In Don’t Make Me Think, Steve Krug gives a spot-on guide to website usability— all that stuff that helps visitors to your site find what they’re looking for. What Krug’s book doesn’t touch on is the relationship between usability and search engine optimization (SEO) —how visitors actually find your site in the first place.

I really don’t fault Krug for this (too much) since it’s not his area of primary expertise, and there’s plenty written elsewhere on SEO. Still, a nod to SEO might have been nice since some principles of usability that Krug advocates can appear to be in conflict with best practices in SEO.

If you’ve read Krug’s book along with a few guides to SEO, you probably know what I mean.

The current maxim for SEO is “content is king” with textual content sitting high atop the searchability throne. If you want search engines to find your site, you need good copy. A picture may say a thousand words to most of us, but to bat-blind Web crawlers, a picture only whispers whatever you can squeeze into its alt tag.

In contrast, to make sites more user-friendly, Krug suggests you “Get rid of half the words on each page, then get rid of half of what’s left.” (Cue hearty shouts of approval from graphic designers everywhere.)

When less is more and when less is just less

In my first fresh-out-of-a-college writing job, I was confronted with a harsh reality: the 12 pages of brilliant verbosity in my college essays as an English major was not necessarily going to be rewarded in the business world. I’d just written my first article for the agency magazine, and I proudly passed it on to the graphic designer. It was promptly returned with “You need to cut at least 500 words to fit the page” written on top. How could I cut 500 words from perfection? And for what? “White space”?

Left with no alternative, I began the painful task of cutting my precious copy. I cut and reworded and cut and rephrased. When I was done, something miraculous happened: the fluorescent light above my cube glowed a little brighter as I realized my article was actually better, not worse. I hadn’t amputated any limbs — I’d performed lyposcution and lost the excess fat.

I think what Krug is advocating for is simply good writing. Unfortunately, the Web isn’t always the place to find this. With the lack of physical limitations like paper size, and the speed with which content is generated, the time and motivation to write tight-skinned copy is in short supply. Couple this with a sloppy understanding of SEO and “more” can feel like value added when, in fact, more is mess.

What’s a writer to do? Know thy audience(s)!

Fortunately, most of the principles of writing well apply to both SEO and usability. The key is to remember who you’re writing to. Every good writer knows that “identifying the audience” is step one. For writing on the Web, you have two audiences: the visitors who will use your site and the search engines who will drive them there. Do your due diligence on both. By researching what terms people actually use to find your products/services, you can make educated decisions about what terms are key (avoiding less is less) and what are superfluous (avoiding more is mess).

Consider the following examples of copy for RickySticky Widgets, a small company that helps users improve the performance of their Quicky Stickets:

Example 1:

In order to improve and enhance the quality of the performance, efficiency and speed of your Quicky Stickets, try our newly redesigned and highly innovative RickySticky Widgets which are the trusted and proven source to provide the perfect cutting-edge solution to resolve your Quicky Stickets’ performance issues. Buy your RickySticky Wickets Today!

Problem: the writer is making SEO the enemy of usability by cramming in every searchable keyword he can think of including many that are likely low-value. He loses clarity, and readers, in the process.

Example 2:

Buy our new RickySticky Widgets.

Problem: This is quite usable for a visitor who knows exactly what they’re looking for (and many will), but, with the important search term “Quicky Stickets” omitted, how many visitors searching for “Quicky Stickets” will never reach the page?

Example 3:

Newly redesigned for 5x greater efficiency, our second generation RickySticky Widgets are guaranteed to optimize Quicky Widget performance.  Shop online

Much better: This includes a few high-quality search terms but doesn’t overwhelm hurried shoppers with so much text that it obscures the action (i.e., “shop online”).

The good news is nearly all principles used to optimize a Web site for usability (alt tags, titles, clear navigation, etc.) are also things search engines reward. Which audience your site copy is most heavily weighted for (visitors or search engines) will depend on how well established your site and brand already is. And, if you want to have a bit more freedom in how much you write and a place to be a little freer with keywords, start a blog like this one. If I’d written the above advice on a page of the Hile Design site, it’d probably of kept it to 50 words or less. (Hint: notice how many keywords related to good Web design are included in this post.)

Poetry and fiction may be more personal works, thus requiring seclusion from the distraction of others. But agency copywriting is a different ball game altogether.

Marketing writing is a form of communication that is constantly evolving, and to be successful copywriters need to be actively involved with others. I have learned a few things from my experience in writing copy for Hile:

1. Swallow your pride. As a young writer in the advertising world I had to learn very quickly that not everything my creative little fingers typed out was gold. Writing copy for a website or a script for a video is not your personal memoir, so take a dose of humility and make adjustments, edits, and rewrites where the client wants them.
2. Respect the input of others. An advertising agency is a diverse community; there are designers, programmers, project managers, copywriters, etc. When your writing is under review (and it will be) don’t discount the critique of the web programmer just because he took fewer English courses than you in college.
3. The more perspectives the better. Think of the workplace as a microcosm for the larger, diverse communities of people that will eventually read your writing. So, send your copy to more than just your boss for review. This doesn’t mean you need to adhere to every single suggestion that you get back, but it will give you a better idea of how your work will be read by the public and the client.
4. Designers are your friends. Marketing materials are composed of both images and words, and the best kind happen when words and images are married to form a happy union that we dub “advertising.” As the writer, it is crucial that you work with the designer rather than simply expect him or her to create images that conform to your writing.
5. Don’t always expect a high-five. Writing is a personal endeavor because it is a form of intimate creation. It is also a measuring stick of your intelligence and creativity. But, just because the copy you wrote for that coffee company brochure is riddled with metaphor and alliteration, don’t always anticipate getting a pat on the back. Writing for the media is a job, and while it’s nice for good work to be recognized, don’t take every project as a personal appraisal of your worth as a writer.

In the words of the poet Richard Tillinghast, “humility is naturally rare, particularly among young writers, for whom the value of doing something remarkable is vastly increased when they can say it only took them fifteen minutes.”

Writing for the media is not about sitting down at your computer and producing a masterpiece of copy in “fifteen minutes.” In fact, no type of writing should be about quick and easy creation. Working in an advertising agency is a good way to learn that the best copywriting comes from collaborating with the people around you, whether through requesting editing and revision, a wider range of perspectives, or a simple dose of inspiration.

Maggie Tibus is the Copywriting Intern at Hile Design.

My 3-day a week treadmill regimen lasted 2 years.

Yup! I was a statistic. (Lest you think I’m a total slackard, I was exercising sporadically, but not on our expensive treadmill.)

Two and a half years ago when I decided to launch our company blog I had the same noble intentions as my early exercise aspirations. I promised myself I’d write two fresh posts a week, including compelling interviews with industry leaders, and that my entries would be GOOD. By my fifteenth post I realized that all those great ideas I’d had when I decided to become Mr. Social Media had run out. Uh oh. All of a sudden it got harder to be clever and meaningful. My blogging had ceased being a lark and had become work. This was especially problematic since I was counseling several of our clients to start blogging. After encouraging them about the benefits of writing online as a way to engage with their customers I always ended by warning them, “…and you know you have to stay with it since there is nothing sadder than an unblogged blog.”

A few years ago there was the belief that blogging several times a week was optimal or you’d risk losing the interest of your followers. That often led to people posting… how should I put it?… less than thoughtful content. As I followed the blogosphere and read more articles stating that producing compelling content was much more important than churning out posts for quantity sake I was somewhat relieved. Like a good portfolio, a few good articles are better than a few good articles along with a bunch of uninteresting ones.

But the fact remains that for a while my writing regimen got pretty sparse by anybody’s standards, so I am recommitting to making the time to write regularly. It’s challenging because I am the president of my company and I manage all the duties associated with my title. We’re also in the process of developing a new company website for which I am writing the content, so my time is even more limited than usual (Could that be why I am writing this at 7:45 pm?). But you will be my judges. I don’t have any excuses left for not writing regularly after this post goes live, so hold me to it!

P.S. A year and a half ago my wife and I adopted a dog from a shelter and it’s now my job to walk our pup Ellie every night for about 45 minutes come rain, snow, sleet or tsunami. I DO get my exercise since I need to walk her briskly, because she barks and lurches energetically at anything on 2 or 4 legs, which embarrasses me in front of my neighbors. Good for me!

In their book The Power of Small: Why Little Things Make All the Difference, Linda Kaplan Thaler and Robin Koval talk about how focusing on the details yields big results. They know whereof they speak. Their agency, The Kaplan Thaler Group, started as a two-woman ad firm with a single Clairol Herbal Essences account and grew to renown as the creator of the ubiquitous Aflac duck. An excerpt from the inside front cover flap captures the flavor of the book: “Our smallest actions and gestures often have an outsized impact on our biggest goals… Going that extra inch—whether with a client, customer, family member or friend—speaks volumes to others about our talent, personality and motivations.”

In addition to typing the phrase “think big advertising,” into my Google search bar, I also tried “think small advertising.” Interestingly enough, my research led me to a web page listing the top 100 advertising campaigns of all time. First on the list of a top five that included “The pause that refreshes” (Coke), The Marlboro Man, “Just Do It” (Nike) and “You deserve a break today” (McDonald’s) was a campaign created by Doyle Dane Berbach in 1959 for Volkswagen entitled “Think Small.” I guess it’s not a new concept in advertising, but one that’s all too easy to forget.

At Hile, we want to excel both in thinking big and thinking small. When we’re conceptualizing a new ad or marketing plan, we’re all about big ideas, because we know that small ones are often dull, ordinary and cliche. But when it’s time for a brochure or ad we’ve designed to go to press, we know we need to find the time to be there when the presses roll or do one last proofreading to make sure there are no “off” colors or typos to mar the finished product. To illustrate the point, we recently received a local business monthly in the mail, and on the back cover was a full-page ad for an award-winning agency. Unfortunately, there was a glaring typo smack-dab in the middle of the professionally written copy that would have probably been discovered by another set of eyes. (In Kaplan and Thaler’s book, they talk about how their in-house rule “read twice, send once” eliminates many e-mail errors that would otherwise be sent on their way with a single mouse-click.)

The real importance in discovering typos and making design tweaks is not perfection, of course, but trust. Continuing from the Power of Small book cover flap: “After all, if we can’t take care of the small details, how can we be counted on to deliver when it really matters?” We want our clients to be able to count on us to get the job done on time, within budget and with great communication along the way.

So how are we doing in giving our clients expansive creativity (big thinking) along with the detail-oriented precision that leads to mutual trust and long-term relationships? Only our clients can say for sure. In the meantime, we’ll keep working on it.

Instead, it’s about being who you say you are (or “show” you are, in the case of a website). During her visit, the consultant mentioned that her experience when she walked in our door and met our staff was the same as what she encountered in her visit to our Hile Design website (and fortunately for us, she liked what she saw in both places). That was music to my ears, and was one of the main goals of our most recent website redesign. Before starting the project, I reviewed a lot of other agency websites, and quite frankly, many of them began to look and sound eerily similar. For us, it was very important that we not only present our business services and design portfolio (all advertising agencies do that), but that we also communicate the culture (informal) and personality (friendly and creative) of our company to our site visitors.

Why? Because after 25 years in business I’ve noted that knowing who you’ll be working with is very important. As a matter of fact, most of the business relationships I’ve observed either endure or fail based not so much on performance as on issues related to corporate character such as honesty, responsiveness, friendliness and follow-through. A company can have all of the talent in the world, but if they are not focused on customer service or are hard to work with, they may not succeed for the long haul. I’m sure that all of us have at one time or another been burned in business. Perhaps it’s because the person we needed to reach never returned our calls, or they made promises that they didn’t keep. And perhaps sometimes the company that presented itself so professionally on its website didn’t live up to their claims.

What about your company? Do you communicate the real you? Does your company have a distinct personality, and is that personality communicated online? With a hundred other firms providing the same services as yours, what sets you apart? As an individual, you take pride in what makes you unique. Is it too much to ask the same for your company?

As Fee-Only Financial Planners, Oliver Financial Planning does not sell products such as mutual funds or insurance or accept commissions from the sales of those products. Therefore, all conflicts of interest regarding compensation and recommendations are removed. As a result, the company is free to work in their clients’ best interest.

For us, the good news is that our traffic has doubled since we launched our updated site last January. Visitors are staying longer and viewing more of our work. Statistics show they are most interested in who we are, whom we work for and what services we provide, pretty much in that order. All in all, we’re happy with the site. And yet…

I can tell by the average time site visitors spend on various pages that most of them aren’t reading my carefully crafted copy but are only scanning the page or reading headlines and subheads. And to think, after all my hard work! I spent a lot of time trying to make the text informative and entertaining. And based on recommendations from Steve Krug’s insightful book about web usability, Don’t Make Me Think (highly recommended reading) I wrote the copy, then cut it in half, and cut it in half again.

Google Analytics does keep us humble, doesn’t it? The fact is that the majority of web visitors are either incredibly finicky or short on time, or both (as am I). As we build our websites, try as we may to be clever and meaningful, much of what we think is so darn important about our companies and services gets glossed over by the masses.

It’s a lot to ask busy people to give us their attention on the web, so what ends up on a site has to be not only relevant, but also pared down to its essence, and intuitively navigational while still communicating the “personality” of our company or organization. And that’s what makes building an effective website such a challenging, worthwhile and creative endeavor.

In the field of advertising, when you find a means of connecting with people, you take advantage of it. So considering that my previous blog posting, “Thirty Years of Illustration,” got triple the readership of any of my former posts, I decided to write another article along the same lines—that is, looking back over my career as an illustrator. I promise not to repeat myself (the film Rocky was good and Rocky II was palatable, but then Sly made the disasters Rocky III, IV and V).

For the first 20 years of my illustration career almost all my work was done using an airbrush. Most people wait 20 minutes into my airbrush stories before politely asking what an airbrush is, so I thought I’d explain the tool. Listeners get hung up on the word “brush” when there isn’t anything resembling a brush on the device. Think of an airbrush as a tiny, highly accurate paint sprayer. It looks like a silver writing pen (see photo, above right). On the top, or off the side of the front end of the brush, there is a small paint reservoir about the size of a thimble. This holds the paint that is sucked up into a stream of air that is released when you push down and pull back on a lever mounted on the top of the device. The airbrush is hooked to a small compressor by a nylon-coated rubber hose, which provides its pressurized air source. You can spray the paint in widths from a pencil-thin line to an 8 to 12 inch swath of paint depending on how far you pull back on the lever and how high the airbrush is held from your working surface.

But for the most part you don’t just paint freehand. There is a time-consuming process of cutting both adhesive stencils (called friskets) and non-stick stencils (acetate, in different thicknesses) to mask off areas you don’t want to spray onto. Friskets give you a clean, sharp mask and acetate stencils give you a softer edge, since a bit of the paint will work its way under the non-stick acetate. Think of a car getting painted. You need to mask off the headlights, chrome details, windows and tire wells so you don’t get paint on them. For instance, if I were illustrating a person’s face I would mask off everything but the flesh-tone areas of the face, including the teeth, hair and eyes, since I wouldn’t want flesh-colored paint on them. After spraying the paint to get the desired result, I’d work back into the artwork in order to add highlights, define shadows and do other detail work. For that I would use fine-tipped paintbrushes and colored pencils. Sometimes I’d add highlights by erasing or scraping off paint with an Exacto blade. You can run several different kinds of paint through an airbrush but I always used gouache, which is a water-based paint resembling watercolor, but made more opaque with a chalk-like substance. Back in the day, I used to have four airbrushes hooked up at a time, each with a different color so I didn’t have to constantly spend time cleaning them and changing from one color to another.

Airbrushing isn’t for everyone. It requires a lot of skill, patience and concentration. And this is where it gets weird. Ask my family or fellow employees how tidy and organized I am. My work area is the messiest in the office. But for some reason, the minute I picked up an airbrush I became Mister Neatness and Perfection, with the patience of a saint.

Reflecting back on how challenging the medium was, for the first year I airbrushed I almost always walked away from client assignments secretly hoping that I could just pull off the illustration at all. The third year I remember congratulating myself for not messing up on a project for the first time. Later of course, I had total mastery of the medium.

Now that my work is digital it almost seems too easy. There wasn’t any Command Z with my airbrush, and today’s illustration work gets done much quicker. But I keep in touch with my past in that I work out all my digital illustrations by hand on tracing paper.

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Top: This engine and transmission was one of the highest paying illustrations I’ve ever done in my career. Originally created for inclusion in a GM brochure and trade show display, it was later blown up into an 8 foot poster and hung behind the desk of the chairman of the board at GM. Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1988

Second: In my opinion, the most versatile airbrush is the Iwata HP-SB. It was a trusty workhorse that was good for both fine detail work and laying in broad areas of color. I painted the engine and transmission with this one.

Third: This painting was done for the cover of Jotham’s Journey, the first book in a trilogy I illustrated. The books were fictional adventure novels about three children who were present at the birth of Christ. I hired a 12-year-old model from Detroit to serve as the main character Jotham, and borrowed the period clothing from a local church’s theatre department. After publication, the book had a very loyal following and last year got republished after being out of print for nearly 10 years. Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1996

Fourth: This is an interior illustration for the second book in the Jotham series, entitled Bartholomew’s Passage. I was given the manuscripts and asked which scenes I’d like to illustrate, which was very nice of the art director. This drawing shows Bartholomew washing the floor of his master’s house. Medium: Airbrushed watercolor. 1996

Fifth: This illustration was done for a book entitled The Forever Feast. I bought all the food items and photographed them together to get a sense of scale. I then shot each element up close for detailed illustration reference. The idea was to do a realistic illustration, but stylized in a way that made the image hyper-real. I had agreed with the art director to leave the top two-thirds of the illustration sky for his title type treatment. In the end the publisher decided not to use my illustration, but I got paid. Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1995

Sixth: Although I did a lot of realistic work, I also enjoyed assignments that were more graphic. Here is an illustration I did for a magazine’s Questions and Answers page. The art director wanted a contemporary take on Rodin’s classic sculpture The Thinker.  Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1997

Seventh: I ended up doing a lot of work for family magazines. This article, aimed at fathers, was about switching from work life to home life. Medium: Airbrushed gouache. 1997

Eighth: The cartoon on the left was done shortly before I switched from airbrush to digital media. The one on the right is a digital illustration with similar subject matter. I thought it would be interesting to show them side-by-side. Medium: (Left) Airbrushed gouache. 1997. (Right) Vector. 2000

One thing I find refreshing when I meet with these newcomers is their excitement and passion for the design process. Their enthusiasm is contagious, and they remind me of my earlier years when I first started my career. I must confess that after almost 30 years in the advertising business, there are times that I’ve experienced my job as routine. But I don’t want that to happen. I want to keep the creative fires burning and I want to be excited by each and every project our clients entrust to us.

A few years ago we offered Lindsey Mishler (now Lindsey Cousino) an internship over the summer. She was studying graphic design at Grand Valley State University in western Michigan, and she had a strong portfolio for a third-year student. To say that she livened the place up would be an understatement. Her attitude and humor were refreshing, and she definitely raised the energy level around the office. She was up for anything we threw at her, from assisting our designers with their production work to running errands to washing dishes. She loved it all, and it impressed me greatly. So when she graduated the next year, we hired her. She has excelled in the design and production work we have given her, and as importantly, hasn’t lost a bit of her enthusiasm. All of our staff (and our clients) have benefited from her positive energy. And that’s where having youthful designers can pay off in a big way.