Category: Communications

I have managed cutting-edge and strategic communication projects, developed high-impact marketing campaigns effectively utilizing multiple social media and traditional media channels, project management plans that heavily utilize collaboration with diverse stakeholders, and increased positive interaction within teams, customers, as well as with critics.

I view communication as more than just writing. Over the years I worked in print, including a stint in a print shop (three-stage-web, AB Dick, and even an antiquated Heidelberg press). I witnessed the shift from “shooting-plates” printing through the emergence of desktop publishing. I bear many memories of Quark’s beauty and its transformative impact. And have been part of the journey as we’ve moved from Quark to InDesign.

Creating and managing newsletters delights me to this day. Memories of bulk mailing and the aggravations of the postal system evolved into navigating email newsletters. I’ve come to deeply value Mailchimp and modern CRM tools.

I see the web as the future of mass media and communications. I have over a decade of blogging experience, both personal and professional. I’ve used the medium to engage with the full range of stakeholders: clients, customers, and critics. Successful at building organic SEO as well as online advertising (pay-per-click, Facebook and Twitter ads, etc) to increase market presence. I know how to maximize email campaigns with various CRM tools and Mailchimp. And I’m familiar with traditional media as well, everything from writing and distributing press releases to creating flyers, brochures, posters, and bulk mail newsletters.

And I’ve deployed websites with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, and PHP. I also know tools like FrontPage and WordPress.  Wix and Squarespace also reside within my repertoire.

Some of the results I’m proud of:

  • 150% increase in Facebook followers
  • 250% increase in Twitter followers
  • Increased SEO optimization – achieved page 1 Google Ranking for key search terms
  • 1000% increase in Facebook engagement (“People Talking About This”)

Why I decided to study web development

Carl Setzer
information sign on shelf

I came to study web development a bit differently than most (more on that journey here). Much of my background has been in some variant of communications. Lots of writing (I’ve loved writing for years…it’s what got me started in blogging), but also photography, newsletter creation/editing/management, web content, public affairs and policy…my list goes on a bit here. Over the years, I started exploring website creation. Mostly just exploring on personal projects. In 2000, I created one for the church I worked at. I then worked specifically in communications roles in a few companies. The past 10 years or so, I’ve focused on digital marketing. This includes pay-per-click, SEO, content marketing, blogging and social media campaigns. Websites have been crucial elements of that. I created and managed several sites, mostly WordPress sites, but several others as well.

I was struggling to choose between web development and graphic design. Web development won since I’ve long seen the web as the future of communications. Now, though, it’s really, well, the “now” of communications. And I really want to grab hold of the now, and what’s coming. With web development, I guess I need to explore Web 3.0.

Help your audience find your stuff

Carl Setzer
man holding mug in front of laptop

A few days ago I was scrolling through Instagram, as we’re want to do these days. On a rather popular site (for some pop-star) was a post featuring some product. Whoever crafted the post wrote the standard “link in bio”. Then the top comments were asking “where’s the link”? Interest piqued, I followed the link. The landing page showed links to a blog and plenty of pages, but where to find this specific link, this product was unclear at best. This caused me to cringe. People are interested in this item and they’re having to play “hide-and-seek”. You don’t want to do this with your fans!

I am reminded of a developer maxim (I believe it was said by Jeff Hawkins, creator of the Palm Pilot) about minimizing the number clicks you need to access information. I can’t remember the specifics of that quote, but the basic premise is the fewer the better. Each click builds frustration, which is worsened when the process isn’t clear. Also, having to guess where to click next is a key element of bad UX. I assume they shared the information in that post hoping to engage their audience and sell some stuff. Clearly, that wasn’t successful, or at least not as successful as it could be.

There are a number of ways that this could’ve been executed better. Now, I understand that Instagram gives you one link. One! And no links in the content are allowed. Plenty of folks have developed solutions, however. The easiest (to me) is linktree. Elegant in it’s simplicity, linktree simply collects your links and serves them up in a clean, clear list. This is a highly used tool: you see it in many profiles. Here’s mine for example.

Another, perhaps slightly more complex solution, is to create a landing page on your site with all the links you reference in your posts. I would itemize them in list, with the dates and post titles and also the images of the Instagram posts to make it very clear which link goes with each post.

Put a little thought into your anticipated user flow, into how you want them to find your information. How easily do you want to make it to buy your stuff? To interact with your latest “thing”? Providing clear calls-to-action, clear directions, and clear paths to finding what they want makes your user experience good and enjoyable. That helps good ol’ conversion, which ensures your project keeps moving. Great things, right?

Communicating The Bare Necessities

Carl Setzer
clear communications

This morning I was talking about the importance of brevity in communication. Elegant prose has its place, of course. But when you’re communicating information, say in a corporate environment, in the blizzard of information that is today’s modern landscape, crisp, clear language is critical. Bullet points, sentence fragments, focus on key elements, don’t bury the lede.

“Wait”, you might say, “isn’t this guy studying web development? Why’s he going on about writing and communication?” Well, remember what purpose a website serves: communication. It’s a delivery mechanism for information. Interactivity, color schemes, layout all need to serve the function of the site. Cool features, in and of themselves, at best are distractions unless they serve the reader/viewer.

So, with that, remember, when it comes to most “business writing”, focus on the bare (bear?) necessities.

https://youtu.be/08NlhjpVFsU 

SEO: Link Building and Establishing Authority

Carl Setzer
SEO

Authority is a key part of evaluating the quality of a site. And inbound links, aka “backlinks” are key parts of how Search engines develop ascertain that authority.  Additionally, Google has confirmed that links are one of the three main elements for determining a site’s ranking. So, earning quality backlinks is extremely valuable in pushing your site up a search engine results page. Search engines evaluate the quality of the referring site as well. One good referral is worth far more than dozens of weak ones. With that, we want to focus on links from sites that will direct high-quality traffic to our site. I think it’s best to find sites that will send users that are highly interested in whatever your site features. If you focus on providing good and interesting content, you will naturally attract good links.

Below are some key best practices, and a few things to avoid.

Let’s start with a list of tactics to avoid:

  • Purchased links
  • Link exchanges or reciprocal linking
  • Google’s specific guidance is to avoid “excessive” link exchange.
  • Low-quality directory links

To end on a positive note, here are some recommended tactics:

  • Earn your links! Good, useful content that adds value
  • Seek to gain links from pages with high-authority
  • You want to increase your backlinks over time
  • They should come from topically relevant sources
  • Make sure you use natural anchor text
  • Publish a blog
  • Create “resource” pages

A Summary Of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines

Carl Setzer
Google Webmaster Tools

One of my assignments this week was to read through the Google Webmaster Guidelines and summarize their general recommendations.

  • Make sure your pages can get links from other pages. You will want to make sure you use crawlable links when you do that, which means using anchor tags (<a> with a href attribute).
  • Create a sitemap and ensure that it has links to all the important pages on the site. They also recommend having this as a “human-readable” list of links for those important pages.
  • Keep the number of links on a page to a “reasonable number”. They recommend “a few thousand at most”, which, to me, seems excessive.
  • Ensure that the hosting server supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, which is what informs the Googlebots when content has been changed since they last visited the page. It’s important as it saves bandwidth and, thus, networking overhead costs.
  • Use the robots.txt file well. It is important to ensure that the web crawler bots are not crawling non-important pages. Besides ensuring the robots.txt file has the right information, you also want to make sure that it is kept up-to-date. Doing these things ensures that your “crawling budget” is utilized well.
  • Another thing that you can do is manually submit your site to Google’s crawlers. This triggers them to head over to your site immediately, as opposed to waiting for it to be discovered crawling other sites.
  • Lastly, you should make sure that administrators of other relevant sites know about yours. Emailing an announcement, or posting such on social media is a great tool towards creating awareness of your site and garnering backlinks.

Design Matters Podcast Featuring Fanny Singer

Carl Setzer
Design Matters With Debbie Millman

I’ve been following Debbie Millman’s “Design Matters” for years (I’ve written about previous episodes before). She’s a brilliant interviewer with a great gift for finding interesting guests. With a focus on creatives and the life of being a creative, I find her guests to be inspiring and fascinating. I love seeing a new podcast in my feed.

Today’s episode features Fanny Singer, author, art historian, and, perhaps, most famous for being the daughter of restauranteur Alice Waters, proprietor of Berkley’s Chez Panisse.

I must confess my ignorance of Dr. Singer, Ms. Waters, and Chez Panisse before today. Even though I have an affinity for Berkeley that started in the mid-80s when I was a music student. One year we went to the West Coast Jazz Festival, hosted by Berkeley. I loved the campus and the city and seriously wanted to head there. But, well, life happened. With all that, I’m disappointed in myself for this ignorance.

I highly recommend taking the time to listen to the podcast. For some reason, the podcast is only showing up on the Design Matters Soundcloud feed. Maybe it just takes some more time to ripple out to iTunes, Google’s Podcasts, etc. But, hey, Soundcloud is awesome!

 

The episode references a few things that I thought I’d add links (for your convenience).

  • Fanny’s Instagram
  • Alice Water’s Instagram 
  • Alice’s Egg Spoon: A classic tool that, well, looks like fun to use. Not cheap, but I’m sure hard-core foodies will find it indispensable.
  • Debbie and Alice discuss the fun cooking videos make together during the pandemic. You can see them on their IGTV channels on Instagram (here are their direct links for your convenience: Fanny & Alice). Also, they put together a few YouTube videos through Knopf’s YouTube Channel. Here are the videos (finding them is a bit of a pain):

Colophon: Dr. Singer’s dissertation focused on the British Pop artist Richard Hamilton, who I hadn’t heard of before this podcast (I learned a lot this one). Their description of him makes me extremely intrigued so I intend to research him further. In particular, his cutting edge computer-generated art seems very intriguing.

 

The Power Of Animation

Carl Setzer

The ability of animated graphics to communicate is powerful. This one shows the evolution of US Death Rates during the evolution of the Covid-19 pandemic, a sobering topic. In just a few moments, it demonstrates the point deeper and richer than a 10 minute PowerPoint could.

Great Design Example: Exquisite Poster

Carl Setzer

I’ve long admired Debbie Millman’s design chops. It was really awesome to see this poster she created for Print Magazine. Its elegance resides in simplicity and clarity. As a fan of Swiss Style as well as the Japanese minimalist ascetic, this really speaks to me.

What do you think?