Reading Why Parents Write More Persuasive Copy post, only because the post title was interesting for me personally as a parent.
During the reading i got to the thought that this post is not true just for writing, its true for conversion and SEM as a guide.
The mental image i got while reading the line

“Have you ever walked into a toy store with your kids and asked them to choose something? Good luck with that. They‚Äôre overwhelmed by the options and run about, touching everything and totally unable to make up their minds about anything.

Your site visitors feel the same way. Give them too many links, too many options, too much to do, and you‚Äôll lose them to option paralysis.”

Was so strong that I had to autosuggest it to the latest shopping experience i had for a compact flash unit.

most of the shops don’t offer all the information in a simple way, when you go to the electronics shop front you have 10-25 categories on the right hand side asking you to start drilling down, their titles are not always that easy to encrypt even if you are a tech guy. Memory in one shop is RAM at another and Media at a third.
The massive amount of links makes it impossible to choose the items that are right for you, nor is it easy to find items at all.
This resonated for a while in the need to create some easy to follow conversion rules.

I will start the list and want you all to participate in adding to it.
So here are the items i got so far:

• use simple navigation and make the choice easy – don‚Äôt give me 15-30 navigation points to get me to the subcategories of these to get me to a list of items for the subcategory! Give me my product in the realm I would look for. give me the product using classification and not your internal stock order, if I need a Compact Flash card put it in memory->compact flash or camera->memory->compact flash, Don‚Äôt make me think!
• cough up the cost – I want to know how much is delivery before I click “add to cart”, give me related alternatives if there are with costing.
• tag your products and make them match – use tagging to handle products that need to match, i.e. cpu to motherboard, memory to motherboard, display adapter to motherboard, soil for pots to pots and so on.
• push me to buy it – this is the place for the store to shine, make me know how good this product is and how much i need it, be the salesman I miss. Learn from Amazon and give me the full store experience. Taking the article answer to the ‚ÄúWhy?‚Äù question
  

  “Site visitors who feel good about their choice and feel they‚Äôre making the right decision for them are going to take action ‚Äî and confidently so.”

• Put yours in the comments

NOTE: this rant is brought to you from the latest online shopping experience I had for compact flash, most of the stores I gone through didn’t get my business because they made me think. I didn’t buy from the easiest to use but I spent more then 30 minutes to get the bloody thing even though I knew what I wanted and how much I wanted to spend.

I love the idea of Liferay portal, its a self sustaining portal and content management system that comes with many applications out of the box that enable you to shape your site as you wish without seeking a third party applications or plug-ins. The portal supports the JSR 168 and 286 for portlet development allowing you to develop a very elaborate applications on top of it with the power of Java, Spring, Hibernate, EJB, JSF and more.
The position of this Portal as of all portals is more in the mid-size business more then the personal site developer.
But with this positioning comes some software design and architecture responsibilities.
The portal should be able to cluster easily and be able to give better performance using caching.
The good news is that although clustering is not a simple switch in the configuration it is not allot more complex then a configuration of the web server, cache and Liferay. caching is also OOTB and has the benefits of the Hibernate.
Having this is very good and very reassuring for the business that sets its eyes on establishing a portal as their website.
The other great feature in the portal is the CMS based on the popular Journal portlet. though it is not a really great and flexible CMS with many of an enterprise CMS features it does get the job with simple content like Articles and so on. Dont expect to get the Vignette Content Management server out of it.
I do have some problems with the portal, especially GUI design and the separation of interfaces.
My first trouble started with the lack of a backend administrative application. i am used to this type of mechanism in most of my web applications including the Wordpress i am using now. the separation of preview and management is some thing i find very important for applications.
For an example i would bring the page template management. though i have chosen a very arguable example i believe that this should be a part of the navigation tree and it should be possible to make a selection of several pages and change their templates collectively.

But this is not the end of the problems with the lack of administrative application, the administration is done by pages in the system that make it very elaborate to make it clear what is user controlled and what is administrative.
Now i have not gone beyond the simple install and have not tried to integrate it with any LDAP for users and groups or any other integration to Caching mechanisms but it appears that there is some community out there that will be happy to try and help and you might be able to archive your goal.
So if your company is in the route to get a portal and you want to go the open source way you probably should consider Liferay Portal. if you want an enterprise portal Come to Vignette.

Hi guys i found this online demo tool to sketch your SQL ERD diagrams.
Although supporting only the great MySQL and SQLite and not Oracle or SQL Server, the tool is amazing from the UI design and usability.

VoiceThread set to create the canvas of future collaboration. But after browsing for a short while in some personal experiences, most of them are educational assignments or related to education.
In the beginning of the stroll the application seems promising. a few pictures with voice annotations and a few voice comments.
The interface is very clear and holds the navigation between speakers and items in a very elegant cube like matrix.
But the moment i hit one of the more loaded items with above 10 commenter’s the interface gave in.
The amount of user icons became confusing and the flow between speakers was not expected.
Going into collaboration based on text called a forum we get to see the users interaction to the initial post in an orderly and sometimes hierarchically manner. This enables us to understand the time line and the plot… the post in VoiceThread lacks the plot we are expecting! it is not sufficient to be able to voice out people and let them respond with interactive means. The interface should be guiding and anticipated enough to put the spectator at the receiving end of the experience giving him the tools to understand the plot and participants.
The VoiceThread application is still not mature in its UI and the understanding of the story telling going on in collaborative applications that acts as the drive and motivation of users to post a post initially.
The UI is unable to sustain mass collaboration due to limitations of its display style and needs to look at the UI manufactured in apple to grasp the correct way to condense in a small space like the iPhone allot of information.

I was reading, in the CM Briefing area of steptwo site, about Intranet website designs.
The title of the article is Should the intranet look sexy?
I think that the three major stands of the short article are relevant to any site and are not really adding information to the table.
Every site should be usable, identifiable and branded.
I would like to broaden the view.
Since we are looking at users and thinking of their usage of the site my initial thought will be the need to create a usability to the website that will not be lesser then the internet site and at times better then the intranet since the clients of the intranet site are your asset that gains value to the organization. Taking that into a fact and you need to invest in a modern Web 2.0 interfaces to attract the users to information.
To achieve this I would take a look at iGoogle for example. a user should have the ability to customize the view he wants of the data. to all the control freaks in the organization you can limit this to a template based view or some basic elements that are not configurable.
To make it more attractive you can enable users to consume external news feeds and so forth and make this the page users will use most in their working environment.
This can also be a viewable by other people in the organization (based on security) for review and comparison by peers.
This is just one way to tackle the hurdle of information availability in the organization.
In the company i am with right now Vignette we have a portal implementation that allows you to create your own page. also we provide a content management with a similar implementation that allows you to view and customize your interface to match your needs and role.
I truly believe that the Intranet realm is under-developed and will need to be reconsidered by many organizations since they are neglecting their internal users that are their assets.