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Content management and systems
As an information architect and content manager, I spend time getting to know the priorities and working practices of the clients I work with. Content comes in lots of formats, flavours, shapes and sizes and finding a way to shape the messges of a client to the audience they’re trying to reach can be one…
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Teller – on how magic works
[blockquote]In its most fundamental form, magic is about what happens when what you see differs from what you know. You seem to be seeing something that is really happening, you know it can’t be happening, and those two forces come into collision. That purely intellectual element of magic, where what you know about the world…
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Magic, information and interaction design
All projects require a focus on the result you need to achieve and the audience that the product is being designed for. It’s only then that you can combine and negotiate the needs of both client and audience to ensure that they intersect and the solution is a success. That’s a bit of a jargon-laden…
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On Moodle
[blockquote]Question: You can’t just use Moodle out of the box – the basic Moodle install just isn’t that sophisticated Answer: Have a look at the feature list, all of which comes as standard with every Moodle download. Additional themes, blocks and activities are easy to integrate and the vast majority are free, open source code…
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Off-page SEO
Link building Search engines judge each link to a page from another page or site as a vote for the page. Search engines are really just big popularity contests – the more links you get the better. It is not just the number of links that are important, but also the quality. Quality is determined…
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Keyphrases, not keywords
Around 33% of all searches are for two-word combinations, 26% for three words, and 21% for four or more words. Just 20% of people search on single words. Search engines such as Google attribute more relevance when there is an exact phrase match on a web page (a phrase that matches the user’s search term),…
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SEO – art or science?
I think content on the web should twinkle and sparkle, so that when a user finds it they’re sure that it’s what they were looking for. Some people say that search engine optimisation (SEO) is a bit like throwing mud at a wall – and that the more you throw, the more chance you have…
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Choose your own adventure
Navigation helps users to do two things – find content and explore. Content isn’t bound to a single platform these days. Good brands are really content producers – they tell stories about themselves so that audiencescan buy into their values and get a better understanding of why they should connect with them. And audiences connect…
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Tourism site – Sheffield Theatres
The Forgiftede Lodge site is part of the Rehearsal Room for Sheffield Theatres’ production of An Enemy of the People. The copy on the site is playful and subtly introduces the themes and elements of the narrative so that the audience can enjoy the content before they see the production and bring that knowledge to…
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The play’s the thing…
Happiness is a play called Hamlet Happiness is perhaps too bold a claim. Tobacco manufacturers are always more than happy to make claims about their products that other more circumspect minds may shy away from. And yet, happiness is certainly close to the mark. The Crucible Theatre has been opened a good seven months now,…
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The Rehearsal Room – Sheffield Theatres
Before every production, actors and directors spend time in a real-life rehearsal room. They focus on the story they’re going to tell and understand the characters and places that will be brought to life. Now, in the digital Rehearsal Room, you can do the same. The Rehearsal Room isn’t just online – its a website…
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I feel a campaign coming on…
“tell us about a recent campaign that you especially liked.” There was something about the whole conversation that had, so far, left me cold and unengaged. It was like I was being interviewed via satellite and the delay between the motion of the questioner’s mouth and the sound that I heard was robbing the words…
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Importance of scripting the user
[blockquote]Stories have the felicitous capacity of capturing exactly those elements that formal decision methods leave out. Logic tries to generalise, to strip the decision making from the specific context, to remove it from subjective emotions. Stories capture the context, capture emotions… Stories are important cognitive events, for they encapsulate, into one compact package, information, knowledge,…
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Enemy of the people trailer
After a 2-year closure for renovations Sheffield Theatres wanted a trailer that would introduce the themes and tone of the new production and act as the first asset on the organisations YouTube channel. The trailer would also be the only asset added to a pre-launch version of the Rehearsal Room website. I wrote and worked…