Are your lenses boring?Many Squidoo webmasters go to great lengths to create lenses chock full of information, but many forget about "Entertainment Factor".
A visitor to your lens seeks information, but they don't want to read a book. They want to be entertained. The differenece between a book and the internet is that other than photos and words, it is difficult to add entertainment to a book.
But the internet offers many ways to help you entertain your visitor in ways that books can not. For example, you can not add a video to a book. But you can add a video to your lens. You can not add music to a book. But you can add music to your lens.
Bling can also be used to increase the "entertainment factor" of your lens. To be sure, if used too much or if used wrongly, bling can make your lens look bad. But if used in the right way, a bit of bling can make your lens more interesting and improve the entertainment factor. If your lens combines good information AND entertainment, it can keep your visitor on your page, even if the subject matter is difficult.
There are many sites on the internet that can help you to add a bit of bling to your lens such as Bigoo which has provided the image I used in this post. I have created a lens which reviews some of these sites and gives suggestions on How To Add Bling to your site, blog or Squidoo Lens.
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Really good post with basic but often overlooked advice. I'm going to go check out Bigoo; I love the image in this post!
ReplyDeleteIt's good to dress up lenses a bit, but graphics that move are often very distracting. Once I read through the first paragraph of this post, I scrolled that animated guy off the top of the screen to eliminate the distraction. Any animation can distract from text. To me, too much always tells me the person who created the lens, page, post, etc. is more interested in calling attention to themselves than to what they have to say.
ReplyDeleteThe nice thing about videos is they just sit there until the reader chooses to activate them, and sometimes even the static image is a good graphic. When the reader chooses, not when someone else chooses, the video can be watched.
The same applies to audio, which is so easy to misuse. I've visited sites and left very quickly because of intrusive audio, where the person making the page foisted music on me without regard to whether or not I might already be listening to music of my own choosing.
It's really a matter of personal taste, mine and the visitor's. Some "blings" might truly enhance a lens viewing, others might distract. For instance, in a "slap stick"-type humorous lens, a bunch of silly GIFs might be appropriate; not so much on a page about all my murdered in-laws. Unless I want to distract from all the suspicion falling on me...
ReplyDeleteI just placed a row of "beating hearts" letters saying "I love you" on my lens "My Wife - My Superhero". It's tacky as hell, but she went "Aaaawww...". :-)
Agreeing with Moby - less could be more.
I also agree that Bling can be overdone and I too find that little guy in the post distracting. I can not imagine that I would actually use him in a lens. He certainly is eye catching though.
ReplyDeleteBut in the lens about Bling, I left two examples of other lenses where I think I effectively used Bling. Please have a look at those examples and let me know if you think that they were effective or not. I would love to see your comments about those on the Bling lens.
I like one small animation like the one you've used, but a line of dancing babies, and those cursor-powered graphics that follow you around on websites are a bit much, I think.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to check out Bigoo. I'm always on the lookout for something unique.