No one ever went to a site because it was pretty

Posted on September 2, 2011 by Bill Wren

Ask yourself this question: “How often do I go to web sites because they are so good looking?” Most people will answer, “Never,” or so I believe. Some people will go to a site because of its brilliant look, but not many. And once seen, they don’t go back. There is no reason to.

Most people go to sites for reasons that have nothing to do with the look.

This isn’t intended as a shot at designers, by the way. Far from it. Design makes a site sing. But if that design doesn’t highlight and enhance content, it’s wasted effort and wasted money.

Yet design is what most businesses concentrate on. Often, in my experience, the content is an afterthought. I think this is because content is a lot harder. Not harder for designers. For them, design is probably the hardest part. But for non-designers, like most business owners? Design is easy.

They have brand colours and logos they can use as a reference. They have their own sense of what looks good and what doesn’t. (This is not always an accurate sense, by the way. But everyone feels they know what looks good. So in that sense, design feels easy. That feeling can lead to disaster but that is another post.)

Should that line on the page be a little thicker or should it be a little thinner? Let’s do a mock up of both and compare them.

But content. Oh my … I mean, who even knows what content is? Product information? Okay, how do I present it? What do you mean that’s too much information? What do mean it’s boring? How do I make it not boring?

And what on earth is that supposed to mean? “It’s not just what you say it’s how you say it.”

Give me colours. Give me layout. I understand that. My spouse just did a redesign of our living room. Believe me, I know design now!

But not content.

If you want to know what content should be on your site and how it should be presented because you would like to get people actually going to your site and staying there, stop thinking like a business. Start thinking like a web user.

Ask yourself questions. Why do I go to a web site? What do I expect to find? Why did I buy that product? Why do I use that service? Why am I doing what I am doing when I am online?

If you answer questions like that as a web user – not, I repeat, as a business – you’ll get some inkling of what kind of content should be on your site and how it should be presented.

And if you present it in a pretty way, all the better!

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Maintenance, our human flaw and a dreamed of plugin

Posted on August 26, 2011 by Bill Wren

икони на светци

“Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build
and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

– Kurt Vonnegut

Today has driven home to me Kurt Vonnegut’s quote regarding maintenance. He is right. I’m guilty of that flaw too. Most of us are. We want to get on to the next new thing; maintaining what we’ve done previously doesn’t have the same energetic oomph.

I’ve been trying to get a web page removed that has misleading and downright wrong information.

From what I’ve been able to determine, the page was created in the mid 1990′s. It even refers to a fundraising event for 1996/97. Even more alarming, the corporate name hasn’t been valid since 2004 — it has a forfeit status.

The page also refers to a charitable tax number that isn’t a charitable tax number at all but a file number. And the charity lost tax status as a charity in 1999.

In trying to get the page removed, I found it was part of a larger community site, likely created in the mid-90′s. The page is dated April 1997. The community site it is on cannot be contacted — phones just ring (no voicemail) and emails go unanswered.

I tried contacting the domain host thinking they could help but found out very quickly (they responded immediately) that it was actually pointed to yet another host. I’ve now sent them an email in the hope of getting this page removed.

It all boils down to a maintenance problem and what I call the great digital landfill.

And I’m as guilty as the next person. A few months ago, on one of my sites, I took a lot of pages offline and have been slowly updating them and putting them back up. But as I sit here, I’m dreaming of a WordPress plugin that for all I know already exists. But here is my dreamed up plugin (or what it does):

  • It applies to pages or posts or both (it is an option).
  • It has a time frame you can set: one year, two years, three years etc.
  • It alerts you (via email?) that a page is up for review.
  • It gives you seven days to review and okay or update the page.
  • There is an “Okay” button.
  • If the “Okay” button isn’t clicked, the page goes to an offline status  (Visibility = Private).

Well, it seems one way of making sure information is current. I guess the problem would be having every site in the world on WordPress — which I would not object to!

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Marquez and his Melancholy Whores

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Bill Wren

(Review of Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.)

When I first read Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores (translated by Edith Grossman), a novella published in English in 2005, I did not like it. I’ve recently re-read it and found it much more rewarding.

I believe my first reading was influenced by the name Marquez and thus by expectations. But this is a different kind of book than those he is best known for and while some of his former style remains, such as syntax and tone, the fantastic element found in books like One Hundred Years of Solitude has been replaced by the fantastic nature of memory, perception and ego.

In this book, Marquez offers his take on a story idea we’ve seen before, most notably for me in Yasunari Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties (from which Marquez borrows a quote for the story’s epigraph).

The skeleton of the story is this: on his ninetieth birthday, an aging Lothario decides he will treat himself to a virgin. The madam of a brothel he has frequented throughout his life arranges this for him. She provides a young girl drugged with bromide and valerian.

That part is similar to Kawabata’s story. But while in House of the Sleeping Beauties the old man can only lie beside and observe the young girl sleeping, in Melancholy Whores the narrator is expected to have sex with his provided girl, taking her virginity.

He doesn’t, however. Rather, he becomes infatuated with her and falls in love, or so he would describe it.

Many people didn’t like this book when it came out finding it lacking what had attracted them to many of the books that had made Marquez famous. But I think the inevitable comparisons readers make when they read something new from an author they’re familiar with are, in this instance, misleading. This book isn’t like One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera. If it is similar to anything it might be The Autumn of the Patriarch.

Colombia's Nobel Prize laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez. (Photo: AFP)

Marquez isn’t interested here in communities, families, relationships, history, fable and many of the other elements that appear in his famous books. He is interested in one person and one person alone. In Autumn of the Patriarch, his interest is in a man of power and exploring that man’s nature.

His narrator in Melancholy Whores is like the man of power, although in the world he is not a powerful man. (He is a newspaper columnist.) But like Patriarch, this book is an exploration of the male ego, or at least one of its manifestations.

The young virginal girl the narrator names Delgadina only exists in the narrator’s head. It could be any girl, really. He fashions a character for her; he falls in love with this imagined character.

But it is hardly love since what he imagines all returns to, focuses on and is born out of him. Everything relates back to him. Everything is about his gratification – not sexual gratification but the gratification of his imagination. And his imagination is his ego.

This relationship with Delgadina that he creates in his head is a variation of all the relationships he has ever had with women: sex paid for or taken (rape). In the story he relates how, to his surprise, he discovers his housekeeper (whom he had raped over twenty years ago) had been in love with him. He, however, had been oblivious. She had existed for keeping his house and sex. Beyond that, he was hardly aware she existed.

He is an utterly isolated man with no apparent awareness of this or why it should be so.

I read Autumn of the Patriarch many years ago and my recollection of it may not be the best, but it struck me as something recounted in a delirium, the dreamlike memory of a patriarch. Similarly, Memories of My Melancholy Whores makes me think of someone talking nonstop about himself. No matter what subject comes up, he relates it to himself. Like Patriarch, the focus is always the same: the narrator.

It is this obsession with self that is responsible for his isolation. It is also this self-obsession that poisons those who get close to him, like his housekeeper; like his Delgadina.

If this book lacks the breadth that books like One Hundred Years of Solitude had it is because the narrator’s world lacks that breadth. He can only see the world in terms of himself and that diminishes life’s possibilities and constrains it.

This is the story of man who has lived ninety years alone and with no true awareness of why and no ability (or desire) to change it.

And about child prostitution …

A scene from the miovie Memoria de mis putas tristes (Memories of my Melancholy Whores)

I saw on IMDb.com that a movie of this book has been completed (Memoria de mis putas tristes). I also saw this story from October 2009 about a group suing the film protesting that it promoted child prostitution.

And that brings up a disturbing aspect of Marquez’s book, as well as Kawabata’s House of the Sleeping Beauties.

They do concern child prostitution and pedophilia. In both cases, however, they are about the mind of the person with the attraction to children.

In the case of Memories of My Melancholy Whores, we get a telling insight into what is really happening and why. Marquez’s narrator is consumed with himself. His ego obliterates all parts of his personality and tries to go beyond that by consuming the self of the young girl he calls Delgadina. As horrific as the physical aspects of child prostitution may be, perhaps the real violation is in being banished to non-existence; it’s in being obliterated by the other’s ego, as we see in Marquez’s story.

It’s not so much that they become chattel as it is they become props.

The aberrant behaviour results from the dominating ego that can’t incorporate with the rest of the world. It wants to shape and define the world in the service of itself. Like Marquez’s narrator who speaks of love, a person like this often talks about how much they love and care for their victim when it is anything but love. If anything, it is a kind of murder: a murder of the soul.

And that is what Memories of My Melancholy Whores is really about: a stunted, self-obsessed ego.

It is worth noting that the narrator is never named nor do we learn the real name of the girl in the story. In the romantic, sentimental fantasy the narrator’s ego constructs, individuality does not exist; only imagined characters do.

You don’t need a name if you don’t exist as an individual.

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You need poetry in your posts

Posted on August 24, 2011 by Bill Wren

What the world really needs is poetry in posts. Seriously. Keep in mind, when we use the word poetry we usually mean it in one of two ways.

There is the very technical use when we are talking about something like a Shakespearean sonnet. But there is also the much more common use, in the general population, where it refers to really damn well done communication.

When it is damn well done communication it often uses metaphors, similes and analogies. It uses examples and descriptive language without going overboard. It creates images that communicate sense and makes what we read relatable and understandable.

Bald facts are boring. And they’re often difficult to wrap your head around. But poetry, in a very broad sense, makes them clear and drives home their meaning. Let’s try an example to see if I can communicate this notion.

I could write a post that would have the merit of being brief by simply writing, “Before any public speaking engagement, it is important to go to the bathroom beforehand.”

Or, I could write this:

About 45 minutes into my two hour lecture before 1,000 students at the University of Ottawa, I crossed my legs. Roughly five minutes later, I crossed them more tightly.

Not long after, perhaps five minutes, I began to perspire freely although the room was climate controlled and quite pleasant. Unfortunately, I had to pee. And I had about 50 more minutes to go at the lectern.

As it turned out, I humiliated myself by peeing my pants before a thousand eyes and thus learned my lesson: always pee before a public engagement!

Imagery conveys meaning and imagery is often the element that adds poetry to a post, in the sense I’m using the word.

Why would a news network send someone to a place devastated by an earthquake when they can simply say it registered 7.9 and over 500 people lost their lives? It costs money to send people all around the world. But the data doesn’t quite convey the meaning. Images of people and structures ravaged by the event do. It makes the event relatable and understandable.

So put some poetry in your posts. Make it mean something to me and everyone else.

Put another way, try telling a story that makes your message vivid.

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Jack Layton and an end to dogma

Posted on August 23, 2011 by Bill Wren

PM Stephen Harper and Jack Layton share a joke.

Canada’s Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party, passed away yesterday and there was a huge upswell of grief and commiseration expressed.

In all the remembrances of the man and in all the accolades sent his way, it’s worth asking why he should be remembered. I think there is a very specific reason.

He should be remembered less for what he achieved and more for how he achieved it. He was realistic, practical and never a dogmatist.

In the world’s current climate, that is a rare thing. He had very definite beliefs, values and convictions. But he also knew they had no merit — no hope of being obtained — if buried within dogma. His beliefs were informed by a vision of Canada, one that involved community, goals and accords achieved together, unachievable aspirations for anyone straight-jacketed by doctrine.

There was never any sense of a wishy-washy politician in Mr. Layton — far from it. Nor was there ever a sense of an opportunist who would say whatever was necessary to get what he wanted. He came across as someone who would actually listen and give consideration to views he didn’t share. One of his most used words was “we”; he loved the plural. He seemed to love the idea of mutual agreements.

Jack Layton understood the importance of, and he mastered as well as it can be mastered, the art of consensus. He had no choice. Consensus was his vision.

It is this I think he should be remembered for and I only hope he is not the last non-dogmatist. In a world increasingly entrenched in its polarized positions, we can’t really afford to lose a Jack Layton.

Sadly, we have.

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