OK you do need SEO and usability. But find out why you really need to invest in a good writer.

Chris and I were chatting and he threw me this comment today:

Nobody reads anything from usability experts. Especially programmers. Some day our field will be taken more seriously. For now, it’s an after-thought.

On the contrary, I think usability and beautiful design have gained momentum recently, and web firms are taking these things much more seriously than they were five or six years ago. What we really need to shift our focus to is content. No, I don’t mean Information Architecture. Leave that in the SEO & Usability camp, too. I’m talking about writing. Usability adoption and understanding still has a long way to go, but now we need to go adopt its orphaned cousin, content writing, and bring it along for the ride.

The fact of the matter is: If your content is good enough, people will take the time to learn how to use your shitty site to read more of it.

Example: www.sheldonbrown.com is the most popular web site for bicycle information among bicycle enthusiasts worldwide. Look at the web site. It has terrible design, a poor structure and inconsistent navigation menus. It truly lacks all the essentials to what we in the web industry would judge as esthetically pleasing design and architecture.

The late Sheldon Brown didn’t buy Adwords campaigns. He didn’t have PPC (pay-per-click) accounts. He didn’t know a damn thing about Search Engine Optimization. He never hired a web designer, an SEO consultant or a marketing agency.

Sheldon Brown knew about bikes, which makes his web site the best resource for cyclists at any difficultly level.

Don’t buy into the tricks and promises of SEO work alone. You can fool Google and Yahoo into listing you at the top, but you’ll never fool people. Machines recognize patterns and play along to the rules of an algorithm (which, remember, is written and rewritten daily to emulate human behavior). But people are emotional, irrational and impulsive. People have short attention spans. Humans still need an interesting headline. They don’t care about your keyword density.

If you can’t write something people actually want to read, all your SEO, usability studies, information architecture and beautiful design flies right out the window.

Start with a good headline. What was true in print design on newspapers hundreds of years ago is still true today. You have to grab the reader in the first sentence. Regardless of how well you did on Google, people still have to be intrigued by your title.

Write with conversational tone. Business2Business, Business2Customer. It doesn’t matter. Write with a natural voice in human language that common people understand. Don’t overdo it with technical words and exceptional vocabulary. Send your content around the office. If most people get stuck on the words, make them simpler, smaller and use less of them.

Poke a little fun at yourself. Don’t be afraid to inject some humor and playfulness into your writing. It makes your content easier to digest and can get people feeling good about contacting you for business.

Invest in the community, not just campaigns and charts. Google analytics and PPC charts and graphs can never teach you what your customers can. Start a conversation with them, find out what they think about this or that, find ways for them to get involved and show you what you’ve missed.

Write about things you care about because they matter to you, too. Don’t pick topics that are trendy, cool, or because you can “monetize” them (worst new word in the web industry, by the way). If you stay engaged in the things that are important to you, what you have passion for, you will attract more people like you. You will get more customers who are like you.

Business doesn’t have to be just about money. Of course, revenue and profit are important. But business can revolve around things you genuinely care about, too. Think about how you can have fun and do what you love now, rather than putting it off until retirement. Thanks to the age of the internet, there’s all sorts of ways that you can turn what you love into a profitable business and have some great conversations with people.

There is no easy over-night answer. You can’t flip a switch and magically get countless people visiting your site over and over again. You have to participate, engage and inspire others in your community. You’ll have to make comments on other blogs and forums, appear at public events, speaking engagements and conferences. But this means you’ll attract others who are like you and care about your business, too.

This is in contrast to haplessly attracting mindless internet searchers who will take the first decent result they see. Of course, you want to get them, too. And you will, but this time with much better content that keeps them coming back for more.

Write for humans and hire a good HTML developer who can code for machines.

When I saw the Microsoft Surface Demo I was saying things like “wow…very impressive!” and “oh…that’s cool” It wasn’t necessarily groundbreaking as many of the ideas of the touch interface are also employed in technology like the iPhone, the pinch and zoom in particular. But it was very impressive when you could drag photos from one camera to another simply by placing the camera on the table. I’m not sure how often that feature might get used on a day to day basis but it sure makes photo transfers a snap when you need it.

The most useful demo was setting down a credit card and then dragging your meals to it on the touch screen surface. This solves a real efficiency problem in restaurants making it very streamlined in how you select and pay for your meal especially amongst a group of people. This was an example of a technology solving a problem or doing a process better. 2 points Microsoft.

However it is not without potential downfalls. It would fit very nicely into markets like sport restaurants or casinos, but I can’t imagine having this screen throwings ads at my face while I eat at the Olive Garden or my local quiet restaurant. And you know they’re going to run a ton of ads on it and while I’m eating and I certainly don’t want a light up display under me advertising the latest special on mozerella sticks at Chili’s. I already go to the movies and have to sit through TV commercials and a slide show of loud ads before the movie even starts. This Surface technology could be more of the same, and please oh please don’t have it make sounds at me too. We learned that lesson with noisy flashy websites. Aren’t we already overly video/audio bombarded in society? Remember Minority Report?

Tom Cruise annoys me enough let alone this potential marketing dystopia. The idea of successful technology is something that goes beyond being cool or flashy. Apple has recognized the idea of finding niches and doing things better in those niches to serve it’s users. Apple saw the mp3 player and knew it could do it better, they saw the cell phone and knew there was a better solution. I’m not sure if Surface is identifying anything that’s being done poorly besides the bill paying solution to warrant a business investment for it’s price but it raises some interesting new ideas. As the cost of the technology comes down it just may find some useful niches. If not then it just may become more flashy noise in already over stimulated world.

David from 37signals had this to say, during their live Q&A session, about why they don’t list their big name clients on their web site:

(paraphrasing, mind you) “We care about the small teams within those companies and the thousands of other small companies using our software. We don’t feel the need to brag about the size of our clients.”

Personally, I don’t see the value in showing off your client list as a sales tool. The potential customer cares about their project, not someone else’s. Maybe some of you will say that a case study or portfolio might give them an insight into what kind of work we do, and influence them to buy. And maybe some of you are right sometimes.

I say that being personable, genuine, caring and passionate about the work that you do will drive the right customers into your office. You can tout statistics, testimonials and corporate buzz words like “e-business” all day. But unless you can relate to the person that represents your potential sale, build trust and communicate how much you care about their business, you’ll either get no sale or an unsatisfying, uncooperative working relationship.

So, focus your time and energy on caring about the sort of people you want to work for. 37signals gains its success by caring about small teams and businesses, the kind of people they want to work for.