Archive for the ‘Tools of the Trade’ Category

Email, E-mail and the Fight for Consistent Verbiage

Email or e-mail? Web site or website? Who sets the standard and how important is it to comply?

Hand-in-hand with societal and technological progress, new words emerge and become a part of our general lexicon. Digital and social media terms are the most obvious example of this.

Though digital media terminology is an ever-growing list, some of these “modern” words have been around for a while now. Most of us are comfortable seeing e-mail, email, website, Web site, internet and Internet, without really knowing which spelling is correct or even stopping to think about whether a correct spelling exists. Continue reading »

Make the Most of Your Business’s Facebook Page

We link to our Facebook page every chance we get. Click the image above to visit our page (and like us, too).

I’m sure you’re used to reading articles about how to engage the followers of your business’s Facebook fan page. Though most articles shy away from clearly defining engagement in terms of social media, they often tell you to post content your audience is interested in, ask questions, watch engagement rates, use images and video, respond to user posts and make sure you’re posting on a regular basis. That is all great advice.

However, there’s more to it. I recently read a Search Engine Watch article about a study that found 34% of the referrals to Facebook pages come from Google, Yahoo and Bing. How does that happen?

Search engine optimization, baby! This idea is nothing new. The social media community has been talking about it for quite some time. However, it’s becoming more important for all Facebook page owners to learn some basic ways to optimize their page so they can be easily found. Continue reading »

The Hidden Beauty of the CMS

A “content management system” (CMS) is a program used to manage website data so that individual web pages can be easily updated with little knowledge of web programming. It’s designed for user collaboration, data storage and flexibility — modern CMS’s can contain hundreds of page templates or modules. The CMS is typically the heart of expansive websites such as hospitals and universities.

The things that make CMS’s great tend to make web designers cringe. Anything that involves a “system” tends to squash our dreams of breaking free from a conservative look and grid. And we gasp at the idea of allowing non-designer users to freely edit page elements.

Despite the cons of implementation costs, maintenance and untrained users, I admit that I often find the challenge of CMS design — with its modules and ordered chaos — intriguing. With the advancement of HTML5, web typography and blogging systems, the CMS is no longer a threatening idea; instead, it’s one that allows for nicely designed customizable content on the fly. These systems even allow for easier SEO (search engine optimization) implementation.

Let’s look at the best modern options for CMS implementations. Continue reading »

10 Ways to Pursue Great Creative for Healthcare Advertising

Though advertising has evolved beyond traditional print to more digital experiences, the holy grail is still the BIG IDEA. But how do you find it? Where do the ideas come from? How do you avoid sameness? How do you spur inspiration? Here are ten ideas you should consider. Some of them might surprise you.

1. Put down the trade journal

There’s nothing new in there that you haven’t already seen. Maybe a few new shots of the beach but that’s about it. I suggest you spend time with five publications that you normally wouldn’t look at. You’ll open yourself up to new voices and perspectives.

2. Move around

Get away from your desk. Go outside. Trade spaces with someone. Anything to force yourself to be around new surroundings. Sometimes a completely different kind of lighting will change your mood and spark the imagination. Continue reading »

Making the Most of Your Content Audit

A content audit is a comprehensive review of the content in a website or family of websites. It’s usually conducted using a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, with the qualities, contents, hits and misses of each page painstakingly catalogued. The spreadsheet (called a content inventory) is then provided as a report.

Like other reports, it serves two functions:

• It shows your clients (internal and external) that you’ve done due diligence.
• It provides usable data to continue to the next phase of the project.

When conducting content audits, we content strategists often tout the first function without giving much thought to the second. Yes, we’ve exposed issues with the current website. Yes, we can pinpoint a few red flags in the content. But is the content audit usable? Comprehensive? High-quality from start to finish? Most importantly, does the content audit provide actionable, quantitative information?

After auditing a few large healthcare websites, we at HCB Health have learned a few strategies to improve the value of every content audit. Continue reading »

Ranch-Style Creative Inspiration

Recently, I attended Design Ranch, a three-day, hands-on design retreat sponsored by the Austin AIGA. I’ve been to numerous design conferences in the past, but I wasn’t quite sure how much this “back-to-basics” workshop would influence my career in healthcare advertising.

Although hosted by the Austin chapter of AIGA, fellow designers from across the US attended Design Ranch at Camp Waldemar in Hunt, Texas. Different from your typical design conferences, there were no computers and no iPads, and you had to hike to the top of a hill in order to make a phone call. Design Ranch was meant to get us away from the day-to-day grind, and rekindle our creative spirit. So, I put down my laptop and picked up a few of the long-forgotten tools of my past. Continue reading »

Globalization in Site Design, Content and Development

Globalization has become a hot topic in the last decade. What are the best SEO practices for reaching such a large audience? How much do companies have to spend to make their sites international? Is simply translating the language enough?

According to “Is Your SEO Strategy Global?” by John Tawadros,

Optimizing your site for just one country might create more challenges in the long run. Ultimately, when you eventually begin thinking about a global strategy, it may even cause you to go back and change what you’ve changed once already.

Continue reading »

The Changing Role of the Copywriter

If there’s one thing Ken Segall knows, it’s how to name something. He’s the guy that named the iMac, creating a whole new lexicon of i-this and i-that. Ken also knew a thing or two about naming job positions. I worked for him once and he made sure that my official title was not Sr. Copywriter, but Sr. Writer. To paraphrase Ken: It’s not an accurate term anymore; a copywriter does so much more than write copy.

In her new book The Idea Writers, Teresa Izzi says,

Copywriters today are storytellers, conversation keepers, curators and inventors. They are idea generators, executors and technology savants.

Whatever you want to call a copywriter, there’s no doubt that the rise of social media and dominance of digital has changed the copywriter role. For the healthcare copywriter, these changes give us a chance to contribute to a brand new world of meaningful content. Continue reading »