Browsing the "publishing" category...
What Every Print Designer Needs To Know About Building Web Sites
When Desktop‘s editor approached me a couple of months ago about writing the feature article for the May issue of Desktop magazine, I was a little apprehensive.
On the one hand, it’s an honour to be asked (I’ve been writing a column about web design for the magazine for over a year now, and they haven’t asked me to stop, so I guess I’ve been doing something right). On the other, I was pretty nervous — unlike the online world, reader feedback about a print article is few and far between, so I’ve never had any affirmation that my articles are written at the right level for that audience, other than the editor continuing to give me a new deadline each month.
Additionally, the scope for the topic was potentially huge — “Getting On The Web: What Works and What Doesn’t”. It was a topic that I felt comfortable writing on, so I figured I’d give it a shot, and began fleshing out the article well before my deadline. As it turned out, I had to ask for an extension to get it finished due to my wife having some unexpected emergency brain surgery, but I got it done in the end.
Getting on the web has never been easier for end users interested in publishing photos, chatting with friends and dumping random thoughts for the world to savour, but building a professional website is as difficult as it has always been.
The article was given the title “wwwdotme”, and an abbreviated version has been published at Desktop’s web site (although you can read a full version on SitePoint). Hopefully it will be some food for thought for print designers who dabble in the web without realising just what is involved.
Do Print Authors Hide Behind Their Medium?
There’s one thing that I find a little odd about writing a column for a print magazine, and that’s the lack of feedback.
In web publishing, there are so many metrics that are instantly available for you to gauge whether something is successful or not—number of comments on the post, number of visits to the page, number of times your post has been voted for on a social media site like digg, delicious, reddit … Within 24 hours, you know whether something you’ve published on the web is something that has resonated with others, or flunked.
Even more than that, you can determine what country the people who read your article came from, what operating system and browser they were using when they did so, and how fast their internet connection was. You can see where they went after your post, and which pages they were reading beforehand. Sometimes it almost feels like you know them.
In print, you don’t get any of that. You might get the occasional person who writes in to the magazine with feedback, that the editor may or may not pass on. Or occasionally someone will write a blog post along the lines of “I was reading an article in this magazine the other day which got me thinking …”
But mostly, you just get silence. Whilst the crickets chirp, people may be either loving your writing, or hating it, or worse, feeling nothing. But as an author in a print magazine or newspaper, you wouldn’t really know.
I wonder how much that enables print-based journalists to hide, how much mediocrity is masked by a medium that is one-way.
I really enjoy writing my monthly web column for Desktop magazine, partly because it’s nice seeing one’s words shine on glossy, colour paper.
But print journalism is dead.
Tags: analytics, desktop, journalism, print, webWhere Is Your Passion?
I was a bit sneaky in my latest blog post over at SitePoint.
The post is basically a job ad for the technical editor role that we are looking to fill. But I didn’t want to just write the usual “We’re hiring, apply now!” fanfare. If you were actively looking for employment, then advertising the fact that we had a job going might grab your attention — but for everyone else this is unlikely to get you to read past the title.
Not that I wanted to completely mislead my readers, either. If you pull this kind of stunt too often, then people are going to stop trusting you as an author — and that means not coming back to read more.
In my post I theorize on the different types of people who are passionate about the Web and why they feel so strongly about the Web as a medium. Hopefully, even if you weren’t interested in learning that there was a position available at SitePoint, you might find these four categories of people interesting. The plan was also to convince readers that SitePoint is full of people who are this passionate, and therefore hopefully convince you that it is a great place to work. Which it is!
Anyway, if you know of someone who might be good in this role, you should refer them and win yourself a MacBook Pro!
Tags: editor, job, sitepoint, technical
Matthew Magain works as the manager for online media at 
