Twist Idea Lab

New Linking Features

Twist Idea Lab — Fri, 03 Dec 2010 00:12:13 +0000

The New York Times added new linking features to its site that allow “power users” to highlight and get the URL to specific paragraphs. Here’s how it works:

* If you wanted to link to a specific paragraph, you’d simply add a “#” and the number of the paragraph, e.g.: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#p2
* You can even go a step deeper and skip to a particular sentence, e.g.http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#p2s2 Update 12/2: while you can *highlight* particular sentences, you can’t specifically link to them, according to the NYT system’s developer, Michael Donohue.
* And here’s where it really gets cool, though. If you want to highlight that section, you simply switch the p to an h. I generated the highlighted text below with the following link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/01/world/americas/01colombia.html#h2s2
* To simplify things, if you hit your shift key twice on a Times story, small icons appear next to every paragraph. Click on one of them and it’ll place the paragraph linked URL up in the address bar of your browser.

Could this be right for your content? Typically, if you have content that users site as a source, such as: research; news; events or otherwise, this type of coding would be great. I’m still curious to see how this will effect search as a whole.

This “Power User” says Neeto!

*Source

Traditional Advertising is Dead

Twist Idea Lab — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 14:29:59 +0000

Many moons ago, back when I was a copywriter at an ad agency, I went through a round of layoffs that changed my life and my thinking about marketing. At the time, I was working with an agency that dealt mostly in print and broadcast. I kept pushing my creative director to do more web-driven work including an online Christmas card. Forever stuck in eras gone by, the agency continued to churn out print, magazine ads and direct mail. None of them were trackable and most efforts were probably unseen by their audience, plus our clients weren’t making a profit. Inevitably 75 percent of that agency was dissolved until it finally shut its doors about two years later.

About that time, interactive agencies started to crop up everywhere. There were just a few at that time, but I was lucky to meet talented people who also felt, like I did, that everything should be on the web.

It sounds like other mega-agencies are just starting to understand the same thing. This is an interesting Fast Company article that talks about how many traditional agencies are shifting their focus to digital medial. Unfortunately, many of them don’t have the digital experience to carry their clients through to the end. I was lucky enough to find and understand that medium early.

Content-Heavy Sites

Twist Idea Lab — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:50:07 +0000

I’ve been asked multiple times to find examples and resources for good content-heavy sites. Here are a few links that I’ve run across:

25 Content Heavy Site Designs.

10 User-Friendly Tips for Good Content Heavy Web Designs.

Content Heavy Websites with Brilliant Structure, Layout and Hierarchy.

50 Impressive Magazine and Newspaper Styled Web Designs.

Prism Partnerships

Twist Idea Lab — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:28:02 +0000

The Story: Prism is a multinational organzation with partners all over the world. The provide aide of all sorts throughout third-world nations

The Twist: Prism deals with some of the most harrowing stories, but still needed to recruit members and people to help them. We had to make the site help people understand these stories and provide a database of projects.

The End: The site is now a comprehensive tool to help people find resources and to help Prism recruit more partners.

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Freeworld Media

Twist Idea Lab — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:19:44 +0000

The Story: A new social media group in town wanted to brand themselves for their large corporate clients as the leaders in social corporate responsibility.

The Twist: Establishing a voice that’s fresh and young, but speaks to large corporations isn’t easy.

The End: Freeworld found their voice and made their site easy to navigate and read. Taking focus of their own site, allowed them to pursue their clients’.

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Echo Viz

Twist Idea Lab — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:16:30 +0000

The story: A new social media group in town wanted to brand themselves for their large corporate clients as the leaders in social corporate responsibility.

The Twist: Establishing a voice that’s fresh and young, but speaks to large corporations isn’t easy.

The End: Freeworld found their voice and made their site easy to navigate and read. Taking focus of their own site, allowed them to pursue their clients’.

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Clinical Research Trials

Twist Idea Lab — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 17:00:41 +0000

The Story: SERRG is a group of research doctors who didn’t have a site and needed to communicate to three separate channels: doctors, patients and drug companies.

The Twist: If you’ve ever worked with doctors, you know that they have a really tough time explaining what they do in 50 words or less. These experts wanted everything from a glossary (that didn’t exist), to all their research, to every piece of information ever created on the subject of medical research on their site and they wanted to explain it in a way that no normal reader could understand. They actually wanted 3 separate sites and I convinced them that they could do it with one big fat URL.

The End: Upon entry to the site, you choose which you want to see and all the content is fed to you based on that criteria. Instead of three different sites, they can keep their consistent message on one. The site is informative and easy-to-navigate.

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ADT Pulse Help Guide

Twist Idea Lab — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:50:42 +0000

The Story: ADT had a brand new product, but no help guide to help users navigate the complexities of the product.

The Twist: We literally had to go in and use the product and test everything to make sure that our help guide was correct. We had CMS templates that ran off a third-party server, all sorts of content constraints and lots of other headaches to conquer to get this project out the door.

The End: Together with the writer and the creative director we helped create an interactive guide with videos and helpful copy to instruct users how to understand a very complex product. You can’t see the final content because it’s authenticated, but let’s just say the client is please and people and very few people are calling customer service to ask how to use it.

ADT Pulse

Twist Idea Lab — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:45:03 +0000

The Story: ADT is on the cutting edge of technology and had a brand new product that they needed to sell on their website.

The Twist: New product = no content. All content had to be constructed from the ground up, including their help guide.

The End: While the development of the site was a bit out of my control, the content remains in tact as does the content strategy.

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Xiocom Wireless

Twist Idea Lab — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:37:02 +0000

The Story: Xiocom is a tele-communications service with some complicated messaging. The needed a site to help explain their service.

The Twist: Getting the client to explain what they were in layman’s terms was probably the most difficult challenge. Once that happened, I broke it down in usable parts, so that as a communications company, they seemed clear.

The End: We found a proper brand voice and product strategy that helped them clarify their needs on their site. Together with Think Interactive we created an easy-to-read, helpful site for their partners and users.

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