Louisa Guise's Blog, page 7

Why you shouldn’t use Word to do Graphic Design

Creating documents is central to every role I’ve ever had as a Digital Communications Professional. Colleagues also want something they can edit. It has to be in Word – they insist. Understandable. But they also want pages and pages of elaborate text, with images and graphics and borders.

I, the Communications Professional, try. I put it together. It is fiddly and not easy. I pass it to Colleague. Colleague passes it back. The images have slipped, the page numbers don’t add up, there’s a rogue page and the text has broken!

Nightmare!

The cycle repeats as the colleagues edit the document one by one. There’s a reason for this – Word was not conceived to do this job. It is not graphic design software.

You can be forgiven for thinking that Word can create brochures and booklets and other fancy documents. Word has become more intuitive in recent years. It is easier to save images in a document as images (right-click and save) than it used to be. It has more visual options. When you open it there are templates suggested for you to use.

I’ll let you in on a little secret – these pre-configured templates were hardcoded in XML (a coding language, a bit like HTML but for print). You will tear your hair out trying to get the same result from scratch in Word – or keep passing it back to your Digital Marketer.

What about PowerPoint?

Like Word, PowerPoint can produce some cool effects. You can also animate and there is flexibility to move images and text or create images by building up smaller shapes. But again, PowerPoint is not graphic design software, it was not created to allow users to make elaborate graphics (although the ability to save as different file types has improved).

PowerPoint was created to replace the overhead projector. Remember, that clunky lightbox that used to be a mainstay of school assemblies and business meetings? Word likewise was created off the back of the typewriter. Have a look at the image below, you might see these programmes a little differently.

PowerPoint WordWhat should be used for larger, fancier documents?

Adobe leads the way with its very established InDesign being the industry standard – top magazines are produced using this programme, and I used it back in my Monarch days to create the Cosmos and Monarch Holiday brochures. I haven’t found anything that is quite the same and also free (comment below if you have!), although market-leader Canva isn’t far behind.

Once you get used to this software, you won’t want to create aesthetically pleasing documents with Word or PowerPoint again. InDesign has smart guides to help you place images and text precisely and line elements up easily. PowerPoint by comparison is clunky and not easy to line up – the boxes that hold text also contain excess space which makes compositions difficult. Images can also be easily resized so that they are not skewed, and every detail can be precisely customised.

To further enhance and create images, it’s rare to have Adobe on your computer without its siblings Photoshop and Illustrator (it is cheaper to have the entire package). If you don’t have Adobe, our friend Canva can also handle images as can the open-source programme Gimp, Photoshop’s free cousin.

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Disclaimer: This is not a paid promotion; I am simply discussing the differences between the different software that I use day-to-day as a Digital Communications Professional.

Image credits: Daria Kraplak (typewriter) and mailer_diablo (projector) and Theme Photos (graphic design title image)

SEO for beginners

If writing is an art form, writing for the web is carefully carving the sculpture. If you want to push for a place on that all-essential Google first page, you have to follow the crowd and write in a way which people would google - and not the other way round. This is where SEO comes in.

Let me explain...

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What is SEO?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the art of matching words, terms and phrases on your site, document or social media account with words, terms and phrases that people in the real world would actually search for.

Why is SEO important?

When a web search happens, it might look like magic, but behind the facade a crawler, or bot, (aka the code that runs upon the instruction to search for a relevant website) trawls through millions of websites listed on a search engine like Google and tries to find the site or sites that most closely match what the user wants.

And it makes sense, think about it, when Michael Jackson sadly died, and you might have wanted to find some information about his death, or his life, did you google "Wacko Jacko pops his clogs" or did you google something like "Michael Jackson death"? If the search engine didn't retrieve the results that the user was looking for, it wouldn't be active for very long.

How does it work in practice?

The image above (credit: Jack Barber from the Building Stronger Partners Blog, 2010) shows the ideal SEO layout.

- Spread two or three keywords  across your body text, ensuring that the text still reads well.

- Ensure your headings, meta data (the text you see in the search engine), alt text and any attached files such as images or documents all contain the same relavent keywords.

- Don't overuse your keywords

The bots have become more intelligent in recent years and can better recognise the topic of a page by evaluating its content as a whole, but choosing two or three keywords to focus on can help gain those all-important page rankings.

How do I find SEO keywords for my website?

To find the best SEO keywords for your website, first think logically - remember, "Wacko Jacko pops his clogs" vs. "Michael Jackson death".

What would you search for?

You can get some ideas by starting to type your search suggestion into the search engine search bar - but it's best to use a web browser that you wouldn't normally use because the data stored in your normal browser can skew the results.

You can use the keyword planner in Google ads to get ideas for SEO keywords related to your content, and in Google Analytics you can see the keywords which have brought users to your website. This can help you understand if a keyword you want to rank for is working, or if your users are pointing you to a new keyword which might deserve its own page or section on your site in its own right. To learn more about Google Anaytics take the free Google Analytics courses on Skillshop.

There are other platforms such as Adobe Analytics which can be used in place of Google, and many CMS' such as Wordpress also include their own inbuilt analytics tools.

And finally...

I hope this post gave you a good idea about what SEO is and how to get started. Subscribe to All about digital marketing for more digital marketing information, tips and tricks.

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How to set up a Word document

Setting up Microsoft Word is the basic requirement of most office-based jobs, including Digital Marketing. However it might surprise you to learn that I am always being asked how to do this. Below is a short video, using a beloved story, as a guide for one easy way to set up Microsoft Word documents. The presentation was originally put together to demonstrate how to set up Word documents accessibly, but the bonus is that by doing this your word document will be easier to compile overall, especially if it’s a large document.

In the video presentation below (this paragraph - ironically I am unable to label the video or insert a caption or alt text) I talk you through the basics - setting up headers and body text and using the ribbon to style them, linking urls to text, how to insert, caption and describe images with alt text, how to space your document, insert tables optimally and check everything at the end.

Enjoy.

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