assignment fills me with dread . . . But I also thrive on challenge and refuse to give in to fear, which has made me the bundle of contradictions that I am. My husband says life with me is never boring, so I suppose it is better to be a person full of ticks, quirks and contradictions than a boring one.
I distinguish my reticence from shyness because once I get to know someone, the gloves are off and my passionate, intense nature is revealed. But it does make it hard to make and keep friends, and I have been alone a lot. I was very lucky, though, to have found someone of a similar nature who appreciates my need to have alone time. My husband Richard and I have known each other for over two years now, and were married this August. He has many other qualities, including kindness, patience, empathy, intelligence, and a keen interest in sports, which has greatly improved my social life and brought me my passion for Wolfpack basketball, so I believe I will keep him around for quite a while.
I have profoundly interested in the world and have very broad interests, but I'm basically an artophile. I love all types of film, theater, music and visual art, including painting and architecture. My undergraduate degree is in theology. At one time I wanted to teach undergraduate level theology, but the church got in the way of that. I am a Roman Catholic, and working for any church requires at least some kind of allegiance, an allegiance that I discovered I was not ready to make. I am still very interested in theological questions; at Belmont Abbey College, my professor Fr. Kirchgessner was fond of saying that "theology is the mother of all knowledge," because studying God encompasses any and all basic questions of human existence, from the way we think and act and feel to our understanding of the world. Like most theology students, though, I find the question of God still open. I have as much doubt as I have faith; if I were ordained, I'd be a Jesuit.
Like everybody else in the ETC program, I am most comfortable communicating in words. An early speech impediment made verbal communication hard for me, and while I don't have ADHD or any of those kinds of disorders, I do often experience a disconnect between what I want to say and what comes out of my mouth. When I communicate in writing, however, I experience a flow of communication that is basically effortless. I have heard many people say that what you want to be in life when you are 12 will usually indicate where you end up. When I was 12 I wanted to be an author. I remember seeing an Al Pacino movie, entitled, surprisingly enough, "Author, Author!" when that desire became most clear to me. In religious environments, it would have been described as "a calling," because at one particular moment in the movie I experienced an epiphany. Pacino is in the lobby of the theater the first night his new play opens. Earlier we had learned that he couldn't stand to be backstage on the first night of a new play. He wanted to be behind the audience so he could feel their reaction. When he starts getting the laughs and applause he had hoped for, he smiles and leaves the theater. At that precise moment, in a theater in Asheville, NC, I thought, "I want to be an author like that." That desire has led me down various paths. About seven years ago I realized that if my job did not involve writing I was never going to be happy no matter how much money I made. So I defected from my career path in retail, and started over. My new path landed me in marketing communications, and now I am at NC State hoping to make a permanent career out of this writing thing.
Au revoir, la classe.
Why can't you just get great service?
I had the meeting with our SEO vendor today, and I got treated to a twenty-five minute sales pitch by a senior something or other. It was basically the same pitch I got four months ago, and I was told over and over again that they are going to "review the problem" and "come up with a solution" and "go the extra mile" and on and on. It was clear on the call that the guy who was doing all the talking had not yet devoted one minute to my problem, and that his solutions were occuring to him on the fly. The problem with that is, I have spent hours explaining to this company what we expect from the internet, who our competitors are, what we need and what I must do to keep my bloody job, and now they are going to go off and review again. I'm so fed up I can barely breathe. I have to give them a chance to improve. But still no action plan, after six weeks of throwing up red flags. I know last month was December and holidays cut into everything. But you know what? I am paying for a full month of service in December, and I expected a full month of service. If I don't have something in writing by Thursday at 5:00, they are getting fired on Friday after I talk to my bosses. That's it. They claim that I have their attention. They better mean it this time. I'd like to think they do. But I believe they have built up their bureaucracy to the point that they cannot deliver the service they promise without their clients paying through the nose for it. They want to be a full-service agency, but they have failed at the service part.I've got a meeting Thursday with someone I trust to give me the straight dope, which I fear is expensive; I am also expecting three proposals Thursday from the new, eager company I spoke of before. I hope I can share with you soon the name of the company that has crawled up my butt, but for now, let's just say, they are a big company in RTP and they just announced their purchase of another search marketing company. Yikes. More and more people, less service? I dunno, but that's the way it seems.
Can someone please give me some love on the internet? There has got to be a way to make SEO work that doesn't require the donation of body parts to accomplish.
Just when you think you're a hotshit marketer . . .
. . . somebody treats you like a secretary. I would love to think that being dressed down like I just got has nothing to do with having breasts, but women often get treated like secretaries by men in power no matter what their title. Some men in power just assume that because you're a woman, you're happy to do administrative work and can just jump up and go do it. Format his spreadsheet, pull his mailing list, and how long is it until he asks me to get his coffee? It wouldn't be so bad, if I didn't also get dressed down today about the internet. Scapegoating seems to be the name of the game around here. I don't like seeing signs on the wall that I'm the next player in the game called "this firm's revolving door," but I can't deny that they are there. I'm holding on. School starts tonight, yet another stepping stone on my journey to a new life. One pissed off step at a time.
One point is not a defeat
Well we lost our basketball game. Any minute now, the naysayers in the Wolfpack nation, who apparently thrive only on negativity and darkness, just like some fungi I could name, will come out of their dank little holes calling for Herb's head, saying that Evtimov makes poor decisions, that we can't shoot worth a damn . . . and on and on. Well, this is the ACC. If we are lucky and just play average, we are going to do well to only lose eight or ten games. This is the way the game is played in our conference; hell on wheels, lights out, battling right to the wire. We played great, and I will not listen to anything negative. Which means I'm going to have to stay away from Pack Pride until after the Duke game; otherwise I'll just get pissed. I'm not even listening to the post-game on the radio, because I don't want to hear any hint of disappointment. We have nothing to be disappointed about, except that the last bucket did not go in.But weren't some of our moments just poetry in motion? Did you see some of those threes Ilian put up? My my my . . . it was nice to see him so absolutely confident and controlled. And those guys have to come back to start class tomorrow (just like me). I wish them a safe trip back, and I wish them pride in themselves, because nobody in the world is going to give them a break tomorrow.
Back spasms
My boy is in pain. Actually, our whole team is in pain, and a game that should be a walk . . . well, not exactly a walk, it's a conference game, but it is Miami--is not going to be a nice Sunday stroll. Our tough conference slog has just begun, and Engin has back spasms. I empathize. My, do I emphathize. Since my car accident in April, I've suffered back spasms of my own. My physical therapy made a huge difference, but I think because I'm working out so hard, with weights, as part of my fitness regimen, my back is struggling to keep up. Lately I have this burning sensation that comes and goes, and then the spasms travel around my back. A joy that cannot be measured. Sitting on my rear all day behind a desk does not help, and I'm really bad about getting up and stretching it out because I get into a good zone and the time just goes by.
But this pain is a temporary thing, and it will be for the Pack too. I stretch, I work out, and the pain gets chased away. I hope Engin's does too. Because I know, deep in my heart, that his shot is BACK. Don't give up, guys!
Everyday I have the search engine optimization blues
Today was the first day in about fifteen or sixteen days where our website had no leads. Granted, the leads we have been getting are dogshit, but I was really hoping for the tipping point. Hits continue to go up, and every day I see encouraging signs that our traffic is increasing and people are starting to find our website. But our conversion sucks and my firm is just not going to be patient with it much longer. It's looking more and more like we will dump our SEO agency and go with a very young, determined bunch of local guys who will live and die on our website becoming successful. I hope this works, because if it doesn't my job is toast.
I also had a great interview with a possible intern today. I hope he still likes us after he thinks about it, because I think he could make a big difference and the internship would be a good stepping stone for him. It could easily turn into a job, if we work together well and get some conversion. Conversion, conversion, conversion. It's my mantra; I dream about website conversion. Cases! A law firm is not a law firm without clients! I must. . . make . . . the phone . . . ring!
Newest blog
This is my webblog for ENG 519. I've had fits and starts with webblogs before, and most recently I didn't blog for three months because I was 1) too exhausted writing for school and work and 2) concerned about some legal issues. I'm not confident this will work this go-round, but we'll try.
