Thanks AL!
After reading Jakob Neilsen’s Newsletter Usability: Can a Professional Publisher Do Better?, I was struck by a few thoughts. First, I was in no way surprised that the Post’s newsletter would be better than Bush’s or Kerry’s.
These are people that publish a paper for a living... anyway.
Second, one of Neilsen’s gripes with the posts newsletter was that it was not integrated with the Post’s site. There were not links to it from the Post’s webpage and vice versa. This also makes sense.
Newspaper writers are not known for their ability to cross reference articles. It would be frustrating if the front page of the Post told you that more information could be found in a paper published two weeks ago.
The ability to link information is one of the most revolutionary sides of the internet.
This ability should impact a campaign’s online strategy. The newsletter should not be viewed as a separate project from the website or other emails.
Each component of the online campaign should be viewed as a part of the whole. Each should build and enhance the effectiveness of the others.
Links should connect each intuitively, while still accounting for the poor fools who can not receive HTML emails.
Cross-referencing used to be a difficult ordeal, and citing a reference used to involve a footnote or endnotes. Now both of these are easily done with hyperlinks.
Thanks again for the internet… Al Gore.
These are people that publish a paper for a living... anyway.
Second, one of Neilsen’s gripes with the posts newsletter was that it was not integrated with the Post’s site. There were not links to it from the Post’s webpage and vice versa. This also makes sense.
Newspaper writers are not known for their ability to cross reference articles. It would be frustrating if the front page of the Post told you that more information could be found in a paper published two weeks ago.
The ability to link information is one of the most revolutionary sides of the internet.
This ability should impact a campaign’s online strategy. The newsletter should not be viewed as a separate project from the website or other emails.
Each component of the online campaign should be viewed as a part of the whole. Each should build and enhance the effectiveness of the others.
Links should connect each intuitively, while still accounting for the poor fools who can not receive HTML emails.
Cross-referencing used to be a difficult ordeal, and citing a reference used to involve a footnote or endnotes. Now both of these are easily done with hyperlinks.
Thanks again for the internet… Al Gore.
1 Comments:
Agreed. Sending out an email without good on-topic links is like going door to door and having no literature to hand out...you look amateur and disorganised.
Also, there is no need for HTML emails in order to send the links. In my view, just because it looks pretty doesn't make me want to click on a link...I think Nielsen's point about the subject line is more important - draw me in, make me open it and then make me want to find out more!
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