Luminous: Insights on websites by Michael Barrish

Death of a Standardista

I've never liked the term standardista. Though it gets used with pride by some, I've always heard as a subtle insult. It's the "ista" part that bothers me. To my ear, this makes one sound like a zealot, someone whose passion is potentially blinding. Now, it's true that I'm passionate about web standards. But this is only because web standards support the production of better websites. If spit and chicken wire worked as well, I'd be passionate about spit and chicken wire. If I'm any kind of "ista," I recently realized, I'm a qualityista.

That moment was an epiphany for me. For one thing, it helped me understand the depth of my frustration with, say, the poor writing on some of my clients' sites. I want to make great websites; I have no interest in building kick-ass containers for crappy content. If you've ever worked with me, you know what I mean.

For some developers, the only thing that matters is a happy client. If the client is happy, the project is a success, period. When you think this way, your job is to determine what would make your client happy and deliver it, regardless of what you're delivering. In extreme cases, the quality of the completed site will depend entirely on the client's understanding of what makes for a quality website, because the developer is loath to contradict anything the client says or believes.

I'd like to think that few developers are really so spineless, so lacking in, well, standards. Instead, most failed sites are made by people who want to make good websites but simply lack the necessary skills or understanding. Somehow I find this more forgivable than the brown nose behavior described above, although the result is the same: a sucky website.

But back to my epiphany. What I saw in that moment is that my allegiance is not to web standards, nor to any particular approach or methodology, but to an elusive yet crucial result which for lack of a better term I'm calling "quality." I'm obsessed by it. I want to see it, understand it, and most of all, create it. I really am a qualityista. If you've ever worked with me, you know what I mean.

Published in WWW, Web Standards

Some Comments on Comments

Several readers have asked why, in the recent redesign of this site, I dropped comment functionality from weblog articles. Here's why.

The weblogs I love share two elements:

• An expert author with a strong voice
• A focus on a single broad topic of deep interest to me

When the author is especially gifted, I will forgive a wandering focus, but in general I'm reading to learn what the author is thinking about that single broad topic.

Note the lack of comments (or "community") from my two-item list. I stopped reading blog comments long ago, recognizing, in confirmation of Sturgeon's Law, that 90% of all comments are crap. There are many varieties of crap—off-topic, self-serving, ass-kissing, uninformed, superficial, showboating, belligerent, and of course, just plain dull—but the result is the same.

Of course, 90% is not 100%, which is say that some comments are not crap at all, and that some—one percent?—are truly thought-provoking. Unfortunately the better comments don't come with little flags indicating their higher quality, so the entire endeavor remains too much of a crap shoot (pun intended) to tempt me.

Now, several folks in the web development have recently weighed in on the subject of blog comments—pro, con, and ambivalent. These include John Gruber (via Shawn Blanc), Joel Spolsky, Andy Rutledge, Roger Johansson, and Eric Meyer. I won't summarize their arguments here except to say that Guber perfectly captures my thinking during the recent redesign of this site:

[The] reader I write for is a second version of me. I'm writing for him. He's interested in the exact same things I'm interested in; he reads the exact same websites I read. I want him to like this website so much that he reads it from the top to the bottom, and he reads everything. Every single word. The copyright statement, what software I use, he's read it all.

This idea of a second me is more than a little frightening, but like John, I'm focused on a single reader: myself, essentially. He's a tough audience, sharp and skeptical, but I wouldn't want it any other way.

And at the risk of proposing an ontological impossibility (and of contradicting the point of this article), I would love to hear from him. Or her. Or whomever. That's what my contact page is for. Comment functionality, though, is gone, likely forever, may it rest in pixelated peace.

Published in Content, Luminous, WWW

Great Copywriting—Not for Robots

So the fine folks at Smashing Magazine did a showcase piece on 404 error pages and included the 404 page at Luminous. If you haven't seen this page, it's written entirely in haiku. As is my About page, by the way. I like haikus.

I mention this not to discuss haikus but copywriting, specifically copywriting for websites. Why does so much of it suck? Actually, I think I know why. It sucks because copywriters read what other copywriters write and conclude that website copy is supposed to sound like it was composed by robots.

Now, in fairness to copywriters everywhere, copywriting is hard. For me it's harder than any other kind of writing. This is why I turned to haikus on my About page: they helped me circumvent the constraints of the form and to do so in a way that expresses who I am, which is the underlying point of any About page.

Mind you, I'm not advocating haiku as the one-size-fits-all seventeen-syllable solution to the problem. But a little personality, a little humor, some subtle indication of one's status as a living and breathing and thinking human being, can go a long way toward improving one's copy.

The People of Flickr

When it comes to great copy, the first site I think of is Flickr. Whoever writes their stuff is definitely not a robot. Consider the opening sentence on the Flickr About page:

Flickr—almost certainly the best online photo management and sharing application in the world—has two main goals…

Sorry, robots don't write "almost certainly." "Almost certainly" is a non-robot giveaway and we're only three words in.

I know the counter-argument: Flickr is Flickr, and Flickr is cool. Whereas X Company is not cool, so it can't come off sounding like it employs any actual human beings.

I disagree. Flickr may have more leeway than some, but they created that leeway, they carved it out. Naturally you must know your audience; that's a given. But when dealing with a company, people want to feel like they're dealing with other people; that's a universal.

Of course it's not easy to find the words that convey the right kind of "personness." It's a conjuring act, really, one for neither the faint of heart nor the narrow of mind. But here's the thing: Robots can't do it.

Published in Content

The Death of TimesSelect and the Future of Web Advertising

The New York Times just dropped TimesSelect, their online premium content subscription program. The program ran for two years and was generating about $10 million a year in revenue. Content previously restricted to subscribers is now available to all.

The reason for the change is simple: money. The Times can make more of it by switching to an advertising-based model.

There's a lesson in this, and it's not that information wants to be free.

Now, I remember a time when not quite every cultural product was a vehicle for advertising, a lure for eyeballs. The web circa 1998 was like this. If you were there, you know what I mean. It was cool. But of course the web circa 1998 was a rare respite (or semi-respite, really) from the deluge.

I reveal both my age and my idealism by mentioning this.

The Immediate Future of Web Advertising

Back in the real world, as it were, I've been meaning to note my appreciation for the advertising network approach used by The Deck, particularly the fact that they only accept ads for products or services they've bought or used themselves. It's a crafty move, too, since it adds cred to the ads that appear. (The Deck adds even more cred by being selective about who gets to join the network.) But the Deck, as an idea, doesn't scale easily, so it's hard to see it becoming a widely adopted approach.

The big money, of course, is in targeted ads. The more you know about your individual readers (and evidently the Times, a registration-based site, knows quite a bit), the more you can charge advertisers to hit them up.

I'm awaiting the day, not far off, when I encounter ads aimed directed at me and addressing me by name. This will work much like Amazon's personalized recommendations except the ads will appear on sites I never previously visited and will reveal an uncanny and terrifying insight into my deepest desires.

And what will these ads be about? Ad blockers. They'll all be trying to selling me new and novel ways to stem the deluge.

Published in Ads, WWW