rule - TheWayoftheWeb

It may because I’m tired and a bit ill, and the fact I’m following an ever-increasing number of Twitter-related blogs, but it seems that there is a never ending stream of guides to starting on Twitter, or gaining followers, and 90% of them have the exact same advice. (Even the New York Times carries a Twitter beginners guide!)

For the record, I didn’t feel the need to do one after I read Luke Razzell’s excellent Twitter guide back in October. Search traffic be damned!

Whether you’re an individual or brand, the tips are always to be human, interactive, interesting etc. Which is basically the same as you’d get for any network, or for your offline life.

So I’d like to suggest that following most of these guides is a complete waste of time – if you’re a spammer by nature, or your company is in fact the work of evil robotic overlords, then you’ll revert to your true nature eventually, and you’ll have wasted everyone’s time until the mask falls.

Instead, I’ll present the one suggestion I think should be given out to everyone as the way I’d love to see people using Twitter.

Rule 1: Try to make other people’s lives suck a little bit less.

That’s it.

There’s no ‘how to’ guide because it varies for every individual. It could be providing great customer service (Do I need to reference @ComcastCares or @Zappos?). It could be by responding to someone asking for messages to demo Twitter to their colleagues, or finding a bookmark someone has lost.

Or it could even be auto-posting from your blog via Twitterfeed if that’s how people want to receive information (despite all right-thinking wisdom pointing to the contrary!)

It could be something more formal, like helping out with a great charity project like the Charity Water campaign by @Pistachio, or contributing to a personal attempt to help a family.

It could be posting something that makes someone think, laugh, cry or start a conversation.

It’s simple, but easy to overlook when you’re thinking about other things.

‘We make a living by what we get, we make a life by what we give‘ Sir Winston Churchill.

Buffer

If you want a busy homepage, let your users organise it

My interest in web design is generally based on usability and accessibility, due to the fact I’m not the most artistic person in the world. I can appreciate attractive designs, but there are far better people than me in the world at creating them.

But something has struck me that I think could be a good rule for web architecture and design, based on my own experience of website redesigns, and trying to cram an awful lot of information onto a homepage in the fear that if it doesn’t appear, no-one will ever see it or find it. So here it is:

If you’re forcing homepage contents on your users keep it simple. If you want it to be cluttered, let your users pick how they organise it – or what it on it.

This is backed up by a few examples. For instance, Google is the oft-quoted archetypal example of a very simple homepage. And one that could make more money for the company if it was covered in banner ads – but that would wreck the essence of it’s success.

Meanwhile users can be overwhelmed by busy homepages – but when was the last time you saw an empty Facebook or Myspace profile, or an empty Netvibes page? Users are happy to have a cluttered page, as long as they’ve been able to create and organise the clutter – just the same as people are happy to work at a cluttered desk if they’ve worked out the clutter themselves.

The recent BBC homepage redesign is a good example of moving in this direction -without hopefully overwhelming too many users. Personally I was disappointed it’s still a walled silo of BBC content only – but it’s a start. The Google homepage - keeping it simple