New media best practice
A frequent topic on currybetdotnet is pointing at something someone has done on the web and saying "You're doing it wrong". Perhaps more helpfully, I sometimes write about how to do things right. Although I don't always follow my own advice...
"10 tips for 'ambush guerilla user testing' " and "8 tips for making ambush 'guerilla user testing' clip reel videos" was a short two part series explaining how I go about gathering anecdotal user insight on a budget of near-zero.
"Tweeting a link or a picture? Don't forget to blog it as well..." was a case study of three interesting images that I posted about on Twitter. Only once did I take the time to quickly blog about the picture, and send a tweet linking to my blog rather than a link to photo that will disappear into the Twitterstream. That turned out to be the most successful of the three.
"10 tips for integrating your del.icio.us links into your blog" does exactly what it says in the title, whilst "Functional 404s - Do beautiful 404 error pages still help users?" looked at how to customise your error pages to be helpful as well as pretty. If you want to know why I believe that permanently persistent URLs are important, you should read The BBC Trust abolished not just the BBC Governors, but their URLs as well.
"Making the most of blog comments" was a series of posts looking at different ways to encourage and get value out of the comment contributions to your site. Unfortunately the comment thread on it got hijacked by spammers who couldn't get beyond the tactic of typing 'blog comments' into Google and spamming the first thing that came up,
I've also written about what makes a successful blog in my history of blogging at the BBC, and written about how not to put together a successful blogging proposition in my series "Why my Doctor Who blog failed".
In 2006 I wrote up full length article versions of two presentations that I used to give within the BBC and at conferences. "Designing your website to be search engine friendly" looked at getting the fundamentals of SEO right in the very framework of your site. "Gaining Online Advantage: Building an effective web presence in a large organisation" was a broader sweep, looking at search, global navigation, and meeting audience and business needs.
And if you want to read the antithesis of best practice, you should try "Gene Marks is dangerously wrong about 'Tech solutions your small biz can't use'".