In fact, you can often get so much information returned that it’s a little intimidating even knowing where to start. Information overload gets more and more common as ever-growing amounts of information go online.

At its worst, information overload can be paralyzing. Too much information can leave us feeling overwhelmed and unable to make decisions. It can leave us more confused than if we’d never had the information to start with.

The good news is that information overload can be dealt with. It doesn’t require disconnecting from the Internet or anything extreme, just some prioritization and organization on your part. Read on for a complete guide to dealing with information overload.

Differentiating Between What’s Important and What’s Not

Part of the problem with information overload has to do with a person’s inability to distinguish between what’s important and what’s not. We have a tendency to want to know everything going on, whether it directly affects us or not.

Start to think about the areas of your life where information is important. More importantly, think about the information you take in every day and figure out what you don’t need to know. This is going to vary from person to person, depending on your own lifestyle, profession, and personal life.

For example, if you’re a heavy investor, it might be important for you to keep abreast of what’s going on in the stock market on a day-to-day basis. But only if you manage your own stocks. If you have a good broker that you trust, then let them handle it and only take a look at what’s going on in the market on a weekly or monthly basis. Better yet, ask your broker to send you monthly updates so you don’t have to seek out the information.

On the other hand, if you don’t invest in the stock market, why are you checking it every two hours during your workday? Why do you spend an hour pouring over the overseas markets every morning? If you’re suffering from information overload, stop paying attention to things that don’t have a direct impact on you.

Here you should make a couple of lists, to help you sort through the information bombarding you every day. First, make a list of things that you absolutely have to know about.

This list should include things directly related to your professional or personal life. Next, make a list of things that are important to you, but maybe don’t have a strong impact on your profession or personal life. This could be things related to a hobby or other interest. Then, make a list of all the things you stay informed about that don’t appear on those first two lists. These are the things you’ll be taking a long, hard look at in an effort to remove some of the information coming at you every day.

Where is the Information Coming From?

The other thing you need to look at is how you’re getting all this information. Is it things people are emailing to you or sharing with you online? Are you getting a dozen email newsletters delivered to your inbox on a daily or weekly basis? Are you subscribed to 100 or more RSS feeds? Are you seeking out information online?

Make a list of how you’re getting all this information, the websites and services you use, and a rough estimate of how much time each of these things takes you each day. Then look at how these sources match up to the items on the first two lists you made in the previous section. Mark each source that corresponds with the first list with a “1″, those that correspond with the second list with a “2″ and those that fall onto the third list with a “3″.

Once you’ve marked each source, you’ll also need to look at whether it’s a passive source or an active source. Passive sources are those sources that feed you information without you having to seek it out. Email and RSS feeds both fall into this category. Active sources would be sites you visit on a regular basis that you aren’t subscribed to through either email or RSS.

1. Limit Your Sources

The first step in dealing with information overload is to limit the sources of your information. Look at the list of sources your information comes from and figure out which ones aren’t necessary.

There are a few criteria for deciding what’s not necessary and what is. First, if two sources offer basically the same content, get rid of one of them. Second, if there are any RSS feeds or email newsletters that you rarely read, unsubscribe from them. For most people, this will get rid of at least some of your incoming information.

Then it’s time to get a bit more aggressive. Look at the list of sources you have that are marked with a number “3″ and decide whether to eliminate them or not. I recommend unsubscribing from any RSS feeds or email newsletters related to these items. Then the only way you’re getting information regarding those subjects is if you actively seek it out.

Consider, too, which sources you can consolidate. Are the email newsletters you subscribe to also available as RSS feeds or vice versa? If most of them are, consider switching your subscription formats.

2. Set Aside Time in Your Schedule

Part of the problem with information overload is often that we’re constantly being bombarded with information. There’s never any break from it. To get past information overload, we need to halt the constant flow of information.

Set aside time in your schedule for dealing with information. This means checking email only at specified times, reading RSS feeds at specified times, and otherwise seeking out information on a set schedule. Now, exactly what that schedule is will depend on your own needs.

Some people might need to be reachable by email throughout the day. That’s fine. Set your email client to only check for new email once per hour. That keeps you in contact enough without being a constant distraction.

Set aside an hour in the morning or evening to read through your RSS feeds. Do it all in one chunk, and then keep your feed reader closed for the rest of the time.

Another option is to set aside tiny chunks throughout your day for processing information. It might be five or ten minutes of each hour or every couple of hours.

Figure out whether you’re more productive by absorbing all your information at one time or in smaller chunks throughout the day. Then stick to a schedule. If you set aside five minutes each hour to read RSS feeds or email, then spend five minutes of every hour doing so, but no more. If you set aside an hour each morning, set a timer so you don’t go over that hour.

3. Take Time Off

It’s important to take time off from the barrage of information. Set aside your evenings or weekends as information-free times.

During that time, don’t read email or RSS feeds. Don’t seek out information unless it’s pertinent to something you’re doing at that time.

When you’re on vacation, try to limit the amount of information you take in. Let your mind relax and avoid any information that isn’t absolutely vital. Realize, too, that most information can wait until your vacation is over.

4. Cull Ruthlessly

Don’t be afraid to cull the information sources you rely on. Look for single sources that have most of the information you want on a give subject, and get rid of the rest.

For example, rather than checking a dozen news sites every day, just use Google News for aggregated content. This way you get news from a wide variety of sources without having to visit multiple sites.

Culling also applies to the individual informational items that come into your email or feed reader every day. If something isn’t interesting to you, delete it. If it sits there in your inbox, you’ll feel obligated to read it and devote time to it.

Learn to scan the content that’s fed to you and determine within a matter of a couple of seconds whether it’s something that interests you or not. If not, just get rid of it. Without a dozen or more unread items in your email or RSS reader, you’ll feel less bombarded by information.

5. Learn to Prioritize

Even if you minimize the amount of information you have coming at you, it’s likely there will still be times when you just don’t have time to process all of it. This is when you need to prioritize.

Look back to the topic lists that you made at the beginning of this article. When there’s too much information coming at you, focus on the topics on list 1 first. These are the things that are most important to your daily life, and should be treated as such. If you still have time after processing all of that information, then move on to list 2, and so on.

6. Establish Systems

You should have systems for organizing and classifying the information that comes at you. In your email this might mean setting up filters to direct certain emails (like newsletters) into their own folders automatically. You might also have folders set up for things that you want to spend more time looking at later, or that you might want to refer back to.

The same goes for RSS feed readers. Make use of folders and tags to keep your feeds organized. This way, if you have limited time, you can easily check the most important feeds first.

Also consider if there are any apps out there that can help you be better organized and get through the information bombarding you faster. Does your feed reader give you the level of control you want? What about your email program? Web browser? Look around and find tools that will let you better manage your information. It’s worth the time and effort to do so.

Researching Without Succumbing to Information Overload

One of the toughest times to deal with information overload is when you’re researching something. It could be for a big client project or something in your own personal life. And it often involves finding a lot of information about whatever the subject is.

The most important thing to do when researching a new subject is to limit your research both in terms of the time you devote to it and its scope. When embarking on a new project, limit yourself to fifteen or twenty minutes of research to start with. This will likely be enough to give you a general overview of what the subject is all about.

Then, research specific things as you need to know them. This is generally more productive and efficient than trying to learn everything before you actually get any hands-on experience.

Another option when it comes to researching a topic is to go analog. Visit your local library and borrow a book on the subject, rather than going online. This often gives you a more focused overview and minimizes the chances that you’ll end up going off on tangents in your research.

When You Already Have Too Much Information

So everything above is great if you’re dealing with a problem with day-to-day information overload. But what if your problem has to do with having so much information pertaining to a certain subject that you’re now paralyzed and can’t make any kind of decision? What do you do then?

There are a few different ways to approach this. It can help to make notes and get an idea of all the pieces of information that might impact your decision. If it’s a yes/no decision you’re trying to make, consider making a pro-con list.

There are other decision-making models out there, too, that can help you make up your mind if you’re paralyzed by too much information. Some are everyday models and can be as simple as choosing the first option that you think will ge the desired results. The type of model you choose to use is largely dependent on the complexity of the decision. Wikipedia has a great article on decision making with more detail.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

How do you handle information overload? Please share your tips with us…

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High quality content, regardless of whether the site aims to inform, entertain, or sell a product, will increase the site’s likelihood of converting visitors. But beyond providing high quality content, a site also needs to organize that content in a way that makes it accessible to visitors.

Prioritizing your content is one of the best ways to make sure your visitors are finding the information you want them to find, and that they want to find. But figuring out what content is most important and how to arrange it to reflect that can get confusing, fast.

In many cases, designers and content creators feel like it’s all important, and should all get equal billing. But that’s not doing your visitors any favors. You need to get to the root of what’s most important to them, and then provide that in the most user-friendly way possible.

What Are the Site’s Goals?

The first thing you need to think about when deciding which content is most important on a website is what the website’s goals are. Different sites are going to have different goals. For one, it might be selling a product. Another one might be looking to provide information. Others might want people to become members. Some do a combination of the three, or something else all together.

Once you know what your site’s goals are, you can start tailoring the content to fit those goals. If your site aims to sell a product, then the most important information on that site will be that which describes the benefits of the product, answers potential customer questions, and tells visitors how to buy.

If your site aims to recruit members, then you’ll want to put information about why someone should join front and center. If the site’s primary purpose is to provide information, then you’ll want to make sure that either the information or navigation to find that information is place in a prominent position on the home page.

Case Study: Speak Human

Speak Human
It’s obvious from the Speak Human website that their prospective customers are interested in how the book will help them become better marketers. While the emphasis here is placed squarely on that content, they also make it easy to find other information through a well-placed and well-designed navigation bar (which also places more emphasis on the “Buy Now” link than the others, which makes sense since the main goal of the site is to sell books).

Case Study: VaultPress

VaultPress
It’s obvious here that VaultPress wants visitors to sign up for their service, but the positioning of that banner also directs the eye to the content immediately underneath, which talks about the benefits of using VaultPress. Setting apart certain content with a subtle background color also adds priority to some items over others.

Make a List of Necessary Content

Once you know what the site’s goals are, you’ll need to make a list of the necessary content to reach those goals.

For example, if you have a site that aims to sell a product, you’ll want to include product benefits and features, information about your company, a FAQ page, and information on how to purchase the product (or a form to do so right on the website).

If your primary goal is to provide information, then you’re going to want to make sure a taste of that information is available on the home page. You’ll also want to make sure navigation to the rest of the site is placed in an easy-to-find place and is easy to use.

Case Study: Checkout

Checkout
Prioritizing information through the size and placement of content, as well as through icons, is a slightly different approach that isn’t seen as often. In this case, it works very well, though. Also, including an icon and a bit of information about each feature group right in the local navigation make each section appear equally important, regardless of the order in which it appears.

What Do Users Want?

Once you have a list of all the information your site will need, you’ll want to prioritize it so you can figure out what goes where. To do this, think about what your users want. This, again, will depend on the goal of your site. If you want your visitors to purchase something, then think about what information they’re going to want before making a decision. The larger and more expensive the purchase, the more information they’re going to want.

If your site is there to provide information, think about the order in which people need to learn about your topic. Make sure visitors can find information for beginners first, but also make it easy to tap into more advanced information for those visitors who are already familiar with your subject.

For membership sites, think about what your visitors want to know about joining. It’s likely they’ll want to know what benefits they’ll receive (especially if it’s a paid membership). They might also want to be able to view existing members or sample site content that’s generally reserved only for members.

Taking a few hours to really think about what your visitors are going to be interested in is vital. Visit some similar sites to yours and think about how they’ve arranged the information on their site and what seems to be missing or is hard to find. Then, correct those deficiencies on your own site.

Case Study: Global Spend Solutions

Global Spend Solutions
A lot of sites overlook the use of graphics as major conveyors of information, rather than just complementary to the written content. The infographic used here in the header tells us exactly what Global Spend Solutions does and what their business process is, as well as how they can help a visitor. Sometimes they best way to give priority to content is to simplify it into its most basic terms.

Case Study: dConstruct 2010

dConstruct 2010
dConstruct 2010 obviously knows that visitors are most interested in who the speakers are for the year and place that content front-and-center in the design. They also make other information easy to find, though, both through a well-designed navigation bar and through additional content on the home page.

Deciding How to Organize Information

So, you have a list of the necessary content for your website, and you know what your visitors are going to want to know first. But let’s say you have a lot of information to convey and you aren’t sure how, exactly, you should do that. It’s not uncommon to have lots of information or links that need to be presented that have equal importance on a page. In those cases, it’s best to decide on some formal method for organizing it, rather than just ordering it randomly.

There are a number of schemes you can use to organize lists of information. Alphabetical or numerically are two of the most common, but they only really work for certain types of content. Lists of links, for example, can work really well arranged alphabetically.

Organizing information by who its intended audience is works well for sites where there are likely to be multiple different types of visitors. For example, an online banking website might have business customers and personal customers. Arranging information separately for each type of visitor makes sense, as there will be different priorities for each.

Other schemes for organizing content can include things like geography or format. If your content includes or is dependent at all on geography, that can be an effective and logical way to organize that information. The format of content can be another great way to keep things organized. Let’s say, for example, you have a blog where you offer roundups, tutorials, interviews, and inspiration posts. Separating and organizing that content by format makes a lot of sense in this case. It’s logical.

That’s what content organizing comes down to: logic. If your content is organized and laid out in a logical manner, your visitors will be able to find what they’re looking for. If it’s laid out in a random fashion, they’ll waste time looking for the information they need, and may look elsewhere if they get frustrated.

Case Study: 2pxBorder

2pxBorder
2pxBorder makes use of typography and color to prioritize the information on their home page. The big, bold headings let us know exactly what they do, while other visual cues on the page direct us to the most important other parts on the page.

Card Sorting

If you’re unsure of how to organize the information on your site, or you can figure out multiple ways that seem like they’d work, you might consider using card sorting to figure out the most intuitive way of organizing that information. With card sorting, you put summaries of your site content onto index cards and then let users sort that content into what they think are the most logical groups. You’ll need a focus group in order to carry this out, and turning to your current customers or users can be a good option.

All your users need to do is arrange the cards in the way they think best represents how they should be grouped. You can choose to put them in groups at the start, and then let users rearrange them, or you can just put them all in one group. The former method may work best if you already have a content structure in place and are wondering what improvements could be made, while the second one may be best for new designs.

Card sorting is simple and cost-effective, which makes it a good option for developing a content structure without spending a lot of money. One big disadvantage, though, is that results may not be very consistent between users. You might have ten users and get back ten completely different methods for organizing your site’s content. But it’s often a good starting point, if nothing else.

Pay Attention to Priority on Each Page

Once you know what information is necessary and how important each element is, you’ll need to decide how to prioritize the information on each page. It’s important to properly format and prioritize information within pages, especially when there’s a lot of content present.

If you don’t, the entire thing looks like one giant block of text, and your visitors will have a harder time picking out what’s important and what’s not. Since it’s your site and you have clear site goals, you want to direct your visitors to what’s most important, to increase the chances that they’ll follow through on those goals.

There are a number of elements that play into how information is prioritized on each page of your site. There are the obvious things like color, font size, and graphical indicators, but there are also more subtle cues that will let your visitors know what information is most important.

White space is one of the most important factors in prioritizing information on a page. Leaving more white space around an element on your page increases its importance among the other parts of the page. When combined with color, font size, and other design elements, it does an excellent job of setting apart the most important parts of your page.

The most important information on your pages should be positioned near the top of the page. Use heading tags to format headlines for each of your sections, and remember the hierarchy inherent in those tags (use H1 for the most important, H6 for the least important). Use color sparingly to add even more importance to one section or another. When the page is fully formatted, you should instantly be able to pick out the most important element on that page, without question.

Case Study: Joyent

Joyent
Joyent uses color and typography to emphasize certain content over others. Graphics also play a large role in directing visitors to certain information.

Case Study:The Rackspace Cloud

The Rackspace Cloud
Using different colors in the navigation to set apart the most important element is an excellent way to organize content. Note how they also use different background images and colors, along with icons, to set apart different content areas.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Have you developed any methods for prioritizing content in your web design projects? Or have any resources for getting user feedback on the way your content is presented? Please share them in the comments!

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Just like the blueprints of a dream home or the outline of a well-written article, good website structure organizes information in a way that enhances the user experience and delivers pertinent information as quickly as possible.

In fact, most website visitors only become aware of information architecture when it is poor and stops them from finding the information they require.

Read on for more details and a case study. As usual, you can leave us your feedback at the end of the post…

Why Is It Important?

Even an optimized site with sleek design and compelling copy can fall flat without sound information architecture.  If prospects can’t navigate easily through a site, chances are they’ll get lost, feel frustrated, and leave to never return. And you can forget about converting them to customers.

For example, Starbucks offers two free hours of Wi-Fi in their cafes with your registered Starbucks card, but the actual process of registering and getting online is so confusing, it’s enough to send you to the competition. While most cafes give you a simple access code, Starbucks makes you jump through endless hoops to use this supposedly convenient feature.

Even though Starbucks is a hugely successful enterprise, missing the mark with this small function of their website is enough to make them lose possible revenue from the big draw of free Wi-Fi.  This example shows how navigation can directly affect conversion rates.

Information Architecture for the Ego vs. the Client

Just like web copy, information architecture should be customer-centric. When developing copy for a website, businesses tend to get caught up in themselves, writing what they want, rather than what visitors might want or need to read.

A visitor might be interested to learn about a business, but they mainly want to know what the business can do for them.

The same principle applies to site navigation. Rather than organizing information the way upper management prefers, navigation should be based entirely on how the website visitor needs to find that information.

This goes beyond organizing the information on a website into a coherent structure. You’ll need to know how potential customers will behave when they come looking for that information.

Case Study – Vancouver Bike Repair

For example, a recent Google search for Vancouver bike repair yielded several top results, including a bike shop called Bicycle Sports Pacific. However, a visit to their site gives the impression that bike repair is not actually one of their main services, since the term is nowhere to be found along the top menu. In fact, a link titled ‘Repair/Maintenance’ is buried far down the page on the left and leads to the bike maintenance products they offer – a dead end for someone looking for bike repair services.

A few scrolls down the homepage reveals a short blurb describing their bike repair service. It starts with the sentence ‘We specialize in expert bike repair’, but nothing on the site supports that claim. One would think that perhaps Bicycle Sports Pacific is not the place to go for bike repair considering that information relating to this service appears to be low priority on their website. There are no details on the types of repair services they offer or their rates.

A visit to Bicycle Sports Pacific’s Vancouver location, however, reveals that bike repair is actually one of their main services, with nearly half of their store space devoted to repairs. You would never know this from visiting their website. In fact, their website looks more like someone is trying to demonstrate how knowledgeable they are bikes in general, rather than giving someone looking for bike repair services the information he or she needs.

A much better example of customer-centric navigation is demonstrated in The Bike Doctor website. The tagline on the site reads ‘It’s fun + easy!’ and they’re right! The most pertinent information is arranged into easy and intuitive sections along the top and side menus. The homepage features a clickable thumbnail of their repair rates, and even a special promotion offering a $5 discount on your spring tune up when you mention their website.  SOLD!

These two businesses are essentially the same – they both offer bikes and bike accessories for sale, and also bike repair services, but their sites couldn’t be more different in terms of navigation. The Bike Doctor’s site is simple and broken down into clear sections, while the Bicycle Sports Pacific site offers endless information on cycling in general and how to choose a bike, while leaving one of their main services inadequately covered.

Doing It Right the First Time

Building a site that serves the needs of your potential customers starts with thorough research. You will need to know why they will visit your site, what information they will need, and the fastest, most intuitive way to deliver that information.

But how do you know how the user will behave? How do you organize everything into an intuitive structure? Here are some research tips:

1.  Get to Know the Audience
A good copywriter thoroughly researches the target audience before writing quality, customer-centric content, and your preliminary site navigation research should be no different. Get to know the audience by observing their behavior.

How can you do this? Ask a group of current or potential customers to provide information on what they do in a typical day. This can be in the form of a questionnaire or journal. You may also want to observe them in person to get a first-hand, unedited experience.

This background information will give you insight into the behavior of people who will likely visit the website, the type of information they’ll need in order of priority, and which information can be cut out.

2.  Develop Hardcopy Prototypes
Now that you have a better idea of the information you’ll need to include, you can break it down into categories. Print out sections under each category on separate sheets or cards, and give them to the same sample group to organize into a logical structure.

This process will give you further insight into the way your site visitors will want to find information, with common organizational patterns being the ones you’ll want to implement.

3.  Test Digital Prototypes
Build a very basic site according to your hardcopy research findings. Invite the sample group to come in and use the test site to find information they’re interested in, or to complete a desired task (sign up for a newsletter, fill out a form, etc.). Monitor them to track challenges and frustration, as well as wins. Ask them to note and discuss any difficulties they had during the process.

You can use your research findings from this step to make improvements and finalize your structure.

Other Helpful Tips

Aside from the information you collect during your research, here are some other points you should keep in mind when building a well-structured website:

• Ensure visitors know exactly where they are at all times by providing a visual cue (i.e. highlight the word ‘home’ when they’re on the home page).
• Ensure global navigation includes only the most important categories your visitors will need to access quickly (extraneous global buttons can lead them into unnecessary corners).
• Not every site needs an FAQ page. Technically, if you’ve done enough research, and built an intuitive site structure that delivers what your visitors are looking for, it reduces or eliminates the need for frequently asked questions.

Written exclusively for WDD by Rick Sloboda. He is a Web Copywriter at Webcopyplus, which helps businesses increase online traffic and sales with optimized web copy. He speaks frequently at Web-related forums and seminars, and conducts website content studies with organizations in Europe and the U.S., including Yale University.

How information architecture has impacted your sites and how do you use this principle?

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That being said, regardless of your profession and whether it’s for school, work, or personal improvement, being able to retain the information without the need to spend hours studying is an incredibly useful skill.

One of the best methods for learning new information quickly is to use the scan-absorb process method.

This consists of scanning content quickly, absorbing the important points, and then processing it so you can apply it to your own projects.

Read on for more details on each step…

1. Scan

Scanning is briefly looking over content, picking out only the most important bits to read.

This is probably the most important part of this learning method. It’s the first step, though it is often done in conjunction with the next step, “absorb”.

Not all content is appropriate for scanning, though, so make sure you take a quick look at whatever you’re preparing to scan with that in mind prior to starting.

Image by flippnjj

Look for Content Suitable for Scanning

Lists are particularly well-suited to scanning. Whether they’re bulleted, numbered, or in some other format, finding content that presents the information you need in list-form can improve your scanning effectiveness.

Just be wary of posts that are entirely list-based, with little or no other content. Lists should be used to emphasize the other content within the post, not in place of all other content.

The use of illustrations within a blog post or article can greatly improve how scannable it is. Well-chosen illustrations reinforce the concepts an article presents and can clarify points better than words sometimes.

One caveat, though: sometimes poorly-chosen images can only serve to confuse you more if you’re just scanning content. If the images don’t seem to be making any particular point, it’s best to either read the content fully or ignore the images all together.

Using font styles like bold and italic can make it easier to pick out key phrases within content. When overused, it doesn’t save much time for the reader, but it’s still a valuable way of picking out the most important points in a post or article.

Look for content that includes plenty of white space. This includes empty space around the text as a whole, as well as around headings and between paragraphs. Space in and around the text makes it easier to pick out particular words and phrases, and to read quicker. White space allows your eyes to relax, which lets you scan faster and with less eye strain.

The First and Last Sentence Technique

If the content you need to scan doesn’t include lists or other content mentioned above, you can use the first and last sentence technique.

This consists of reading the first and last sentence of each paragraph within the article. This technique is best suited to more formal text, where the first paragraph in a sentence is generally the thesis statement and the last sentence sums up the meaning of the paragraph and serves as a conclusion of sorts.

What this does is allow you to gather the most important points in an article or blog post without having to read the entire thing. It’s not well-suited to pieces that don’t have a formal structure, though, so be aware of that when attempting this.

Beware of particularly short and long paragraphs, too, as they can either cause you to read virtually everything in the article or miss important points, respectively.

Long is the Enemy

If you’re looking to scan information quickly, avoid long posts and articles.

While some longer posts that are well-structured can still be scanned, many longer articles have extraneous information that isn’t necessary to understanding the core information you’re looking for.

Another drawback to long articles is that they tend to go much more in-depth than many people need. Usually, if you’re using the scan-absorb-process method, you want a general overview of the topic at hand, not an understanding on par with those who have a PhD in the subject.

Long paragraphs are another enemy of scannability. Longer paragraphs have a couple of pitfalls. Longer paragraphs often contain more than one idea or concept, which prohibits the first sentence/last sentence rule from working as it’s supposed to.

These longer paragraphs are also often filled with extra information that isn’t vital to the core information presented. Conciseness is your friend when scanning content.

Look for shorter posts that are well formatted with lists, headings and subheadings, and styled text for optimum scannability. You’ll gain the most useful information while spending the least amount of time and effort.

Pay Attention to the Table of Contents

If you have to read something longer (maybe the only thing available that really covers the topic you want to learn about is a book), pay close attention to the table of contents to organize your learning ahead of time.

The table of contents will generally outline every important point related to a given subject, and can give you a great start on figuring out where to focus your efforts and what to take notes on (more on note-taking under “Absorb”, below).

Speed Reading

When you need to learn more in-depth information than what scanning will allow for, speed reading can be a great solution.

It’s faster than how most of us traditionally read, but doesn’t skip as much content as scanning sometimes does. The absorb and process techniques outlined below can be used with speed reading just as they can be used with scanning.

Beware of False Scannability

There are a few cases where an article will appear scannable at first glance, but upon further inspection you realize they’re not particularly well-suited to scanning after all.

A post that is just one long list is one example. Lists are usually scannable, but when that list has 200 items on it, scannability flies right out the window. Look for posts that use lists as reinforcement of key points, not ones that contain nothing but list items.

Another big scannability problem comes when paragraphs within the article only contain one or two sentences. Reading the first and last sentence of each paragraph doesn’t save much time when those are the only sentences in each paragraph. While short paragraphs are definitely desirable over long ones, look for articles where most paragraphs are made up of at least four or five sentences.

2. Absorb

Scanning information is only the beginning. Anyone can quickly glance over an article or post. That’s the easy part. It’s a bit trickier to absorb that information as you’re scanning, without having to go back over it half a dozen times before any of it sticks.

Image by Jean-Louis Zimmermann

Take Notes!

Taking notes as you’re scanning can be a great way to absorb what you’re reading.

Write down the main points as you read them. You can do this stream-of-consciousness style, with little formatting or structure, or you can create an outline. Choose whichever one works better for you.

Outlines can be particularly helpful if what you’re reading is already well-structured with headings and subheadings. If not, you may just want to jot everything down in one long list.

Whether you write down verbatim what is contained in the article or rephrase it as you take notes depends on your own learning style. Some people have to rephrase in order to retain information, while for others just the act of writing it down will allow them to remember it.

As mentioned above, if you’re working with a longer piece, coming up with an outline or a list of points you want to take notes on prior to actually starting can streamline and speed up your efforts. A table of contents is a great place to get the necessary information to do so prior to actually delving into the text at hand.

Mind Map

If you’re not keen on taking notes, consider creating a mind-map showing the relationships between the information you’re reading.

Mind maps can be more creative than notes and can further help reinforce what you’re reading and allow you to retain that information for longer.

Reflect

Reflect on what you’re reading as you read it. This can be done within your notetaking or separately.

One of the easiest ways to reflect on something is to ask yourself questions about it. Then, go find the answers to those questions in a similar fashion.

Question What You’re Reading

As you’re reading something, come up with questions related to the text. Answer them as you go along.

The purpose of this is to engage your mind as you’re reading. It also helps to ensure you don’t skip over important bits as you’re scanning.

If you can’t answer the questions you’ve come up with, you may need to either scan through the text again or look a little deeper into the subject you’re studying.

Short Sessions

Your brain can only absorb so much information at one time. And that time gets shorter as you get older.

So instead of sitting down for a five-hour cram session, spend 20 or 30 minutes at a time, with 20 or 30 minute breaks in between. This gives your brain time to absorb, process, and store the information you’re scanning so you retain it better.

3. Process

Scanning and absorbing can both be done without much deep or abstract thought.

They’re more mechanical than processing in that respect. But processing is where we actually learn information in a meaningful way. A way that we can then apply to the project at hand and to future projects.

There are a few ways to process the information you scan and absorb, and choosing the right one depends both on the information you’re looking at and your own learning style. Read on for some of the possibilities.

Image by jez

Rephrase What You’ve Read

Rephrasing what you’ve read can be done during the absorption stage (while taking notes) or afterward.

Scan and absorb the information as detailed above and then write out a short paragraph or two about what you just read. Sure, it might remind you a bit too much of all those reading assignments in school, but there’s a reason you were assigned that type of thing so often: it works and really does help you retain information.

Try It Out

If you’re reading a how-to article, try what it’s telling you.

This type of processing is particularly suited to short how-to articles that have advice you can repeat over and over again on multiple projects.

Gain More Experience

This is related to trying it out, but gaining more experience in a particular subject can give you the opportunity to not only try what you’ve learned, but to also expand on it with your own knowledge as you learn more.

Look for opportunities where you can apply the concepts you’ve scanned and absorbed. The more experience you get, the more you’ll learn from just a few minutes of scanning and absorbing.

Dispute It

Argument can be a great way to learn more about something. This works best with opinion pieces or articles where there are opposing viewpoints or options.

When you read something, try looking at it from the opposite angle. Poke holes in it, look for what it’s missing or has overlooked, and then write down those opposing views.

One of two things will likely happen when you do this. Either you’ll find that the original information you read stands up well to criticism and you’ll have a better understanding of it overall. Or, you’ll realize that there are better approaches and you may turn in a new direction. In either case, you’ll have more knowledge than you did when you started.

Content Particularly Suited to Scan-Absorb-Process

Some kinds of content are better suited to the scan-absorb-process method than others. Recognizing the kinds of content that can be more easily learned this way is vital to making the method work. Any well-formatted article can be used with this method, but there are other types of content that are also particularly well-suited.

Image by GrapeCity

Charts and Infographics

Simple charts, graphs, and other graphical representations of information are excellent for this method. The key here, though, is simplicity.

Complex charts and infographics can be nearly impossible to simply scan and get any kind of accurate picture of the data they contain. Graphs are slightly easier and trends can usually be picked out even with larger data sets.

Non-Scientific Theories

People come up with theories all the time. From economic theories to conspiracy theories, non-scientific theories can usually be scanned quite easily as long as they’re properly formatted.

In many cases, theories are written out with tons of supporting information, much of which is repetitive. Scanning lets you pick out the most important concepts without reading a bunch of evidence that only reinforces what was said.

Be careful with this, though, as claiming a theory is valid without being able to quote any evidence can make you look like you’re willing to believe anything. But, scan-absorb-process is a good place to start when investigating theories about any non-scientific subject.

Scientific theories are often too complex for this method, though a cursory understanding can still sometimes be gleaned from scanning, absorbing, and processing.

How-To Articles

How-to articles (not tutorials) are well suited for the scan-absorb-process method. In many cases, they follow a fairly formal structure and often use formatted text, lists, and headings to organize their material.

Things That Work Against Scan-Absorb-Process

We’ve covered things that are particularly well-suited to scan-absorb-process, but what about content that doesn’t work well with this method? Some content definitely isn’t learned well in this way and will require a different approach.

Video and Audio Content

This one’s a no-brainer. You can’t scan video or audio content. Fast-forwarding doesn’t count.

Step-by-Step Instructions

Step-by-step instructions need to be followed step-by-step. And scanning doesn’t really work well with that, as usually there isn’t much extraneous content you can skip over. The exception to this is when anecdotal support is provided for each step.

This can be skipped over, provided you understand the step without it.

Informal Opinion Pieces

This one has more to do with structure than the actual content. Most informal opinion pieces don’t do much with headings or font styles or formal paragraph structure, making scanning nearly impossible. While some opinion pieces might be scannable, the vast majority aren’t.

Pieces with Poor Structure

Structure is your friend when it comes to scanning information. Without well-thought-out paragraphs, lists, headings and subheadings, and styled text, scanning can be nearly impossible.

Luckily, in most cases you can tell right away whether something is well-formatted for scanning or not. If not, look elsewhere for the information you need or abandon the scanning and read the entire piece (you can still use the absorbing and processing methods described here).

Creating Content Suitable for Scan-Absorb-Process

The flip-side of learning to use the scan-absorb-process method for learning things is to create articles that keep this method in mind.

Those seeking information, online especially, often use this method either consciously or subconsciously and are more likely to turn to your site if your information is laid out in a manner that’s conducive to this method.

Here’s a simple questionnaire to cross-check your content:

• Do you use bold, italic, and other font styles to make important bits stand out?
• Do you use headings and sub-headings?
• Do you use lists to reinforce important points?
• Do the images you’ve used to illustrate your content help to clarify your meaning?
• Are your paragraphs short (but not too short, at least 3-4 sentences)?
• Do you use traditional paragraph format (a thesis sentence, followed by a few sentences supporting your thesis, with the last sentence a conclusion)?

More Resources

• Absorb Information Like Never Before – From Get Everything Done.
• Absorb Information Faster Than Your Peers – From Lost In Cubes.
• Scannable Content – From ProBlogger.
• How to Write Scannable Content: A 6-Step Approach – From Daily Blog Tips.
• Reading on the Web – From Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Did you just scan this article?   How do you scan and absorb information? What methods work best for you?

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And what many bloggers don’t realize is that information they put on their blogs can have a direct legal impact.

Even if what you’re posting to your blog isn’t breaking any laws, it may be considered unethical by others, which can often be just as damaging.

Here’s a guide to free speech and freedom of information specifically for bloggers. Legal issues, ethical issues, and other things to consider are all covered.

If you have additional input or advice, or disagree with anything here, please speak up in the comments.

Permanent Records

Do you remember the stories about a “permanent record” that were told to frighten children into behaving appropriately throughout school?

The concept was popularized on television and in movies, with kids constantly being threatened that a particular action was going to be placed on their “permanent record”.

The theory was that this record would follow you through school and then eventually into the workforce, and that negative things it contained could effect your entire life. In reality (in most countries, at least), there’s no such thing as a “permanent record”, at least not in the sense that it was portrayed.

But with the Internet, there is a permanent record. Records are kept of virtually everything you do online, often automatically as part of backups and caches, though sometimes it might also be done manually if something particularly funny or embarrassing or incriminating is done.

This permanent record can come back to haunt you in the future, depending on what it contains, and can really interfere with your ability to get a job, get into a good college, or run for political office.

The thing to remember, is that once you put something out there online, it’s out there forever. You won’t get a do-over if it’s something you’re no longer proud of.

While for the average person this is unlikely to ever cause any substantial problems, if you’re a businessperson or future politician, it can be very damaging.

Consider your aspirations and future ambitions and act accordingly now. Don’t put things online that you think you might regret later. Chances are, you probably will regret them at some point.

Libel and Slander

Libel is when you write something untrue and potentially harmful about someone. Slander is when you say something untrue and potentially harmful about someone.

Laws vary from country to country on how slander and libel (collectively called “defamation”) is handled.

In some countries (such as the U.S.), defamation is a civil matter and is dealt with only if the victim sues the defamer. In most other countries (including Canada, the UK, Australia, Russia, and China) though, there are criminal laws against defamation, at least in certain circumstances.

For the most part, if something you’ve said or written is true, and you can prove that it’s true, you’ll be protected from libel or slander suits.

That doesn’t mean that you still won’t have to defend against them, which can be expensive. You can still run into issues if the information you’ve disclosed isn’t of public interest.

If the information you’ve disclosed publically is considered private information and not of public note, then you can be sued under invasion of privacy laws in some cases.

Privacy

Privacy laws are another thing that vary widely from country to country.

As a general rule, though, unless something is of public importance, if it’s not something someone would likely want shared, don’t share it.

Now, “public importance” is one of those things that’s open to a lot of interpretation. Obviously, if you’re exposing information about a public figure, then there’s a good chance a lot more falls into the “public importance” category.

If it’s someone who isn’t a public figure, then there are fewer areas that would be important to the general public, and therefore fewer things you can expose without having serious worries about being sued or violating any laws.

A good rule of thumb is that if you wouldn’t want someone to expose a particular fact about you, don’t expose it about them without a very good reason for doing so.

Intellectual Property

Intellectual property generally includes copyrights, patents, and trademarks.

In the United States and many other countries, as soon as a work (whether written, audio, or another format covered by the law) is created, it is protected by copyright law.

No registration is required to be protected, though registration does add an extra layer of protection (mainly a specific date when it can be proven that a work existed).

Trademarks and patents, however, do have to go through a registration and approval process in order to be protected.

As a blogger or online content creator, you need to respect the intellectual property rights of others. This is usually relatively easy to do. Here are some things to keep in mind when using the work of others within your own blog:

• Don’t quote more than a few sentences of someone else’s content.
• Properly cite any content you include and link to the original source.
• It’s also polite to link to the place where you found content, if it’s not the original source.
• Don’t use images in your blog posts unless they’re licensed for use (through Creative Commons or otherwise) or you have permission.
• When you use images, make sure you link back to the source and properly credit the creator.
• When doing roundups or posts that are showcasing artists’ work, it’s generally not necessary to ask permission to post small versions of their work with proper credit and links, though you should be prepared to take down the post or the part of the post that features them if they object.
• If you use a trademarked name in your posts, you may want to include a note about who the trademark belongs to and/or link back to the company’s website. If you don’t, you might even get a letter from the trademark owner requesting that you do so.

An interesting side-note about trademarks: trademarks are always adjectives.

Using a trademark as a verb or even as a noun is technically a violation of trademark law, at least in the United States. In other words, if you say you “Googled” something or you “Photoshopped” something, that’s a trademark violation.

The trademarks there are technically the Google search engine, and Adobe Photoshop software.

The problem that companies run into is that if they don’t protect their trademarks from use like this, the trademark can become “genericized” and they can lose their trademark rights to it, meaning anyone could then use the name.

Censorship

When we think of Internet censorship, many people generally think of Iran or China and their massive censorship efforts.

But what most people don’t realize is that a majority of countries worldwide actually employ some form of Internet censorship or surveillance.

Blue countries have no censorship, yellow countries have some, red countries are under surveillance, and black countries are heavily censored.

Among the countries that employ at least some censorship is the United States, the United Kingdom, Bahrain, Yemen, Australia, Syria, Germany, Denmark, Canada, and Brazil.

These censorship laws are varied, with some specifically set up to protect minors from content that would be illegal for them to see elsewhere, while others aim to block citizens from seeing anything that’s considered offensive, immoral, or dangerous by their government.

Many people will agree that some censorship laws are necessary. Laws that protect minors (from things like obscene or pornographic content), for example, are often met with popular support in many countries.

Sometimes these laws only extend to public schools or other government-run institutions, rather than for the populace at large.

Other censorship laws, though, especially those that hinder with freedom of speech, are often met with public disapproval and can cause a country to be ostracized by others in the world community (as is the case with China and Iran).

Censorship plays an important role in what you say online in two separate ways. First, if you live in a country with censorship laws, educate yourself on what those laws permit and do not permit.

Then decide if you can abide by those rules or not. If not, and you’re willing to break your country’s laws, there are often workarounds possible, such as hosting your site outside of your home country or having someone else register your domain and host your site elsewhere. But realize that you may face legal repercussions by doing this, some of which can be very severe.

The other important role censorship plays in online content is if you’re trying to reach people within a particular country.

If your blog’s content is of particular interest to those in, say, China, then you’ll need to make sure your blog doesn’t say anything that violates China’s censorship policies.

Web Host Rules

Above we talked about government censorship. But there’s another type of censorship that takes place regularly, as well. It’s censorship by your web host or ISP.

Hosting companies sometimes have strict rules about what they’ll allow to be hosted on their servers and what they won’t. The usual targets of these rules are pornography, obscene content, or content that could potentially be used for illegal acts (such as excerpts from books like the Anarchist’s Cookbook).

For the most part, these ISP and web host rules aren’t something you can fight against. In most of the world, web hosts are private businesses, and have the right to run their businesses in whatever manner they deem appropriate. If they don’t want to host a particular type of site, that’s their prerogative.

The best advice I can offer in those situations is to find a web host that has no problem hosting the type of material you want to publish.

Censoring Your Own Blog

There’s also the question of whether you should censor your own blog.

When visitors leave comments on your posts, you may decide you want to censor them or not post them at all. This is particularly applicable if the comment is offensive or inflammatory, or if it adds nothing to the conversation.

If you do decide to censor comments on your blog, it’s generally a good idea to post a public comment moderation policy somewhere. This should outline what types of comments will be excluded from publication (whether this is simply limited to posts that are offensive or extends to those that add nothing to the conversation).

A public comment policy lends credibility and can lead to improved quality in the comments you do receive.

Just realize that some feel that moderating comments in this manner is a hindrance to freedom of speech and may react unfavorably.

You may also censor what you write, in terms of the posts you publish. When you decide not to write about a specific topic due to potential negative reactions and repurcussions, that’s self-censorship. Most bloggers self-censor to some extent on a regular basis.

Personal vs. Business Blogging

When considering what information to post on your blog, it’s important to consider whether you’re blogging for personal or business purposes. What one might consider perfectly appropriate on an informal, personal blog could be offensive or unprofessional if you’re blogging for your business.

This is one of those situations where it’s important to figure out the repercussions of everything you post online.

If your blog is for your company or for your profession, then you need to consider very carefuly what you post. And not just from a legal standpoint. You need to consider that everything you say is going to reflect on you as a professional.

On a personal blog, people generally expect you to be more informal, more casual, and less professional. But remember that anything you post online may be seen by potential clients or employers in the future. Just because it’s a personal site doesn’t mean it won’t be used against you professionally.

Legal vs. Ethical Issues

When considering what to publish on your blog or elsewhere online, it’s a good idea to consider ethical issues as well as legal issues.

There are some things you may debate posting that, while not illegal, may have ethical implications. These include things like off-the-record information shared in confidence or maliciously-obtained information.

While these things may not be specifically illegal, they would definitely be of questionable ethical standards.

One of the main reasons to consider ethical implications is your reputation. If your readers perceive you as unethical, they may also perceive you as untrustworthy and unreliable.

Unethical decisions may also result in problems with others in your industry or niche. They may blacklist your content or your blog entirely, which can really hurt your traffic numbers, especially in niches where blogs tend to quote each other a lot and send traffic back and forth.

When it comes to online content creation, your reputation is often the only thing that matters. And often people aren’t given a second chance if they make a blunder.

It’s important to consider what the content you’re publishing says about you, and that the message it’s putting out is the one you want.

Conclusion

For the most part, free speech seems to be the rule rather than the exception in the blogosphere.

Despite censoring, both by bloggers themselves, governments, and ISPs, most blogs are relatively open when it comes to the information they disseminate. This results in a blogosphere that has a diverse array of opinions and voices.

Just remember that everything you put out there becomes a part of the permanent cultural record.

What you say today could come back to haunt you (or help you) five, ten, or even twenty years in the future. Be sure that the message you’re putting out there now will be a message you’ll be still okay with then.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

Disclaimer: I’m not a lawyer, and I’ve never played one on TV. To that end, the advice below should not be construed as legal advice, simply as sage words from one blogger to another. Also, as laws vary widely from country to country, you should always contact a legal expert in your own jurisdiction if you have any questions.

What are your views on censorship and how it should be handled? Please share your opinion below…

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The same could be said of intelligence. What they don’t tell you is that the “smart” people of the world are, in most cases, just better at researching and learning things than everyone else.

But researching is a learned skill, not something you’re born with.

And while some people might be predisposed to learn things more easily than others, it’s generally not enough to make a measurable difference.

By learning how to research, you can quickly and fairly easily become knowledgeable about just about anything. And with the Internet, almost anything you could ever want to know is at your fingertips. You just have to learn how to access it.

It’s all there, online, for free. Here are the techniques I’ve used to find pretty much anything online.

Start with Wikipedia

Whenever you try to learn something new on the Internet, start with Wikipedia. A wealth of information is there, covering practically every subject in an easy-to-use, easy-to-understand format.

The main reason to start with Wikipedia is that it gives a good overview of most topics.

Sure, any given page is bound to have some inaccuracies (as is the case on most user-generated websites), but most of the content is generally reliable. And when the accuracy of certain information is questionable, it’s usually tagged as such.

The key to using Wikipedia as a source, though, is in how you make use of the information. You have to pay attention to a number of things on a Wikipedia page aside from the main content.

First of all, read the introduction to the page. This is where you’ll usually find a quick description of the topic, along with alternate and related terms.

Skim the content to find the parts of the article that you need to know about most. Some articles are short and don’t have a list of contents. Others are several thousand words long. Reading the entire thing is usually unnecessary. Just skip to the sections that are relevant to you.

Next, check the references and related resources. The references is a great place to get in-depth information on your topic. These links often include scholarly journals and articles and other respected sources.

The related sources section includes external links to in-depth information. These websites often include professional associations and organizations devoted to the topic as well as general websites with good topical information.

Move on to Google

Once you’ve built a good foundation through Wikipedia, move on to a Google search (or whatever search engine you prefer).

Having read a bit on Wikipedia, you should know the main terms and keywords associated with the subject you’re researching. Start your general search with these terms.

When researching something, I always open a new window in Firefox. For each link I visit in a Google search, I open a new tab so that I can keep my original search results page open.

And if I click on additional links on pages that I have opened, I don’t have to go back through 10 or more pages to return to my original search.

Go Multimedia

Text isn’t the only educational content on the web. Video, podcasts and slideshows are out there to explain pretty much anything you can imagine.

The advantage of so much multimedia content being available is that it caters to people with different learning styles.

Some people learn well by reading. Others learn better by hearing an explanation or seeing a demonstration. And still others learn by doing (which is where step-by-step tutorials—either video, audio or text—come in handy).

If you learn best by watching demonstrations, then head on over to YouTube, Odeo, Vimeo or any of the many other video websites and start typing the keywords that you found on Wikipedia.

Make sure, though, whenever you deal with user-generated content to verify the information against reputable sources.

One often-overlooked resource for videos is the archive from the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) conferences.

TED videos are available for free on the official website and cover (as you might expect) technology, entertainment and design.

While many of the videos focus on broad concepts rather than the nitty-gritty, they’re still a great resource to expand your horizon. And the lectures are given by leaders in their fields, so the information is generally reliable.

Check Out Free Educational Resources

A ton of colleges are now putting their course materials online, accessible for free.

MIT offers its entire catalog as open courseware, with lecture notes, resources and syllabi. Other two- and four-year colleges are following suit.

You’ll also find purely web-based open education initiatives that cover subjects you might not find at a traditional college. These free courses offer a ton of organized information on any given subject.

Some colleges offer their lectures in audio and video format. Princeton, for example, offers some of its lectures through iTunes, as does the University of Virginia, Duke, Emory, Yale and Stanford.

In fact, iTunes has an entire section devoted to educational podcasts called iTunes U. Non-educational organizations are also represented, including the Library of Congress and Wall Street Journal.

The educational podcast market isn’t monopolized by iTunes, though. Odeo has an education category with 466 channels and more than 67,000 episodes. Participating colleges and universities include Oxford University, the University of Melbourne and MIT.

Look for Tutorials

Depending on your topic, you may be able to find tutorials. For pretty much any practical skill (and a whole lot of unpractical ones), you can find an online tutorial that teaches you how to do it.

You can find tutorials through search engines (just add “tutorial” or “instructions” to the end of your keyword search). You can also find them on these websites:

Instructables is a general tutorial website that offers step-by-step instructions on projects in categories such as arts, crafts, food, kids, music, outdoors and pets. Every tutorial has photos and/or diagrams to illustrate the process.

eHow offers categorized instructions and tutorials created by users. They include both text and video tutorials on a variety of topics, including law, health, food and drink, electronics and computers.

WikiHow is a user-editable how-to manual that covers a ton of different topics. Because of its wiki format, tutorials and instructions are constantly being improved.

The Tuts+ Network offers tutorials on a variety of tech topics, including Photoshop, web design, Flash and photography. Its tutorials are split into separate blogs based on topic and are written by experts.

Tutorialized offers tech tutorials for a variety of software programs, including Photoshop, GIMP, Flash, Blender and Illustrator.

Good-Tutorials offers up tech-related tutorials, covering CSS, Flash, HTML, Photoshop, PHP and more. Tutorials are categorized and searchable.

Use Tools Available to You

A ton of tools are out there to make online research a bit (or a lot) easier.

Some help by organizing your sources, others let you save snippets of pages for later reference, and others do pretty much everything you could ask for from a research app. They make tracking your research and organizing it for later reference a much easier process.

Zotero is a Firefox add-on that acts like a research assistant. It lets you collect links and whole pages, organize them into folders and tag them. It even generates a “Works cited” list from them. You can jot down notes on anything you save, which makes it much easier to remember why you included it in the first place or to remind yourself later how you ended up using it.

Zotero has a ton of features. It automatically captures citations; it cites from within MS Word and OpenOffice; it accesses your library from anywhere; it searches PDFs and notes instantly; and it lets you create group libraries.

It’s also compatible with thousands of bibliographic styles, so when it comes time to create a “Works cited” list, you don’t have to spend hours reformatting the whole thing. The best part is that Zotero is free and open source, so you can extend and modify it to meet your needs (or find others who have already done the work).

Wired-Marker is a permanent highlighting tool for Firefox. You can highlight sections of a web page to refer to later on. It’s a great app if you want to be able to easily refer to a specific section of a website that you’ve bookmarked. Wired-Marker is itself also a bookmark organizer.

iCyte is a note-taking and bookmarking app that works with Firefox and Internet Explorer 7 and 8. It saves any pages that you highlight or bookmark, so that even if the page changes or is deleted, you still have the original version. You can save sections of a website or the whole thing. You can also invite others to join your projects, share information and access information that others have shared.

Similar Web is a great Firefox extension for finding websites related to the one you’re on. There’s also a web-based version for people who don’t use Firefox. The add-on is particularly useful if you’re on, say, Odeo and want to see other websites that offer podcasts.

Notefish is an online note-taking app that lets you custom-save content from any pages on the web. You can organize and share pages based on a specific subject. The app has many customizable features, including ones that let you annotate and color your notes. The downloadable Firefox add-on helps you use Notefish more efficiently.

Diigo lets you highlight and share pages all over the web. You can add sticky notes to pages for later reference and can access notes from your computer or iPhone. Saved pages can be organized with tags or lists. You can create groups to share resources for a project, and you can even enforce tagging rules among group members to keep things organized. Free and premium accounts are available (educators get a free premium account).

Concierge is a Safari plug-in that replaces the browser’s bookmark management scheme with an easier-to-use bookmark and information management tool. You can bookmark links and save links from email, Address Book cards, and folder and file links from Finder. It puts all of your relevant information in one place.

Information overload is a common problem when researching a new subject online. Great Summary helps combat the problem by summarizing the content of a web page, document or section of text for you. It identifies key topics on a page and presents relevant information without duplicating content.

EagleFiler is an information management app for Mac OS X that lets you archive and search PDF files, word-processing documents, images, web pages, mail and more. It has a three-pane interface similar to that of most email programs. Files are stored in a universal format, so they’re accessible from any application. Files can be encrypted, and you can add notes, tags, labels and meta data to them.

When you download something in Safari, no record is kept of where it came from. This can be a problem if you need to refer to it in a “Works cited” list or just want to know where to get similar content. DownloadComment adds a note in the file’s Spotlight Comments field with the URL of the original file.

HistoryHound lets you search the content of every web page and RSS feed that you’ve visited recently in Safari, as well as any bookmarked page. It ranks results by relevance. It’s a great way to track down information in resources that you’ve already discovered.

Reference Tracker is an app for Mac OS X that lets you store documents in one place for later reference and citation. It automatically creates a “Works cited” list in Harvard, APA, MLA or Chicago/Turabian format. It has built-in search and one-click referencing of web pages (in Safari or Firefox) and email (from Apple Mail).

Selenium is a research application for Mac OS X that combines a browser, PDF manager, word processor, bibliography manager and outliner in a single window. Research is much simpler because you don’t have to switch back and forth between different applications.

Evernote is an online note-taking application that lets you save just about anything, from notes to images to web pages. And it stores everything online, so you can access your notes from anywhere. There’s even an iPhone app.

Springnote is a free wiki-based online notepad. You can create personal or group notebooks and access them either online or through the iPhone app.

Google Notebook is a free online note-taking app that lets you create an unlimited number of notebooks and save notes, web pages and other information in a single place, accessible from anywhere. You can organize your notes by adding tags to them, as you would with Google Bookmarks.

Specialized Websites

Specialized online libraries exist for a ton of different subjects. Anything from language to science to technology to history has its own dedicated resource library somewhere on the Internet.

These collections can speed up your research, and they sometimes include only reliable websites. Here are some to get you started.

Arts

If you’re looking for information on art, whether museums, individual artists or art movements, Art Cyclopedia is the place to go. It lists 9,200 artists and has 140,000 links from 2,600 different art websites.

IMDb is a database of movies and television programs, dating as far back as film itself. You can search by cast member or title. Individual listings include all previous and upcoming roles. Movie results include cast and production crew, plot synopsis and other production information (often photos).

Medical and Scientific

BioMed Central publishes 200 open-access peer-reviewed medical and scientific journals. And you can search all 200 of them on the website.

History and Humanities

The Internet History Sourcebooks Project collects public domain and copy-permitted historical texts in one place. The collection includes ancient, medieval and modern texts, as well as ones of specific groups, regions and religions.

Digital History offers historical texts and resources from American history. It is run through a partnership with a variety of educational and historical organizations, including the University of Houston, the Chicago Historical Society and the National Park Service. It has resources for researchers and teachers, including multimedia resources.

The Perseus Digital Library is a resource of mostly historical texts from Tufts University. The digital collection includes material from Greek and Roman, Renaissance and 19th-century American history.

Project Gutenberg offers public domain books and written material for free. The collection includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry and is both searchable and browsable. Most of the content dates to the 19th century and earlier.

General and Scholarly

Intute helps individuals find the best websites on which to conduct their research. You can search or browse by category. It even offers free training on using the web for research and education.

Infomine is a search engine for scholarly resources. The categories, which are browsable, include the following: bio, agricultural and medical sciences; business and economics; cultural diversity; e-journals; government info; maps and GIS; physical sciences, engineering, computer science and math; social sciences and humanities; and visual and performing arts. It also includes general reference and advanced search functionality.

The Librarians’ Internet Index is a searchable directory of content from all over the Internet, broken down by category. It includes only reputable websites, making it easier to trust the information you find.

The IPL is another collection of resources from all over the web, broken down by category. The collections are targeted at children, teens, adults and educators. The collection covers art and the humanities, social science, law and government, computers and much more.

Find Articles from BNET lets you search articles from a wide range of consumer and trade magazines and newspapers. The articles are searchable and browsable by category.

The Library of Congress offers a ton of information, including digital collections. Its online collection includes history, performing arts, legislative information and international resources. It’s a particularly good source of government information, because its THOMAS system lets you search the full text of congressional records, bills and more.

You can learn just about anything with the resources and techniques mentioned here. As you research more topics and become accustomed to learning in this manner, learning new things will become easier.

Pretty soon, you’ll be able to gain a working knowledge of practically any subject after just a couple of hours of research.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman.

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They’re a great extension to your business’ communication toolkit and offer you and your clients an excellent channel by which you can reach potential and existing customers.

In this article, we’ll explore common design patterns of email newsletters and learn which approaches work well, so that you’ll be prepared to create one for yourself and your clients.

We’ve also included a compilation and analysis of different newsletter designs so that you can learn from them as well as tips on what to do and what not to do.

If you know of any other tips, please share them with us in the comments area.

Which Came First: Chicken or Egg?

Before you create and send your email newsletter, you’ll need subscribers. Making this process as easy and intuitive as possible is important. After all, users are giving you permission to contact them. You wouldn’t want to mess that opportunity up!

Not Too Many Fields

You don’t need a user’s social security number to send them an email! It’s most frustrating when someone signs up for an email newsletter only to be confronted with a form that asks for their address, age, phone number, mother’s maiden name, favorite pet… All we really need is their email address and, if we want to push a bit further, their name.

Seth Godin, in his article Permission Marketing, offers good insight into getting viewers to sign up and follow you:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

In other words, the viewer wants to listen to you. They are giving you their attention, so at least respect them and don’t ask for unnecessary data.

With that in mind, let’s look at some examples of good newsletter sign-up forms:

Joshua Porter’s sign-up form is an excellent example of what to do right. First, he puts the sign-up form close to his social icons, indicating that this is an extension of his communications with you, the user.

Next, he offers a short blurb explaining what the newsletter is about. This gets you and your users on the same page, so that they’re clear on what to expect from your content.

Finally, he asks only for the user’s email address and name, followed by a big button with a verb label: “Subscribe.” Very simple, yet packed with just the right information!

Threadless also puts its newsletter sign-up form in the social area of its home page. The location is prominent, and Threadless provides information on how often and when the newsletter will be delivered. Also, notice the simplicity of asking only for an email address: no name, no social security number, no favorite pet!

We’ve Got Subscribers!

Your sign-up form is now a success, and you’re ready to send out some content!

Before we move to the design stage, let’s figure out what the focus of our newsletter is. For example, if you are giving away coupons, you could use more graphics and buttons than usual. If it’s text-heavy, you’ll want it to be as readable and scannable as possible.

Let’s examine two newsletters with different goals. The first is from Barnes and Noble, offering promotions for its stores. The second is from Sitepoint, which gives its newsletter a magazine-style layout and structure.

The first thing you’ll notice about the Barnes and Noble newsletter is that it is designed like a website. It’s literally an extension of the main website, complete with top-level navigation.

You’ll also see that it’s timely; right next to the logo it says “This week,” reminding you that the offers are for a limited time only and that you should make your purchase quickly.

Notice how easy it is to scan the page. All of the paragraphs are short, and the images and content hierarchy make the design feel comfortable even in your email browser!

Finally, the designers have put a clever call to action at the bottom of the page. The numbers in big red type attract your attention, sitting beside buttons with verb labels, pushing you to take advantage of the promotion.

Sitepoint goes for a completely different layout because it has a different goal. Its goal is to build a following for its content, to be able to extend its advertising space.

It adopts a magazine style, starting each issue with a letter from the editor, followed by a table of contents (in-page links) that guides you to the concise articles in the email.

One important design decision made by Sitepoint was to include a photograph of the editor at the top of every email. This approach makes the email feel more personal, like it’s coming from a human who took the time to organize the content.

HTML or Plain Text?

Now that we’ve discussed your business goals for the email newsletter and how to support it with the design, let’s briefly consider the construction.

Back in the old days (i.e. three years ago), composing email newsletters in plain text was safer and more common. You would also see full-length articles incorporated in the email (as long as today’s blog posts).

Since then, people have discovered that they don’t really like reading long emails, and that scannable content that functions as a gateway to the main website makes more sense.

With this in mind, the most logical design would be a hybrid of images and HTML text. Jakob Nielsen has this to say about how much time users spend reading a newsletter:

Users spend 51 seconds reading the average newsletter. The layout and writing both need superb usability to survive in the high-pressure environment of a crowded inbox.

Once you’ve got a good hybrid design, you will have to dive in and code the newsletter (unless you have a great coder sitting next to you). A great resource for best practices and insight on the state of HTML emails is Campaign Monitor’s tips area:

Not only can you get started with one of the templates, but you can also consult a comprehensive checklist of supported CSS and HTML features in all modern email clients.

Email Newsletter Software

Now that we’ve got a solid grasp of what’s involved in creating an email newsletter that serves our business goals, we will choose the right software for our design.

You could, of course, manually write the scripts to create the newsletter, subscribe users and send out the email. But you likely have a business to run, and using tools that were created for these tasks would save you a lot of time.

Here are the three most popular email newsletter services today. They are all low-priced and feature-rich:

Campaign Monitor, which we mentioned earlier, not only has great resources for designers but also great prices: a flat delivery fee of only $5, plus $0.01 for each subscriber.

Mail Chimp is another popular email campaign service. It has a great analytics feature for your email newsletter campaigns and a free plan!

Emma offers email marketing with style. It even plants five trees for each customer who joins. If your business is growing, Emma allows you to easily adjust your pricing plan.

Inspiration

By now, you should have a good understanding of what’s involved in creating an email newsletter campaign for you or your client.

Now for some more fun. Let’s look at some email newsletters for reference and inspiration…

Apple looks good, as always. Its email newsletter is fresh, scannable and beautifully balanced. Notice the attention to detail, specifically how the buttons are color-coordinated with the images.

Zappos’ approach is similar to that of Barnes and Noble: its navigation at the top is an extension of the website, and it highlights its popular free 365-day shipping service.

Target also focuses on scannablilty and clickablity. Notice the email discount, rewarding you for following the newsletter.

Personal success guru Brian Tracy offers a clean, easy-to-read email newsletter. His approach is simple yet focused on his brand and main goal: helping you to achieve success.

Master chef Jamie Oliver has a more artistic email newsletter, keeping the visual language consistent with his upbeat and personal approach to cooking. The buttons match the background nicely and create a fun feel.

Think has followed sensible art direction for its newsletter. The design is consistent with that of its blog.

Clarus Wines beautifully illustrates its newsletter, giving it a human touch. The soft gray offers respite from your cluttered inbox.

A great example of borrowing real-world analogies (in this case, an event poster) and translating it to the web, Blick Shared Studios offers an attractively designed email newsletter.

If your interested in seeing more great examples, check out Campaign Monitor’s Inspiration Gallery.

When Should I Send?

We’re almost wrapped up, feeling inspired and ready to extend our communication with clients through an email newsletter! Just one more topic to cover, and that is what day to send it. 37 Signals has a humorous take on the question:

Want something to blow up? Tell the world about it on a Tuesday morning. Avoids the Monday avalanche people face and gives you the rest of the week to get play.

Want something to fade away? Tell the world about it on a Friday afternoon. It’ll fade into the weekend.

Written exclusively for WDD by Noam Almosnino, a web designer and blogger who helps businesses and individuals connect with their customers online!

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These are some of the more common mistakes that I’ve seen in web copy and some tricks that I use every day to write effectively, from e-mails to site pages.

You don’t need to be an English major to understand any of this advice either. It is written in plain English that everyone can understand.

These are tips based on my own experience and education as a writer, and particularly as a writer specializing in the web.

If you’ve got some tips of your own feel free to share them in the comments section.

1. It’s Versus Its

This is a very common mistake that a lot of people make.

It’s is short for “it is”, so “it’s all relative” is correct while “it’s color is blue” is not. “Its” is a term of possession, so “its color is blue” is correct.

2. Overuse Of Punctuation

Excess punctuation should be left out of most sentences on the web. If a reader sees a sentence with more than one comma, the sentence becomes harder to scan and therefore more likely to turn a reader off.

More advanced punctuation such as semi-colons and colons should be avoided completely by starting new sentences instead.

Example: “It is really important to keep three principles in mind, when thinking of the best shoes to buy; comfort, style, and eco-impact.” Should be: “Comfort, syle, and eco-impact should be kept in mind when thinking of the best shoes to buy.” Short, sweet and no semi-colon.

3. One Space After a Period

This is something I struggle with daily. It was drilled into my head, especially during University, that two spaces after a period were needed.

The convention for web writing is now one space after a period.

This is something that the owner of this blog gently pointed out to me, and I researched it extensively before implementing it. He was completely right.

4. Don’t Begin Sentences with “But”, “And”, or “Yet”

This is more common than you would think, and I have seen it from very established writers.

If you are challenging a concept from the previous paragraph or sentence, use “However” to start the sentence.

If you are trying to follow up on an idea from a previous sentence, don’t begin a new paragraph and just present the idea in the next sentence.

Your audience will leap with you without an introductory “and” or “but”.

5. Overuse of “Also”

I go through all of my articles for what I call the “A Word” before releasing them into the wild.

“Also” has its time and place, but frequent use looks like a grammatical hiccup and is highly noticeable after a while to your reader.

6. Keep Sentences Short

While this was covered in the section on punctuation, it is important enough that it needs its own heading.

A sentence should never be longer than a line. If you need to list something, do it with bullet points or an attractive graphic rather than producing a long sentence.

7. The Serial Comma

The serial comma is used before a grammatical conjunction, such as “and” for the last item in a list of commas. Its use has been a topic of hot debate by writers and people in the publishing industry for a long time.

Since web writing aims to keep itself as simple as possible, the usual preference is to do without the serial comma.

Some clients will insist on its use, especially if they are in occupations where a more formal use of language is the norm, such as law.

Example: “She likes the films of Ridley Scott, Martin Scorcese, and Clint Eastwood.” Technically its use is never really incorrect, but it does serve as excessive punctuation that can trip up the reader.

You want your audience to read the sentence, not to pause on the comma and ponder whether or not it is being used correctly.

8. Capitalize Words in Headlines

Excepting prepositions (of, to, for, is) and the words “and” and “the”, all major words in a headline should be capitalized.

I see a lot of copy where only the first letter of the headline is capitalized.

9. Their, There, and They’re

Their: Is a term used to illustrate possession, such as “their mitts were soaking wet”.

There: Indicates the whereabouts of something, such as “the statue is located there”. They’re: This is a contraction of “they are”. “They’re going to the beach today.”

10. Use Lots of Headlines

Ideally, any site page or blog posting should read much like this article, with a headline and then a paragraph or two.

Headlines act as important signposts for the reader to decide whether or not they want to read those paragraphs, so the headline should always describe the subject matter of the paragraphs which follow it.

This will look weird to those used to more conventional forms of writing, but the more you break it up, the more readable it is.

11. Use Spell Check and Your Eyes

Spell check isn’t always enough. If you spell “breakfast” as “break fast”, the typical spell check will not pick up on your mistake.

This is especially important for site copy. You can’t expect people to trust your brand or product if you have spelling mistakes on your page.

While a spelling mistake may be forgiven by your readers in a hastily written article or blog posting, it won’t be if it is present on a page that is trying to sell something.

12. Weasel Words

These are vague generalizations that are made for the convenience of the writer, not the audience.

If a writer is rushed for time, they may write something like “most people feel that juice is 100% tasty”.

The proper procedure is to find out the statistics and facts and work those into the sentence. The correct form would be “60% of people feel that juice is 100% tasty, while only 5% feel that it is only 10% tasty”.

Web readers are reading your site to get information, not opinions.

13. Then and Than

These words are very commonly misused. Then is indicative of a place in time, such as “there was no internet back then”.

Than is a quantitative term, which can follow the use of “more”, such as “there is no more annoying thing than a writer telling people how to write.”

14. Apostrophe Use

When you are considering whether or not to use an apostrophe, look at your demographic.

Is it a blog like this one that would benefit from a more casual style? Is it a website for a financial adviser?

The web is usually home to a more conversational style, but where you feel the context is more professional, don’t use the apostrophe.

Examples: Personal Blog for a financial adviser: “You’re going to find the new SEC regulations difficult to navigate without a little help.” Website copy for a financial adviser: “You are going to find the new SEC regulations difficult to navigate without a little help.”

15. Obscure References

Think of these as in-jokes with yourself or your industry that your clients just don’t get.

“This new album is more explosive than the Tunguska Event!” would be a good example of an obscure reference.

Again, this is context-specific. Referring to an episode of Star Trek by name will go over just fine on a Trekkie blog, but not in a mainstream news piece on science fiction.

16. Acronym Use

It is a good idea to limit acronym use even if you think your audience will know the acronym.

The 10% who don’t know it will be annoyed and may click off of your site. If an acronym will be repeated throughout a site page or an article, it is only necessary to define it the first time it is used. Once again, this is context-specific.

You don’t need to spell out AJAX for the readers of this blog, while you would have to for a mainstream media article. Wrong Acronym Use: “CPIC, CSIS, and the PAO are running a joint venture to better educate the public about how hard drugs finance international terrorism.”

Right Acronym Use: “The Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), and the Police Association of Ontario (PAO) are running a joint venture to better educate the public about how hard drugs finance international terrorism.”

17. Keep Person On Track

If you are referring to yourself as “I” at the start of your piece, don’t shift to “we” in the middle. Keep grammatical person use consistent.

18. Use Hyperlinks

If you are writing for the web, you want readers to be able to interact with your page.

You saw this above with the “Tunguska Event”. It was linked to a definition rather than leaving it up to you to look it up if you were interested.

If you are writing site copy for a business offering a product or service, use links to other areas of the site here and there to make it even easier for customers to find what they are looking for.

Keep both inbound and outbound links relevant and don’t use too many.

19. Overuse of Literary Devices

This is just good advice for any writing, online or offline.

Overuse of metaphors, similes, or any other literary device will distract from the point of your composition and make you look pretentious.

Literary devices are meant to help you get a point across in a certain way, so use them if you have to sparingly and move on.

20. Words to Avoid: Just and Regardless

“Just” can end up insulting your reader by implying that an action is easier than it actually is.

Look at the difference between these two sentences: “She says that I should just learn the French language.” “She says that I should learn the French language.

The first example makes it seem like the person is being talked down to, while the second sentence reads as more of a suggestion.Regardless should be avoided as it is a nonsense word that really doesn’t mean anything at all, right along with its sister word, irregardless. When included at the beginning of a sentence, the words are not necessary, as you can see in these examples:

Regardless, the show must go on.
Irregardless, the show must go on.
The show must go on.

Written exclusively for WDD by Angela West.

Do you have a pet peeve word or phrase that you would like to see eliminated from the web or tips of your own? Share them in our comments section!

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A wireframe helps you organize and simplify the elements and content within a website and is an essential tool in the development process.

A wireframe is basically a visual representation of content layout in a website design.

The wireframe acts as a prototype that shows the placement of page features, such as header, footer, content, sidebars, and navigation.

It also specifies the placement of the elements within these content areas. If you want to develop a site that accurately matches the client’s requirements and minimize project revisions, wireframing will keep you on track.

Benefits of Wireframing

Creating a wireframe gives the client, developer, and designer an opportunity to take a critical look at the structure of the website and allows them to make revisions easily early on in the process.

Wireframing brings the following key benefits:

• It gives the client an early, close-up view of the site design (or re-design).
• It can inspire the designer, resulting in a more fluid creative process.
• It gives the developer a clear picture of the elements that they will need to code.
• It makes the call to action on each page clear.
  
• It is easy to adapt and can show the layout of many sections of the website.

Tools for Wireframe Development

You have many tools to choose from when creating a wireframe:

• Hand sketching on paper is always a good starting point for any designer. It provides a quick and easy way to focus and organize. If you’re very precise with sketching, you could even use this as your final wireframe. (See Figure 1.)
• Flowchart or mind-mapping software, such as Visio. These software options come with pre-packaged elements that allow you to easily create flowchart representations of your wireframe.
• Web prototyping software, such as Gliffy or Balsamiq. Tools like these were created especially for the purpose of generating wireframes, and they have easy-to-use prototyping capabilities.
• Graphics software, such as Photoshop or Illustrator. The benefit of using these tools is that the wireframe can then be converted directly into a graphic mockup of the website’s design; however, the downside is that you will have to create all of the elements by hand.
• (X)HTML wireframes are almost like actual sites themselves. You can lay out the wireframe with code before applying the styles, or you can create a fully styled, high-fidelity layout that looks a lot like a final design. (See Figure 2.)

Ultimately, the developer or designer should select the tool they prefer. Personally, I use Photoshop because I like the way it organizes the process and how easily I can convert the file into a mockup.

Wireframe Example

The level of detail in a wireframe depends on several factors, including: how much direction and content the client has provided, how complex the content is, how far along in the process you are, and how much detail you’d like it to include.

Here are examples of wireframes that were created using different tools and exhibiting different levels of detail and color:

Figure 1: This simple wireframe sketch for the Coastal Capital Partners website (now renamed Broad Reach Retail Partners) was used to create graphic mockups and, eventually, the final design. By Mike Rohde.

Figure 2: Very low-fidelity HTML wireframe. Useful for demonstrating what a site will look like before the styling is added. Very helpful to visually impaired users.

Figure 3: Low-fidelity wireframe for the Embrace Pet Community, by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three.

Figure 4: A preliminary mockup of a social conferencing tool built on Tiddlywiki for use at Le Web 3. The notes to accompany it are at tiddleleweb.tiddlyspot.com. Wireframe by Phil Hawksworth.

Figure 5: This one is based on advanced use of a blog publishing system (WordPress). By Mattheiu Mingassson or Activeside Internet Strategies and Consulting.

Figure 6: A wireframe for the Embrace Pet Community, by Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain of 31Three.

Figure 7: A wireframe with color and images. Author page wireframe by Bokhandel.

Figure 8: Another wireframe with color. By Mattheiu Mingassson of Activeside Internet Strategies and Consulting.

Best Practices

To achieve optimum results, here are several important things to keep in mind when developing a wireframe:

• Simplicity. The key is to keep it simple enough to be clear to the client and to be flexible for the designer, but detailed enough to guide the programmer. As mentioned, you could create a high-fidelity wireframe, but doing this early in the development process could be confusing for the client, who may mistake it for a final draft.
• Work in grayscale. When creating elements for a wireframe, it’s best to work in grayscale so that you can focus on the layout without being distracted by the design. If you have been given a full-color logo, convert it to grayscale as well. To distinguish between and categorize various elements, show shapes and outlines in different shades of gray.
• Use wireframes in tandem with a sitemap. A wireframe is a visual representation of a good sitemap, not a replacement. A sitemap is a useful tool for any website and would definitely be helpful to refer to during the development process.
• Focus on the desired outcome. Have a clear understanding of how your client wants users to respond to the page before creating your wireframe. The calls to action should be very clear simply from looking at the wireframe.
• Create a full-sized wireframe if it is for a website. This will give the most accurate representation of the actual page.
• Plan the elements by securing the content in advance. In a best-case scenario, your client will have already supplied you with the elements that should appear on each page, such as the logo, ads, Flash or video players, features, navigation sections, and sidebar, header, and footer elements. If you do not have this information yet, meet with your client and get (or create) a sitemap. If you are re-designing existing elements, you can gather them from a careful review of the website. In this scenario, be sure to first confirm with your client that you will not be required to add or remove elements, because not having a clear understanding of their expectations will slow down the process.

Grayscale vs. Color

When creating a wireframe, working in grayscale helps maintain focus on the primary function of the process, which is to finalize the layout, not the design (see Figure 3). Another risk of working in color is that the client may mistake the wireframe for the final mockup.

Color can, however, prove useful when showing the location of each call to action.  Because one page may contain several calls to action, prioritizing them is important. Wireframes can help determine which call to action to draw the user’s eye to first.

I recently worked on a project that had a very vibrant logo, which, in that case, was the primary call to action because it represented a newly launched magazine.

When you use color, you can more easily tell if certain elements are overpowering the primary call to action. This process still falls under the realm of wireframing, rather than mockup design, because element locations are still being determined.

Color can gradually be added to the wireframe as the project advances, which is more efficient than moving ahead with mockups before the location of elements is locked down. In doing this, graphic software can help you switch directly to a mockup when ready.

What to Avoid

Like other aspects of your development process, wireframing can have its pitfalls if not carried out properly. Here are some tips on what to avoid in order to acheive the most effective results:

• Too much happening on the page. Leave ample white space so that the design doesn’t appear too busy or cluttered.
• Emphasis on color and design. Wireframing is for deciding the layout and location of elements. Even though a wireframe can influence the design, adding graphics and color would probably only distract from its purpose.
• Too much detail. You can always add more detail later, but if you include too much in the begining, the client may confuse the wireframe for the final mockup.

If you are interested in learning more about wireframes, Wireframe Magazine is a great resource that shares samples, discusses techniques, and solves problems related to information architecture.

Creating a wireframe for your client’s website provides an effective communication tool for all parties involved.

Even building a simple wireframe will save time in the long run and ease the development process for the designer, developer, and client.

Written exclusively for WDD by Eric Shafer.

Do you use wireframes for your design? What are some of the best ways to create effective wireframes?

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And trying to find related content can also be difficult, depending on what data you’re looking for.

But data visualizations can make all of that much easier, allowing you to see the concepts that you’re learning about in a more interesting, and often more useful manner.

Below are 50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter.

Music, Movies and Other Media

Narratives 2.0 visualizes music. Different music tracks are segmented into single channels that are then shown in a fan-like structure.

Liveplasma is a music and movie visualization app that aims to help you discover other musicians or movies you might enjoy. Type in the name of a band, artist, movie, director or actor and liveplasma will show you related people, bands or movies.

Tuneglue is another music visualization service. Just type any artist or band into the search box and hit enter. A circle comes up representing that band. You can then expand from there, clicking on any new additions after each expansion to expand further. By click on “releases” you can order their albums from Amazon.

MusicMap is similar to TuneGlue in its interface, but seems slightly more intuitive. Search for an artist or band and a list of albums will come up. Once you choose an album a circle pops up on the map. From there you can expand to get related albums, remove that album, or get more information.

Last.Forward is a downloadable, open-source tool to visualize any Last.fm user’s social network, including relationships between other users.

Fidg’t is a desktop app that uses Flickr and Last.fm tags to let you visualize your network and their tagging activities. You can see what your network’s predispositions are toward different tags and types of content.

Digg, Twitter, Delicious, and Flickr

Looks Del.icio.us is a collection of different Delicious bookmark visualizations. They’re created with a python-based graphics library and layout engine.

Arc is a product from Digg Labs that shows the latest Diggs, and the relationships between the users submitting and digging them. There are two different speed modes, the slower of which is great if you actually want to read the story headlines.

Stack is probably the most useful of the visualization offerings from Digg. Stories with the most recent activity load across the bottom of the screen and then ‘Diggs’ seemingly fall from the sky to land and create a real-time graph of what stories are popular. Whenever a ‘Digg’ hits a story stack, the title of the story is shown at the bottom of the screen, pushing previous stories down, and eventually off the screen.

Swarm has one of the cooler user interfaces of all the Digg Labs offerings, with stories and users flying around on the screen. When someone ‘diggs’ a story, they fly over to the circle representing the story itself and are briefly linked up to it. Hovering over a story or user shows its name and allows you to click. You can also download Swarm as a screensaver.

Research Chronology shows the relationships between one student’s research paths via Delicious bookmarks over the course of a semester. It’s an ongoing project and includes bookmarks for more than 270 websites.

TwittEarth shows live tweets from all over the world on a 3D globe. It’s a great visualization tool to see where tweets are coming from in real time and discover new people to follow. It’s also fascinating just to sit and watch.

Tag Galaxy lets you search for Flickr tags and have them shown visually in a mockup of a star system. Clicking on any planet (tag) within the first representation changes the image and recenters that tag as the star and pops up new related tags as planets. Clicking on the sun itself brings up a globe covered in images tagged as you’ve specified.

The Flickr Related Tag Browser allows you to search for a series of tags and see related tags. Clicking on a different tag brings up new related tags. You can zoom into the tag selected in the center of the screen by hovering and see images tagged with that word. It also gives a total image count and lets you browse by page.

Internet Visualizations

Mapping the Blogosphere is a collection of maps of the blogosphere, including hyperbolic maps, as shown here.

The Twingly Screensaver visualizes the blogosphere worldwide in real time. You get a continuous feed of blog activity straight to your screen.

Web Trend Map 4 shows a visualization of current trends online. This is the fourth iteration of this map and the most detailed one yet.

The Bloom Diagram is a project from the IBM Watson Research Center that visualizes the contributions of individuals to open source projects.

Akami Real-time Web Monitor shows a map of the world with real-time information about internet traffic, latency and current network attacks. The maps are color-coded and easy to read, but only give very generalized information.

The Mapa de Conocimiento (Map of Knowledge) is a schematic of knowledge involved in any given idea or project. Built in Flash, this tool visualizes a group of URLs organized under main ideas. The map is available in English and Spanish.

Akami Network Performance Comparison shows the packet loss and network speeds between different cities around the world (to showcase how their technology is better than the standard “public” internet). It also shows graphs of the information.

Internet Health Report shows the latency, packet loss, and network availability of the major ISPs and backbone providers worldwide in a color-coded grid format. Hovering over any of the cells in the grid gives more information about the health of that particular connection.

The Hierarchical Structure of the Internet was a study that looks at how the Internet is organized, both in terms of structure and connectivity. It shows how the central core of the Internet is made up of about 80 core nodes, but that even if those nodes failed, 70% of the other nodes would still function via peer-to-peer connections.

Rootzmap—Mapping the Internet is a series of maps based on data sets provided by NASA and created by Philippe Bourcier. There are a number of different maps available.

Websites as Graphs shows the structure of different websites based on the tags used in their code in a color-coded map that grows on the screen as you watch. Tags are somewhat intuitive in their color-codes, with blue for links, red for tables, and gray for any tags not specifically given a color.

Schemaball visualizes SQL database schema. Relationships are shown based on foreign keys within tables. It’s capable of showing schemas with hundreds of different tables and relationships.

The Opte Project aims to map every class C network on the Internet from a single computer and a single Internet connection. The overall goal is to create a map of the entire Internet.

Miscellaneous Visualizations and Tools

Visualizing Information Flow in Science includes a set of four visualizations showing relationships between citations in scholarly journals that are used to evaluate the importance of each journal.

The Micro Fashion Network: Color visualizations show the continuous change of styles in fashion, with a particular look at the basic elements of color. It was created by using a fixed camera and special software to map the colors of clothing people in Cambridge were wearing.

The TED Sphere shows videos from the TED conference in a spherical format with 3D navigation. You can view the sphere from inside or outside and the layout of videos is based on semantic compatibility.

Visualizing The Bible gives a visual overview of more than 63,000 textual cross-references within the Bible. It’s intention is to be more beautiful than functional.

Walrus is a visualization tool that allows you to interact with massive graphs in a 3D interface. Interaction is based on selecting any node and then having the graph zoom in to expand on that point.

We Feel Fine is one of the most interesting visualization tools I came across. It provides visualizations on the general feelings populating the blogosphere on any given day. You can filter results based on age, location, gender, weather, and other criteria. There are six different visualizations available: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds, each of which give a different portrait of the general feelings abounding on the internet.

One Week of The Guardian is a visualization of the stories from The Guardian newspaper. It focuses on the relationships between headlines, authors, pages, and categories.

Nemulator is a project that aims to visualize “nemes,” or different fragments of states of mind. It also aims to serve as a starting point for discussions relating to the scalability of nemes.

Voyage is a web-based RSS reader that visually displays RSS feeds on a timeline. It’s a great way to explore the different feeds you subscribe in a completely different format.

Blooming Numbers is the 2006 CGD MFA Thesis Project of Yuri Lee. It’s goal is to show the relationships between preferences of numbers and cultural contexts in an interactive way.

CIA World Factbook Visualization shows a visualization of relationships between different countries and continents based on data from the CIA World Factbook. It shows semantic relationships for each country, including neighboring countries, languages, water and terrestrial boundaries, and more.

TextArc Visualization of The History of Science is a static visualization of the book The History of Science. It was originally displayed at the NYPL Science, Industry, and Business Library in New York.

This Newspaper Map is a visualization of the rules of the daily production of a newspaper is a striking graphic format. The closeness of words signifies their relationships with each other as do lines traced between words.

GraphNews is a news visualization browser from the Libero WebNews service. It shows news stories in a mind-map-like format. Clicking on one node recreates the graph with the clicked item as the focus.

Newsmap shows a visual representation of current headlines on Google News. It shows the relationships and patterns between different news stories across cultures and within different news segments. Be sure to click to the new JavaScript version for the best features.

FreeMind is a Java-based mind mapping software that allows you to build your own data visualizations quickly and easily. Finished maps can be exported into clickable XHTML files as well as other formats.

Resource System Reference Database was presented as a poster at InfoVis2004, IEEE’s annual conference. In this visualization, line weight shows the strength of relationships.

Is the New documents instances of the phrase “is the new” and shows the relationships between the subject and object of that phrase. Examples include “Purple is the new pink” and “Technology is the new religion.”

WikiMindMap is a tool to visually browse Wiki content in a mind-map format and includes the ability to download any of their mindmaps in FreeMind format.

How Scientific Paradigms Relate shows the relationships between more than 700 scientific paradigms based on how they were mentioned in more than 800,000 scientific papers. Relationships are also based on how often different papers were cited by each other and by authors of other papers.

Universe is a great app for visualizing the “universe” of particular search terms. There are sample terms available or you can input whatever you choose. The visualization given is reminiscent of astronomical charts.

visualcomplexity.com isn’t strictly a visualization software, but rather a collection of visualizations already created and categorized. Categories include business networks, art, internet, knowledge networks, biology, transportation networks, social networks, and more.

The Strengths of Nations is a visualization of the scientific advancement of ten different nations, including the United States, United Kingdom, France, China, and Australia. The map analyzes 23 different scientific areas, including math, biochemistry, and astrophysics.

Written exclusively for WDD by Cameron Chapman, a freelance writer and designer.

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