Slightly Askew

Huddle ten web designers together. Ask them to build you a website.

Then huddle a website designer, a taxi driver, a child, a grandmother, a butcher, baker, and candlestick maker, an accountant, and a student together. Ask them to build you a website.

Which group builds the most innovative website?

The ten web designers undoubtedly are the most experienced group. They’re the group that most business owners would put their faith in. It’s the safe group to choose.

But I’m not so sure that experience is always the best option. (Let it be said: I prefer my pilots with plenty of experience. And my dentists.)

Experience is a very useful thing. But with experience often comes the status quo. How many times have you sat next to a new recruit who nods at every opportunity and babbles: “yeah, that’s how we used to do it at [company name] too”?

How good will someone be at a job because they’ve done it before?
How interested?
How hungry?

Apparently, Southwest Airlines won’t employ people who have experience at another airline unless they’re convinced the potential recruit can unlearn all those bad habits (again, let’s hope this doesn’t extend to the pilots).

Is it silly to ignore these experienced people? Well, Southwest Airlines have been consistently profitable for 35 years - you argue it with them.

So if you’re planning on being different, growing an enthusiastic workforce, and reaping the rewards - ask yourself how much experience you really need.

In the wrong hands, experience becomes competence. Before you know it, you’ve gone from competent to adequate. And being adequate is something to avoid.

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A joyous little video satirising the effect that committees have on simple, good ideas.

Let’s go eskimo:

Via Seth.

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I got them from Moo. 50 of them in fact, and for a very reasonable price.

And Moo, bless them, describe business cards as greetings for meetings. Which I think is quite wonderful.

If I had any gripes, it would be that the quality of the printing on the front isn’t great. As you might be able to see, it looks slightly tired around the edges.

According to Stephen (who knows about these things) it’s because they use digital printing. Indeed, Wikipedia’s entry for digital printing tells us that:

The Ink or Toner does not absorb into the substrate, as does conventional ink, but forms a layer on the surface and may be fused to the substrate by using an inline fuser fluid with heat process(toner) or UV curing process(ink). 

So because the ink doesn’t absord into the card (or substrate, for you jargoneers) it can flake when the cards are cut.

Or something like that.

I don’t actually mind the effect. Each card looks like a well-read book. Which can’t be a bad thing for a writer.

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A good copywriting reminder dropped through my letterbox today.

It reminded me to use examples when writing about technical stuff. Because as clever as we all think we are, we don’t really understand a lot of the waffle that’s thrown at us.

But that’s not our fault; just a copywriter’s problem.

The item that arrived through my postbox was a leaflet about Virgin Media broadband. Apparently, it’s the mother of all broadband.

The sell is its speed. We all want faster broadband, whether it be for Second Life, BBC iPlayer, or grotty porn. Virgin Media supply it (the faster broadband that is, not the… oh, never mind).

But how fast is 20Mb?

(Your Dad will tell you that “it’s ten times faster than 2Mb”. That’s just the way Dads are.)

To most normal folk, 20Mb means diddly-squat. Sure, they know it means twenty megabytes. But that’s just a number and a unit. And, to be pedantic, it’s not even a unit of speed.

Virgin Media’s promotion uses the example of time it takes to download a music track. For 20Mb, the time is two seconds.

Two seconds to download a music track isn’t a feature of the broadband, it’s a joyous benefit. One that means something to the reader.

It’s one that the reader can easily pass on too. My mother isn’t going to tell someone that she’s just had 20Mb broadband installed and it’s fast because of those brilliant fibre optic cables. She might, however, tell someone that her Virgin Media broadband is so fast that she downloaded the whole Mamma Mia soundtrack in less than a minute.

Customers will talk about you, but only if you talk your customers’ language.

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Everything in moderation. That’s what my Nan says.

I suppose everything must include puns then. I have a love / hate relationship with puns.

Shit ones infuriate me. Especially when they’re written by people that have a good heart and should know better. You know the type of people: do a lot of charity work, organise a fundraiser over Easter, design a poster with clipart and Comic Sans (die Comic Sans! Die!), and call it an Easter Eggstravaganza.

Mediocre puns are like eating a pack of Tangfastic Haribo. Short term high, long term guilt. Mediocre puns are great initially, then they make you feel a little queasy, then decay into something altogether more sinister. Exactly like Haribo then.

Great puns, however, are worth every hour of idle pen-chewing they take to write. The Sun sports sub-editor who dreamt up “Super Cali go ballistic, Celtic are atrocious” (after part-timers Inverness Caledonian Thistle dumped Celtic out of the Scottish Cup) deserves Her Majesty’s sword on his shoulder.

We also have the Sun to thank for the fractionally less subtle “I’m A Mind Bender” headline, after Derren Brown declared his preference for the fellas. (Thanks Louis.)

And I stumbled across a local gem the other day; a pun that any copywriter would be proud of. I’d stick it on my fridge if it didn’t lack magnetism because of the cupboard door that conceals it from guests (because it’s really embarrassing having a fridge in your kitchen isn’t it?)

Anyway, back to the pun. I’ll give you the background: Lesley Dolphin is a DJ on BBC Radio Suffolk. So how does the first paragraph of her biog start, on BBC Radio Suffolk’s website?

Be a Dolphin-friendly tuner…

Copywriter, take a bow.

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(This is a search engine optimisation tip.) 

How many home pages do you have?

You probably think you’ve got one, and you’ve probably got four.

I used to have four:

http://slightlyaskew.co.uk
http://slightlyaskew.co.uk/index.php
http://www.slightlyaskew.co.uk
http://www.slightlyaskew.co.uk/index.php

And whatever URL you used, the same page would appear.

So why does it matter?

Well, it’s to help those wonderful search engines that you want to send free traffic your way. Google will count them as four separate pages because you could have four different pages that appear for those URLs (the fact that you haven’t matters not).

And having four separate pages isn’t good for backlinks.

If you’ve got 100 good backlinks, yet they’re split 25/25/25/25 across the four URLs, then search engines aren’t going to give your home page the respect it deserves.

To optimise your site, you need to permanently redirect the four URLs to one.

I’ve chosen the www version without the index.php bit.

In order to do that, you need to add the following code to your .htaccess file that sits in the root directory of your website.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^slightlyaskew\.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.slightlyaskew.co.uk/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.slightlyaskew.co.uk/ [R=301,L]

Obviously, you need to change the slightlyaskew.co.uk bits (and the index.php bit if you’re using index.html site). 

This is called a 301 redirect. Google prefers 301 redirects if you’re permanently redirecting the search engine spiders.

Don’t ask me to explain any the technical side to this because I don’t understand it. Try Matt Cutts: he works for Google and uses words like canonical. I’m just a yokel from Ipswich.

But, for this Ipswich yokel, the code works. And if it helps improve your website’s visibility, I reckon it’s five minutes of search engine optimisation worth doing.

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You either put up, or shut up.

And when someone does put up, it’s worth mentioning.

Swanfest is this weekend. Three days of live music and DJs in a little pub in the middle of Ipswich. The pub is called The Swan. Everything becomes clear.

I’d like to consider Damo - the landlord - a good friend of mine, although I haven’t okayed this with him yet. And what he’s doing is quite remarkable. They’ve got wristbands, programmes, t-shirts, and even VIP passes (of course I have).

And the bands are great too. I went to see Rosalita and Cheeky Cheeky and the Nosebleeds last night, James Severy is playing tonight, and my beloved NovaSouls are playing tomorrow night.

There’s no clever marketing plan, no focus group, no SWOT analysis. Just a damn good time.

Look hard enough and you’ll always find a reason not to do something.

Stop looking, start doing.

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The alarm was sounding. I stood there like a lemon with a guilty look on my face.

I’d go down for this. I’d lose my job, my house, my girlfriend, the lot.

All for a bottle of Pimms.

Have you got your receipt, Sir?

Shit. What if wasn’t in my back pocket where, on auto-pilot, I’d probably put it? What if the dopey cashier hadn’t scanned it?

Thankfully it was, and she had.

She hadn’t taken the security tag off though. That was why I was currently looking like a criminal.

And as the customer services assistant walked past me and muttered “I’ll tell her off for not taking that tag off”, it was left for the security guard to apologise.

In customer service, you deal with the problem first, then you assess the cause. And never forget to say sorry if you’re at fault.

If I was the guilty party, would an apology from my dad have been sufficient? I doubt it.

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Ah, the serial (or Oxford) comma

You may have heard Vampire Weekend’s take on it.

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?

Erm, I do.

No idea what I’m talking about?

Some people would write

Red, white and blue.

I prefer

Red, white, and blue.

The serial comma is the comma before an and or an or (the conjunction, darling) in a list of three or more things.

Without the comma, white and blue seem somehow related. And less important than red. The serial comma restores equality.

We’d say “red… white… and blue” with equal pauses, so why not let the comma denote that pause?

And when using semicolons to separate a list, it’s common practice to put a semicolon before the last and (or whatever conjunction you decide to use) - so why not with commas?

My real bugbear is that many copywriters pretend to worship the classic Strunk & White book The Elements of Style, yet decide not to use the serial comma.

Did these copywriters give up at page one?

Because on page two of that book it reads:

In a series of three or more terms with a single conjunction, use a comma after each term except the last.

Thus write,

red, white, and blue
gold, silver, or copper
He opened the letter, read it, and made a note of its contents

Who knows what fate has in store for my beloved serial comma. Its usage on these shores is slim, but our American cousins keep the flame burning.

At school, I wasn’t taught to use it. Thankfully I’ve seen the light. My schooling ruined my education.

And it’s lost me some friends (they were bizarre drunken conversations), but nobody said that finding clarity in writing would be easy.

Maybe I’ll send the words “I give a fuck” to vampireweekend@gmail.com.

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Thank the lord for Apathy and Other Small Victories. Or Paul Neilan, he wrote it.

If you’re a dullard without a sense of humour, you won’t like it.

If you have a deluded Mother Teresa complex and get a little upset by things that haven’t been signed-off in triplicate by some unelected bunch of students parading as a human rights movement, you won’t like it.

If you weren’t born yesterday, have a healthy chunk of cynicism for pretty much everything, and have ever worked at an insurance company, this is the book for you.

Follow Shane through his life as a saltshaker stealing insurance temp who’s having sex with a woman he hates and happens to be his girlfriend. And his landlord’s wife (but only on Tuesdays).

On my first day I tried to alphabetize for about ten minutes, but being twenty-eight years old and not severely retarded I really couldn’t justify it to myself so I stopped.

The guy who live above him sells guns and walks his guinea pig, his local bar’s happy hour is between 7 and 10 in the morning, and he’s learnt sign language.

Oh, and Marlene - the deaf dental secretary - is dead.

Read it.

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