John | John McGarvey - web copywriter

Author Archive for John

Are ü annoyed yet?

Published

on July 3, 2008

. 0 Comments

I went to the Taste Festival in London the other week (if you’re thinking of going next year, it was a collosal, pretentious waste of money).

But one of the companies promoting its wares there was Gü, the people who make those nice puddings you can buy in Sainsbury’s. Not exactly Michelin-starred cuisine, but very nice nonetheless.

I just got around to visiting the company’s website. I was immediately irritated by the gimmicky use of the umlauted ‘ü’ wherever a ‘u’ or ‘you’ would normally suffice. Check this out:

“So over to ü! Just upload ür masterpiece here and get ür friends, family, neighbours, people in the street, long-lost Facebook friends… (ü get the drift!) to vote for ü. Ü can view all the entries in the Gallery and see who’s currently in the Top 5 on the right here.”

Honestly, it’s hurting my eyes just to read that. Stop it. Right now.

I don’t honestly know if the ‘ü’ within the name of the company is an affectation or not (the company website suggests the name’s origins are in Belgium). Either way, the use of the letter like this is quite ridiculous.

I suppose it’s an attempt to be quirky, friendly, and echo the brand throughout the promotional copy. But actually it comes off as clumsy and makes the text less readable because your eyes jolt each time they run into a ‘ü’ in an unexpected place.

I can’t imagine it’s particularly screenreader or search engine friendly either. In all, a big thümbs down.

The Vauxhall Vectra usability study

Published

John

on May 27, 2008

in Tips and Websites

. 0 Comments

I moved house this weekend and hired a car; a tank-like Vauxhall Vectra. Actually, despite having the appearance of a lumbering behemoth, it wasn’t that bad being behind the wheel.

Bizarrely enough though, the car’s indicators got me thinking about how important it can be to conform to people’s expectations.

Conventions abound in virtually every product we use. They make things easy-to-operate and easy-to-understand.

Imagine if every kettle worked in a different way, or if some door handles were postioned on the ‘wrong’ side of the door. Making a coffee would be a nightmare. And each time you opened a door would be a gamble; it might hardly move, or it might fly open and send you crashing through it.

As any web designer worth their salt will tell you, conventions work online too. Following them is a good way to make your website easier to use. Just ask Jakob Nielsen.

Put menus where people expect to find them, make the normal things happen when people click links and using your site will be a less-frustrating, altogether more pleasant experience.

Challenging conventions

Every now and then, a company tries to challenge a tried-and-trusted convention. Just occasionally, they’ll do so successfully; think of the iPod’s click wheel. Why use ‘up’ and ‘down’ buttons to navigate through lists when you can do the same thing faster (and more accurately) with a touch sensitive wheel?

But most of the time, these convention challenges fall flat. The Vectra’s indicators are a fine example - because they work in a different way to virtually every car I’ve ever driven. To turn them on, you push the indicator stalk one way. To turn the indicators off, you push the stalk the same way again.

It’s true that, like most other cars, you can also stop the turn signal by pushing the stalk the other way. But often it doesn’t work well; you simply end up signalling to turn the other way, and then get all confused.

Honestly, I’ve never driven another car like it, and I do apologise to anyone who had to share the Hanger Lane gyratory with me yesterday afternoon. I was trying to go right. Not right-left-right as you might’ve been led to believe.

I’m sure that, given time, you get used to this new way of doing things. But why bother when the old way works just as well?

Because this was a hire car, I was stuck with it for the weekend. However, if it had been a website with a dodgy navigation, I’d have been right out of there.

Clear benefits

Don’t get me wrong: I don’t think challenging convention is always a bad thing. If nobody ever did it, all our vacuum cleaners would still have bags and the world wide web probably wouldn’t even exist.

However, if you do decide to do things differently on your website, remember that you’re asking a lot from your visitors. You’re asking them to learn a whole new behaviour, just for you. Essentially, you’re forcing them to do something different to what comes naturally.

For it to work, there has to be a definite benefit for them. It has to be easier, or faster, or better for some other reason. If it isn’t, don’t do it.

So be careful when you go against convention - or even when you bend it a little. Your great new idea might end up driving visitors away. If you’re running an online business, that could be costly.

Image © GM Corp

The strangest small ad ever

Published

John

on April 15, 2008

in Spotted

. 2 Comments

I’ve been running through the photos on my cameraphone this evening and as well as an exciting shot of a Virgin Media van, I found this classic. It’s a small ad - I spotted it in a newsagent’s window in West Drayton the other day:

‘No cigarettes before the Dentist! If this means anything to you, PLEASE call…’

(Full size version here.)

What on earth is that all about? I was half-tempted to call the number, but commonsense prevailed and I haven’t dared.

It doesn’t have much to do with copywriting I know, but did get me scratching my head…

Any suggestions?

Asking for trouble?

Published

John

on April 15, 2008

in Spotted

. 2 Comments

I’ve spotted a few Virgin Media vans about with a slogan that’s tempting fate. ‘Forward, back, back a bit more, stop!’ just seems to be inviting a parking mishap.

And it’s surely only a matter of time before we see a van with ‘near miss’ on the side stuffed into a hedge or something. (See a picture of the whole van here.)

Still, I like the copy. It has a nice sense of playfulness and made me smile the first time I saw it. And I suppose if one of these vans did have a coming together with another vehicle, the inevitable photo in the Metro the next day would at least be exposure of sorts for the company.

How to find cheap flights - a beginner’s guide

Published

John

on February 23, 2008

in Tips

. 6 Comments

Plane wing I’m not exactly a frequent flier. But I’m occasionally on the look out for good value flights to various places - usually for a holiday or short break.

It seems to me that booking flights is one thing the internet manages to be simultaneously really good at and really bad at.

On the up side, there are loads of places to go to find deals. There are thousands of web pages offering tips and advice. But on the other hand, there are so many sites selling flights and so much information that it’s virtually impossible to be certain you’re getting the best deal. It’s enough to send you running to the nearest branch of Thomas Cook.

I spent a lot of time last week trying to track down some good value flights, and wrestling with all the different travel sites out there. So I thought I’d explain how I found a decent deal.

There are only three steps, but I reckon they work best if your travel dates are fixed. They strike a good balance between finding a great price and not driving yourself mad hunting down the absolute cheapest deal:

Find which carriers fly the route you want and get a feel for what constitutes a good price.

This bit’s easy: search for flights on Kayak and Skyscanner. These are two of the most comprehensive flight search engines out there. They do a great job of searching thousands of flights across lots of different agents and airlines.

Skyscanner is best for short-haul flights with budget airlines. It won’t always return flights with traditional carriers like BA, but it does normally tell you who else flies the route you’re interested in.

If you find a price you’re interested in on SkyScanner, always check the text which says how old the quote is. If it’s more than a few hours old then make sure you hit the Check now button to see if the price is still accurate.

Kayak does the lot. Long-haul, short-haul - and it searches airline sites directly and other agents like eBookers and Expedia. It can take a while to perform a full search, but the prices it returns generally seem to be very accurate. If you use it in conjunction with Skyscanner, you should have a pretty exhaustive idea of which airlines fly where you need to go.

I’ve found Kayak’s prices pretty much 100% accurate so far, but its links out to the companies actually selling the flights don’t always seem to work. No matter - we’re just trawling for a ball-park figure anyway.

At this stage, try and narrow your search a bit. Come up with four or five options based on price, flight times and your preferred airlines (if you have any).

Start digging deeper. Search for your preferred flights across all the main online travel websites.

To kick off, try Expedia. It’s the bees knees when it comes to online travel and can show you hotels, tours and all sorts. But to keep it simple, just use the flight search. Note the options to select preferred airlines, times and whether you want to fly direct or not. These can help you home in on your preferred flights quickly

You should also try Opodo, eBookers and Travelocity. Then there’s Travel Supermarket, Flight Centre and STA Travel (STA aren’t just for students, though if you are a student, they’re probably the very first place to look).

Yes, Kayak has already checked most of these sites for you, but it doesn’t always seem to pull out the best deal of all. Cheapflights is a website that always comes up in Google searches, but don’t bother unless your dates are flexible.

Hitting those sites might take a little while, but afterwards you should absolutely know who’s cheapest. Now go to the airline’s own website and check the price there. It’s unlikely to be better than you’ve seen already, but occasionally you’ll bag a bargain.

Check for further discounts.

The main online travel sites are usually running promotions of one sort of another. They often take the form of voucher codes you can enter to claim a further discount on the price of your flights.

Although a Google search (e.g. ‘Expedia voucher code‘) will usually prove fruitful, I reckon the place to start is HotUKDeals. This community website highlights great deals and discounts - just type the name of the company selling the flight you’re after into the Find a Voucher box. If any vouchers are available, you should see them. This simple step netted me £50 off a holiday I booked last week, so it’s well worth bothering with.

And for a final bonus, you can usually pick up cashback on your purchase. Sites like Quidco have commission deals with websites like Expedia. But instead of hanging onto all the commission themselves, they’ll pay most of it back to you. Often it’s quite a significant amount. Quidco got me £50 back on a laptop last year and £12 on my house insurance, so it really is woth looking at.

(Incidentally, Quidco and HotUKDeals were founded by the same chap. I guess some people just have an eye for a bargain.)

If you do use Quidco, make sure you clear all cookies from your browser before signing into the site. That maximises the chance of the cashback actually registering properly.

And that’s it: find out who flies where you want to go; check the main sites; and search for discounts and vouchers. Then spend whatever you saved on a nice hotel or something. After all, you are going on holiday.

What have I missed? Where do you find cheap flights? Leave a comment and let me know.

The Daily Mail and Digg - an unlikely success story?

Published

John

on February 4, 2008

in Websites

. 3 Comments

I’ve always found Digg an interesting place to kill a few minutes. There’s usually a story or two on the homepage worth a read, usually for amusement value.

A couple of weeks ago I noticed a trend: articles from the Daily Mail seem to make it to the front page quite often. At first glance, the decidedly right-wing tabloid isn’t a natural fit with the social news site, where there aren’t any editors and the combined votes of users determines which stories get most prominence.

But in defiance of that assumption, here are some of the Daily Mail stories that have appeared on the Digg homepage over the past couple of weeks:

There are more - you can search the site to see them.

A skim through the titles does reveal some common elements. The popular stories are frequently about sex, psuedo-science or some sort of miracle cure.

What does this tell us about the Daily Mail? To be honest, not much. I think there’s some truth in the idea that barely a week goes by without the Mail reporting on some miracle cure or hidden danger in something we eat, drink or do. It’s a similar story with sex; the paper’s love of family values and its focus on moral standards ensure that one of its staples is stories involving a person of responsibility being discovered in some sort of compromising or scandalous position. The articles about the teacher and stewardess above are good examples of these.

But has the Mail discovered a new audience in an unexpected place? I think maybe it has. I don’t know whether there’s been any attempt to ‘game’ Digg (rather like last week’s shenanigans involving stories from Times Online), but I doubt it. I reckon it’s just more likely that the type of story which is the Mail’s bread and butter is also the sort that appeals to people on Digg.

The lesson for the rest of us? Well, let’s be honest: it’s hardly rocket science. If you want your story to go hot on Digg, try and write about sex, sciency-sounding stuff and easy cures for common problems or diseases. Quick fixes are good - how to get better at something without having to make too much of an effort. And it won’t hurt if you can find a technology angle and drop in a photo of a young lady in skimpy clothing too.

Accordingly, the next post on this blog will be titled ‘How having sex with computer programmers protects against cancer and makes you a better person’. That should press most of the Digg crowd’s buttons.

Wireless on the move

Published

John

on January 11, 2008

in Uncategorized

. 0 Comments

Ok, so by and large trains in the UK are too expensive. Frequently they don’t run on time, and quite often they’re filthy as well. (As a long-suffering First Great Western customer, I know these things all too well.)

But I’ve just encountered a glimmer of hope on the new National Express East Coast franchise. Not only is my train to Edinburgh clean and on time. It’s got free wireless, which I’m using to post this.

It works, it’s fast enough to do useful stuff with and … did I mention it’s free? Or at least included in the price of the ticket.

Ok, providing a decent internet connection is hardly one of their core objectives, but it’s nice that a train company in this country can get something right.

Free thinking: I speak to Chris Anderson

Published

John

on January 7, 2008

in News

. 0 Comments

One of the projects I’ve been working on in my day job is to write a series of interviews with some internet ‘celebrities’ and entrepreneurs.

It’s fair to say that I wasn’t massively optimistic about being able to secure big names, but it’s actually been easier than I expected. So far I’ve persuaded five or six interesting people to take part, and the first piece has just been published.

It’s an interview with Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief of Wired and the guy behind The Long Tail. Yeah, I was surprised he had the time to talk to me too.

You can read the full interview over on the 123-reg blog. He talks about the idea of ‘free’ - how the internet is making it possible for companies to make money by giving stuff away - and uses Google as an example:

“It started with search and then software and services of various sorts and now they’re rolling out telephony and communications. They’re a sort of tsunami of ‘free’, which disrupts every industry it touches.”

You’ve got to love a phrase like “tsunami of free”. It could never have been coined if the internet hadn’t been invented.

Although it’s been done to death, we also touched briefly on The Long Tail. And before he dashed off I managed to squeeze in a quick question about what he thought of the Facebook craze:

“Fundamentally, social networking is going to be something that every site has. You’re going to go from having one place for social networking to it being devolved to a very granular scale, where your social network is not a subset of Facebook, but instead something that you expect to find as a feature in every site you visit.”

In all, an interesting chap. And very friendly too.

Tips for writing good help articles

Published

John

on November 25, 2007

in Technology and Writing

. 0 Comments

It’s not uncommon to visit a website and be impressed by what’s there. Encouraged, you buy from them.

It’s only when you need some assistance with your new purchase that you realise the online help is woefully inaccurate. Lacking in depth and quality, it feels like a last minute bolt on. And all-too-often, it is.

Whether you’re a professional writer or not, if you get given the job of producing online help articles, please think about your approach before you get stuck in. It can be hard to hit the spot, and as a reader, there’s little more frustrating than being stuck with a problem you can’t fix.

I spent much of the first half of this year writing help articles and tutorials. I reckon I got a reasonable feel for what works, and what doesn’t. So here are some tips to make help articles clear and understandable:

Use numbered lists, not bullets. When people follow your instructions, they’ll often be flicking between their web browser and other windows. It’s easy for people to remember that they were on step five, so put instructions in numbered lists.
Break complex processes right down. It’s better to have a longer list of simple steps than a short list of complex ones. A good rule of thumb is that people should be able to read each step, then follow it without having to refer back to the instructions half way through.
Use screenshots to complement written instructions, not to replace them. Screenshots are a really good way of showing people what to do. But not everyone will be able to see them - think about people using screenreaders or on slow connections. By all means, use images to make it blindingly obvious which button to click. But make sure your copy spells everything out too.
Underestimate the IT level of your readers. If your audience is a tech-savvy bunch then you won’t have to explain every single point. But if you’re not sure exactly how much they know, or the audience spans a range of levels, err on the side of caution and explain things more fully. A few of your most knowledgeable readers might feel a bit patronised, but everyone will understand everything properly.
Think about the permutations. Are your instructions valid for Windows XP and Vista? What about Apple Macs? Have you thought about different web browsers? And don’t forget about the user’s preferences - make sure your instructions match what’s on their screen. Try and take care of the most common permutations at least - if you can, use web metrics to find out what software your audience typically uses, rather than relying on guesswork.
Do some testing. The instructions might be blindly obvious to you, but that doesn’t mean everyone else will be able to understand them. Ideally, get some typical readers to follow your instructions. At the very least, get a friend to look them over.
Be consistent and be precise. Use the correct terminology, and use it consistently. Don’t tell people to ‘press’ a button when actually they should ‘click’ it. And if there’s any ambiguity, explain things so they’re clear. I had to write online help content for a popular piece of security software - some screens had two ‘Configure’ buttons on. It was a hassle explaining which one to click every time, but it had to be done.
Don’t reinvent the wheel. If the articles you’re writing deal with problems with someone else’s software, link off to their help pages rather than duplicating it on your website. After all, they made the software and so they’re in the best position to document it.
Get to the point and don’t joke around. If I’m having a problem with your product, I want it fixed. I don’t want to see clever puns or over-elaborate copy. Get to the root of the problem, and get it solved. Quickly.
Don’t try and sell other stuff. If someone’s having an issue with your product, it’s not the time to persuade them to buy something new from you. Just fix the problem efficiently - that’s a good way to keep your customers loyal.

Any more suggestions? Leave a comment and let me know.

Loads of pun - best tabloid headlines to make you smile

Published

John

on November 22, 2007

in Writing

. 2 Comments

The England football team’s performance this evening was dire. Rubbish. Awful. But it did get me thinking about how big football stories tend to bring out the best in tabloid sub-editors. When it’s open season on an England manager, the puns start to flow - so look out for a few good ones in the red tops over the next few days.

In the meantime, I’ve dug up some classics that anyone would be proud of. Enjoy - and remember: although all these headlines would score virtually zero for search engine optimisation, they all looked great in 128pt type on the front (or back) page of a tabloid.

FROM RUSSIA WITH GLOVES. In 1994 Chelsea played their first European away game for years. They won 4-2 on aggregate against Viktoria Zizkov (who?). Russian goalkeeper Dmitri Kharine saved a crucial penalty, and one of the British tabloids immortalised him with this, one of my all-time favourite headlines.

HOW DO YOU SOLVE A PROBLEM LIKE KOREA? Back in October 2006, North Korea decided to conduct a not-at-all-provovative nuclear test. International condemnation followed, but no nation’s response topped The Sun’s. The newspaper’s headline raised the question of which is worse: reality TV, or a nuclear holocaust? Tough call. See the headline>

SUPER CALEY GO BALLISTIC, CELTIC ARE ATROCIOUS. It doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue, but this headline from The Sun proves that the king of British red tops is difficult to beat when it comes to punnage. It’s the classic formula: rip off a song lyric everyone knows, substitute a few words and stick it on the sports pages. Brilliant.

TWO SH*GS. Accompanying the Daily Star’s coverage of John Prescott’s various indiscretions, it’s simple and to the point. Given the amount of flesh that’s frequently on the front page of this paper, it seems strange that they’ve stuck an asterisk in ’shags’, but then who am I to comment on tabloid standards? Whatever, it’s simple, effective - and very British. See the headline>

GORD HELP US NOW! Regardless of your opinion on the Daily Diana Express, occasionally its staff come out with a gem. Ok, very occasionally. I liked this one which greeted Gordon Brown’s move into No. 10. It’s great because it makes the paper’s position immediately clear, pokes fun at the new PM’s name, and also sounds like something Alan Partridge would say. See the headline>

MORON TERROR. The Sun hits the spot again. Almost two years after the 21/7 attempted bombings in London, four people are found guilty of planning the attacks. Choosing to focus on the ineptitude of those involved, the paper sums up their intelligence in two words. Presumably they included the picture so that we didn’t think they were referring to George Bush. See the headline>

CELEBRITY BIG BLUBBER. Yet again, from The Sun. While part of the country was obsessed with the antics of Chantelle in Celebrity Big Brother, the rest of us were intrigued to see a whale swim right up the Thames and into central London. Despite rescuers’ best efforts, the poor animal didn’t survive - it just seems a shame that Celebrity Big Brother hasn’t yet suffered a similar fate.

TOM AND THIERRY. Being an Arsenal fan, I’m completely biased on this one. Thierry Henry and Tomas ‘Tom’ Rosicky scored as Arsenal beat Liverpool at Anfield 3-1 early this year. It’s not one of The Sun’s best efforts, but they get extra points for printing it in a cartoon-style font.