Monday, June 27, 2005
Going offline for a week
Sadly, I will be offline for the week. My father-in-law is on life support after another problem that left him unable to breathe. My mother-in-law is adjusting to the nursing home, being unable to take care of herself. So my wife Joanne and I are going there for what will likely be the last time she sees her father and a visit with a mother who no longer recognizes anyone.
I won't have access to the Internet while we're there, but plan to get back to this blog sometime over the weekend, after we have done what we can there. I look forward to sharing my thoughts about starting a business online with you after I get back, but right now, family responsibilities take precedence. Have a good week!
Jeff
Sadly, I will be offline for the week. My father-in-law is on life support after another problem that left him unable to breathe. My mother-in-law is adjusting to the nursing home, being unable to take care of herself. So my wife Joanne and I are going there for what will likely be the last time she sees her father and a visit with a mother who no longer recognizes anyone.
I won't have access to the Internet while we're there, but plan to get back to this blog sometime over the weekend, after we have done what we can there. I look forward to sharing my thoughts about starting a business online with you after I get back, but right now, family responsibilities take precedence. Have a good week!
Jeff
Sunday, June 26, 2005
Favorite free tools
It's time for the second installment of my Sunday feature on favorite free web tools. This time we turn to tools for evaluating your writing.
We-We Monitor
You've got to love a company with a sense of humor, and Future Now, Inc., certainly has one. Their Customer Focus Calculator (or We-We Monitor, as they affectionately call it) scans your page to evaluate how well your writing focuses on your customers and not on yourself.
It's easy to fall into the trap of writing about our products and our experience and our philosophy—and it's about as effective of a way to make a sale as dumping a bucket of lukewarm water on each customer would be. People don't come to your site to hear about you. They come to see if you solve their problems. And you don't do that by focusing on yourself.
The We-We Monitor lets you enter any URL into it and then spits back a report that lets you know whether your page is acceptably customer-focused or ineffectively self-focused.
It's a great check on your writing and always puts a smile on my face when I use it.
The Bullfighter
Another playfully named tool is The Bullfighter. It works a little differently from the We-We Monitor in that it doesn't go out to your website to read your writing; you bring the writing to it. This means you can use it also for non-web writing, too.
Just copy and paste up to 20,000 characters into the box and it will give you a report on your writing's readability. It flags verbosity, prolixity and formalistic grammatical constructions. (In other words, it tells you when you use the kind of formal mumbo-jumbo like the previous sentence that can easily sedate your reader into a coma.)
Run an occasional bit of your writing through The Bullfighter and see where you can improve. (Just for fun, I ran this blog entry through it. It gave me a high grade, but warned me of the presence of some unnecessarily long words in it. Hmmm. There must have been some verbosity, prolixity and formalistic grammatical constructions in it somewhere.)
At any rate, I recommend both of these free tools to help you improve your writing.
Jeff
It's time for the second installment of my Sunday feature on favorite free web tools. This time we turn to tools for evaluating your writing.
We-We Monitor
You've got to love a company with a sense of humor, and Future Now, Inc., certainly has one. Their Customer Focus Calculator (or We-We Monitor, as they affectionately call it) scans your page to evaluate how well your writing focuses on your customers and not on yourself.
It's easy to fall into the trap of writing about our products and our experience and our philosophy—and it's about as effective of a way to make a sale as dumping a bucket of lukewarm water on each customer would be. People don't come to your site to hear about you. They come to see if you solve their problems. And you don't do that by focusing on yourself.
The We-We Monitor lets you enter any URL into it and then spits back a report that lets you know whether your page is acceptably customer-focused or ineffectively self-focused.
It's a great check on your writing and always puts a smile on my face when I use it.
The Bullfighter
Another playfully named tool is The Bullfighter. It works a little differently from the We-We Monitor in that it doesn't go out to your website to read your writing; you bring the writing to it. This means you can use it also for non-web writing, too.
Just copy and paste up to 20,000 characters into the box and it will give you a report on your writing's readability. It flags verbosity, prolixity and formalistic grammatical constructions. (In other words, it tells you when you use the kind of formal mumbo-jumbo like the previous sentence that can easily sedate your reader into a coma.)
Run an occasional bit of your writing through The Bullfighter and see where you can improve. (Just for fun, I ran this blog entry through it. It gave me a high grade, but warned me of the presence of some unnecessarily long words in it. Hmmm. There must have been some verbosity, prolixity and formalistic grammatical constructions in it somewhere.)
At any rate, I recommend both of these free tools to help you improve your writing.
Jeff
© 2005, 2006, 2007 Jeff Baas, One Stop Web Support
