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Importance of Consistancy
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Loading ...When visiting a website of a company, wether corporate or commercial, you may sometimes have had the feeling that something just isn’t right. Can’t quite put your finger on it, but you do notice it. Well in many cases this has to do with the text of the website (sometimes graphics as well, but not in this article :)).
So what is it you noticed. Is the text wrong. Does it not appeal to you. Or do you simply don’t like what they say. Maybe even all of the above. It really doesn’t matter since any would drive you away from the website. What does matter is why did it feel off.
Discovery of the problem
In most cases you will have found one simple problem. The creator of the website forgot to keep his audience in mind when writing all of the text. Or maybe he didn’t even consider you part of his audience (bad him ;)). But what does this mean to conversions of that website. Well for one you will be unlikely to buy anything because you probably don’t trust it completely.
Knowing that text could cause problems with your targetted audience what is it that makes the text on a website right. Well the following list could make a text unattractive for your readers.
- Wrongly using complicated words,
Using difficult words may be hot in your niche, but it won’t attract the John Doe from the street. Most of them don’t even understand what they are reading. Something that won’t help you selling products to them. Always keep your audience in mind when writing texts. - Using he, she, you incorrectly,
This is especially important in other languages then English. If you look at German for example they have ‘Sie’ or ‘du’ which both means you in English. But one is polite and the other isn’t. Make sure you know which your audience prefers and stick with it. Don’t do half with ‘Sie’ and the other have with ‘du’. - Missing call to action,
One of the most common mistakes is that the text doesn’t tell your visitors to actually do something. If you want them to buy something don’t stop at how good it is. Also inform them of how to buy it (and don’t use ‘Buy now’, thats just wrong in so many levels). - Annoying calls to action,
On the other end of the scope is a to agressive call to action. This will rub your visitors the wrong way. Making them anger or dislike you. Both not good things if you still want them to buy.
Solving the problem
If you know the problem then you can solve it. Right…..
Well not necessarily. The problem may be a bit more complicated. You may not know your audience well enough. Prehaps your audience has changed over time. So make sure to keep updating your information about the visitors of your website.
If you have something to say about this article, don’t hesitate to comment….
How One Small Delay Can Have Huge Impact
In my company the developers work on quite some projects at once. Which isn’t that strange, it happens everywhere. Anyway, I currently have a very simple problem. I’ve been working on a lot of projects with dependencies on each other. For one of these updates I had to get some new text, which means going to our copywriter to get it and then having it translated. Now that I’ve completed all of my developer work I was kinda hoping to get everything live quickly.
Now here comes the problem. Appearantly the e-mail about the texts got lost. I’ve requested the texts two weeks back, but since I didn’t hear anything from the copywriter I decided to check. She never got the e-mail, which means nothing happened. Problem is that I can’t close the update until I have the text. Even worse is that I can’t do any work without closing at least some of the updates.
See my problem! So for the past couple of days I’ve been very bored. Trying to do some documenting and helping out others only gets you through so many hours of the day. Worst part of it is that I now need to wait probably another whole week on the translations.
What to do with all that time, when I still have to look like I’m working :).
Why To Pick Projects Name Carefully In Netbeans
I recently had a problem that baffled me. As you may have noticed in my previous posts I work with Netbeans for my job, and have had some problems and help from the community in the past :). This time I had the following problem.
I had several web projects that were all in the same root package name. Every time I deployed one project another would undeploy, using Tomcat not JBoss. For the live of me I couldn’t figure out why deploying a web project would cause this problem. But it sure is annoying.
To try to solve it I first deleted my Tomcat, thinking that this might have been causing it. Of course I had to copy the Tomcat folder of one of my colleges to get everything to work again. Starting to deploy my projects again with all the hope it might have been solved. Shocker to see my hopes shattered when I had the same problem again.
Second step was de-installing Netbeans completely and reinstalling, if that doesn’t do it then I don’t know what will. After all this and setting up some of the libraries again I started to deploy again. No luck. I still couldn’t get multiple web projects deployd.
The solution
After some thinking and a lot of testing I found out that it had to do with the names of my projects. Though I still don’t know why! I’ll try and demonstrate the problem. I had a project in the package a.a so I named the project ‘a.a’. Another project was in the package ‘a.b’ so I named the project accordingly.
When I deployed ‘a.a’ I had no problems, after all I didn’t deploy ‘a.b’ yet. But as soon as I deployed the project ‘a.b’ my other deployed project ‘a.a’ was un-deployed.
Apparently Netbeans can’t handle multiple projects that have similar project names. For some reason it undeploys them. So be sure to keep track of that when you encounter the same problem I did. Just for the record I used Netbeans 5.5 and Java 6.
The not so protected Java protected member
This week I found out something new. At collage I was always tought that a in programming you need to protect a class members. One way of doing this is using the protected level. According to many programming languages, like C++ and pascal, this means only inheriting classes can access and modify the value.
To my suprise and somewhat dislike Java does not know this type of protection level. In Java protected means the same as the default and extends it so that all inheriting classes can access the members. Unfortunatelly the default access level means that all classes in the same package (namespace in C++) can also access it.
I never expected this which introduces flaws in design. After all I don’t want my personal protected members to be accessed anywhere within the package. Only the inheriting classes.
Playing Games At Work Good For Motivation
Bit of a strange title I know. But think about the following. You have hard working employees that are getting a bit stressed because of the work. Not that strange now is it. Can it help to allow them playing games?
I think so! My current employer tolerates it. If it doesn’t interfere with the work we are allowed to play a game just after lunch or during the Friday night drinks. Usually it doesn’t take up to much time from actual work, but I’ve found it helps relieve some stress. Which means increased productivity.
Haven’t had any complaints so far, so I’ll keep doing it. At least for as long as it helps me wind down a bit after a busy week of work.
