Alan Brandon

I’m impressed so far with the redesign of the Boston Globe website. The new layout is clean and easy to use, but best of all it now features responsive design so that the page display adapts to whatever device you view it on. I have only casually browsed the site so far, but I have tried it on my notebook, smartphone, and color ebook reader. (OK, that’s a ThinkPad, Droid Incredible, and Nook Color.) The stories are easy to find and follow on all devices, and site performance seems good (unlike the old boston.com sluggishness).

I currently subscribe to home delivery of the Sunday Boston Globe, and every time the paper is wet, missing, or late I think seriously about canceling. However, access to the new online Globe is now included with the subscription. I think this new redesign may be enough to keep me subscribed.

Frank Chimero has a great post up entitled On Content, in which he explores serving bad soup in a fancy bowl. Content strategy anyone?

…and everyone is running around screaming “No one wants to buy our soup!” Then they start looking for different ways to distribute the soup. Do they buy new ladles? Would people like it if the ladles were fancier? “Let’s buy new bowls. People would enjoy the new bowls,” they say…. Would people want the soup if it came without a spoon? It could be called “undesigned” or “naked” soup.

In many of the organization I have worked with, design (or redesign) has been tried as a way to fix bad content. Even though design is hard, it’s still seems easier than fixing content (content is hard work). But it’s not effective. If you want good soup you need a good chef and good ingredients. Slurp.

Not only is that a great headline, it’s also a great metaphor used by Brain Traffic’s Meghan Casey in her article, “4 Web project problems content strategy can solve“.

One of my biggest pet peeves is corporate websites that are designed around the company’s organizational structure, and influenced  by internal politics. Casey calls this “underpants on the outside”.

When I see a website where the products are organized under “small cap verticals” or “solutions, broadcast” I know that company didn’t think of me, or other potential customers, once during the design process. Then it’s up to me to decipher their “code” to find what I want. This inside-out approach is practically an epidemic in larger companies. A smaller company, with fewer products, has an easier time of organizing their content around what their customers want to know.

As Casey points out, this type of non-user-centric approach leads to, “Lost opportunities … sales not made, relationships not built, brand not recognized.”

The article includes three other common problems as well (plus solutions!), and is definitely worth a read:

• Great ideas, no content
• The content broke my design
• We thought you were creating the content
• Underpants on the outside

Via content strat doyenne Kristina Halvorson — check out Firehead’s page with “1001″ content strategy links. I just fell ‘way behind in my reading!

You can’t play Facebook games on the iPad.

The much anticipate Apple iPad everything-killer is coming, due to arrive in consumers’ hands this Saturday. Previews and reviews abound, and while there seems to be a lot to love about the iPad there are also a few complaints. One of the biggest gripes is the device’s lack of Flash support. Many, many websites run on flash, but Apple appears to be taking a firm stand against the ubiquitous technology. The reasons for their anti-Flash stance are plentiful, and alternatives seem scant.  Apple is taking a gamble here.

Apple’s intended iPad customer is the casual computer user who wants to check email, listen to music, watch a movie, read the paper, and surf the web. But when these customers visit Facebook on their iPad, they are in for a shock. The majority of the popular social games run on Flash.

Farmville (and the other ‘ville games), Cafe World, Lexulous, Bejeweled Blitz, and many other games depend on your browser having Flash installed to work. So the question is, will iPad customers (and potential iPad customers) be willing to give up their virtual horse stables and imaginary restaurants?

In a move reminiscent of the mid-90s browser compatibility wars, Apple has compiled a list of “iPad-ready websites”. Seriously? The list does include heavy hitters such as CNN, The New York Times, and The White House. But Facebook is the second most visited site on the Internet after Google. That’s a lot of online farmers to alienate.

Maybe a better question is “will Farmville kill the iPad?” — or at least change Apple’s stance on Flash?