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Great thoughts
"Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions."

Edward R. Murrow
(1908-1965)
Broadcast journalist

After Murrow's passing in 1965, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson called Murrow a "gallant fighter" who had "dedicated his life as a newsman and as a public official to the unrelenting search for truth."

We believe what made Edward R. Murrow a great journalist was his ability to see through the meaningless, something we try to do every day for our clients.
 
Adams Jette Marketing
+ Communications
100 Argyle Avenue
Suite 202
Ottawa, ON  K2P 1B6
 
Tel: 613.235.5445
Fax: 613.235.5514
[email protected]
www.adamsjette.com
 
Content is not king!
by Ron Jette
Magnifying glass
You can spend a bundle on website design, work until all hours getting the content together and hire the best programmers the world has to offer, but if users can't find what they are looking for when they visit your site, you've just wasted a ton of time and money.
 
For the most part, the old mantra that "content is king" is a good one, but it's not the only one. Here's another:
 
"Make great content easy to find."
 
I was on the website of a national television network recently and I could not find the telephone number I needed. Unless the network is run by Luddites, I'm sure they have one--I just couldn't find it.
 
Making a website user-friendly is about more than just logic and intuitiveness. It's also about knowing users' habits.
 
F scanning For example, did you know that users spend an average of about 70 percent of their time on the left side of the page and just 30 percent on the right side? That makes a pretty strong case for putting links down the left-hand side! (Regular readers of this newsletter will remember an article last May that discussed how our eyes tend to browse websites in an F-shaped manner.)
 
Did you know people are now more likely than ever to read "below the fold"? While 80 percent of their time is spent on the screen that is presented, they will scroll down and spend about 20 percent of the time looking at below-the-fold information.
 
Imagine if you owned a restaurant and, instead of handing each of your customers a menu when they entered, you told them they had to use their detective skills to find them somewhere in the restaurant. Inviting them to your website and hiding the information is the same thing.
 
Content may well be king--but only if you can find it.

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Quotables
Weight management clinic logo
"In a short amount of time, the team provided the Clinic with a comprehensive communications strategy that dramatically improved the awareness of the Clinic to physicians and patients in the community."
 
Simon Akinsulie
The Ottawa Hospital Weight Management Clinic

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QuikTips
and/or -- While we try to avoid this clunker, sometimes we can't. However, it can usually be replaced by "and" or "or" without losing the meaning. Another option? Use "both." Instead of "We can nail and/or glue it." try "We can nail it, glue it or both."