What if I told you that shiny stock image you just spent an hour searching for didn’t help you? Or if I said that the hundreds of dollars you’ve given iStockPhoto has actually hurt your site?
Recent research from renowned usability expert Jakob Nielsen suggests that “users pay attention to information-carrying images that show content that’s relevant to the task at hand. And users ignore purely decorative images that don’t add real content to the page.” (emphasis his) So, what does this mean for public relations?
Press pages need to be user friendly
Nielsen used eye-tracking studies to show that unless the photo is of the specific person or product being researched, most website visitors will skip it. The screenshot below is from his study and shows that the relatively low-quality photo being used on this Yale contact form is essentially wasted space. Continue reading
I love working with tech entrepreneurs. Their enthusiasm, innovative minds and passion for what they’re doing is infectious. But ask many of them what their business does, or their cool new product or service is all about, and you’re likely to get a variety of nonsensical answers rooted in geek speak:
Both the PR and media world have undergone great changes since I first got started in the field in the mid 1990s. When I first started off as a reporter, I spent several hours learning how to use the flywheel to resize photos. And just when I had that figured out, along came Photoshop, which made all that knowledge useless.
Moby is a unique musician. His music is somewhere between dancehall and coffeeshop, and that’s not a bad thing.
Happy Friday!!
We don’t buy things just because they’re on sale at a good price. There’s a need, or a sufficient want for the cost and benefit received from an item.