I think the thing that attracts me most to Vanilla is its simplicity and elegance. Sure, it is incredibly powerful however this is not at the expense of usability. The admin interface is beautifully designed and intuitive to use. You can add categories, manage users, send out announcements and indeed do everything else you would expect without any documentation or training. It’s just obvious.

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“We basically have two kinds of readers that visit the site: native readers and nomadic readers. Natives come to you because you’re you; nomadic readers are coming in from other communities or search traffic.” Welcome mats are an attempt to do what every news organization hopes to: to convert some of the nomads into natives.

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People who don’t have a photographic memory are going to forget who’s who or what’s what. In the digital context, you can easily help people with that; but if you’re anything like me, you tend to follow a link to learn more about a subject, and then you end following this interesting trail that never leads you back to what you were originally reading. (more…)

Podcasts, videos, and other audio files must include a transcript in order to be accessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing. If you don’t provide a transcript for your audio files, you are discriminating against some people, preventing them from getting the information.

Providing a text alternative for your audio is required by law in some cases; in others, it’s just the smart thing to do.

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On the “best” side, you’ll notice the subject lines are pretty straightforward. They’re not very “salesy” or “pushy” at all. Heck, some people might even say they’re “boring.” On the “worst” side however, notice how the subject lines read like headlines from advertisements you’d see in the Sunday paper. They might look more “creative,” but their open rates are horrible.

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When the iPhone first appeared, followed by the Kindle and then the iPad, it became clear that e-books and apps provided a way to siphon the resources of the Internet to individuals, who could now sample that energy without having to be vulnerable to the Web’s commercialism. That was an enormous breakthrough. Anyone who’s honest with herself knows that the Web stopped being a great place for consumers of culture a year or two ago. (more…)

“Publishers seemed to have this fantasy that iPad would allow them to call time out on the Internet,” Gene Liebel, a partner at the interactive agency HUGE, tells Fast Company. The idea is that for 10 years, publishing suffered from the Internet and its indignities, but that all of a sudden, thanks to the benevolent Steve Jobs, “now we’re back, now we’re gonna call a time out, start over, sell magazines at full price with immersive ads,” and so on. (more…)