Jump Out of Your Skin

Update:

According to Wired magazine the reason Twitter is down is due to denial of service attack.  This is malicious attack to try and bring the servers down at Twitter.  Looks like it is working. Twitter has become more than a fun tool over the past 12-18 months as more businesses use it as an information retrieval and distribution tool and a useful medium to interact with tehir customers.  So for the moment no Tweets out there!

Screams throughout the micro blogging world while Twitter was down today Thursday August 6th.  There is a short announcement on their status blog but other than a short message no detail as to the reason.

In the early days of Twitter there was a lot of downtime as they experienced the massive growth that has continued unabated since it first got mainstream popularity outside the technical geek world.

An interesting impact of this was the fact that a lot of people automatically moved to Facebook as their microblogging platform creating a similar slowdown on this system.  If you are getting Twitter issues here are some 5 things that you can do

• Write a full length blog post on your niche fine tune it instead of staring at Tweets
• Call someone on the phone and have a long chat with them
• Look at some of the other social tools out there like Linkedin, Facebook, Stumbleupon and Friendfeed.  Learn about them and how they  can add to your social network toolset.
• Take a break for 24 hours from Twitter – it wont hurt believe me

It’s the Tuesday after a long weekend and I am feeling like a lazy list.  Here are some simple and important features that every site should have.  If your site does not have it then take the time to implement the bleach and cleanup quickly.

1. Contact Details

Make sure that your contact details are visible on the first page and above the fold (like in the newspaper).  They should be clearly visible.  Even if they are in the footer don’t rely on someone scrolling down to it.  In fact don’t ever rely on someone scrolling if they are looking for fast information

2. Flash Gordon
 
Flash Gordon was one of my favourite TV shows in the 1970s.  Every week he saved the world.  I like Flash on sites,  I think it looks well.  However make sure it doesn’t dominate the page and think about making sure it stops as well and does not loop constantly.

3. Me Me Me….

It is important to have a page about you and your company.  But if you are a small company don’t write content that makes you seem like Google.  Keep it simple.  Let your portfolio page and testimonials speak for you.  If you had a perfect attendance record in 7th grade it might not be relevant.

4. Floral Text

I am guilty of this too.  I have a tendency to write text that is a bit too floral with adjectives and nouns that make the sentence too long.  Write short sharp text.  Simple words, use one word when you might have used two.  A site is a marketing tool but peoples eye speed and time on page is too short these days.  Use bold text  to catch peoples eyes instead (I nearly wrote in lieu there) of several words.

If you have a lengthy piece to write link to it.  If people are interested they will click on it.

5. The Lonely Back Button

In the early days of the web before the Back button worked or people knew what it did people use to put a link in their page called back to allow people go the previous page.  I am not advocating that you do this but it often helps to have a few related links at the end of a post or page to keep people interested.  Ideally on your own page but if you are expanding their minds then send them elsewhere to learn.  They wiill appreicate it and send you some love.

Useful Links

• F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content
• Your Site May be Sinking Below Sea Level