About Talia Whyte

Posts by Talia Whyte:

Time To Do a Spring Content Audit

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The Web Design ProcessSpring is here, and it is time to do some cleaning, and I am not just talking about around your house.  Now is a great time to do an inventory on your online presence by doing a content audit.

What is a content audit?

No, a content audit has nothing to do with your taxes.  Rather, it is an inventory check of the content on your website, social media or other online platforms.

Why would I want to do a content audit?

The main purpose of having a content strategy is to make sure the information you are presenting online is consistent with your organizational messaging and brand identity.  It’s a good idea to do audits to keep your content on point.

What things should I be looking for in a content audit?

This depends largely on what the goals are behind your content strategy.  An audit can be an inventory of your whole website, or certain parts of it.  Some audits might just look at the effectiveness of your email newsletter or social media strategies.  There is also something called content sampling, where you randomly select content on your website to review.

How exactly do you conduct a content audit?

In the simplest fashion by using a spreadsheet, a basic audit for a website will include columns for the following: Page Title, Page URL, Keywords/SEO, Description, Date Published and Audit Date.  There you want to go through your website and fill in the rows with the metrics you are auditing. If you use a web traffic reporting tool like Google Analytics or Hootsuite, you would need to match the traffic with the pages.

You will spend your time reviewing the conversion rates and content for your pages on the spreadsheet.  Specifically:

  1. What are the web pages or links with the most or least traffic?
  2. Are images easy to view and tagged correctly?  
  3. Is your content up to date?
  4. Are pages meeting the standards for web accessibility?
  5. Are blog posts written with proper grammar and appropriately embedded SEO keywords?  
  6. Do you need a redesign of your website?
  7. Are your email and social media outreach consistent with content posted on your website?   
  8. Can some content be repurposed on other platforms?  
  9. Should you stop using a certain platform if it isn’t giving you the needed results?
  10. Etc… other content questions specific to your audit

Now would be a good time to correct and/or delete any content that no longer serve your purposes. Depending on how much content you are reviewing, like a website with hundreds or even thousands of pages, the process might take a while and you will need to get your co-workers or colleagues to help you.

How often should I do a content audit?

It depends on what your content strategy looks like.  Most people do it quarterly or annually to coincide with company financial and marketing reporting.  Others do it monthly or even weekly.  No matter how often you do an audit, it is always a good idea to review how your content strategy is working for you.

I still need help with doing a content audit

You can contact me or my staff at Global Wire Design about getting further assistance with a content strategy and audit or web design and marketing support.  We are hosting an “Extreme Website Makeover” on 14 May where we will showcase a “before and after” of two websites we redesigned recently.   Space is limited and priority will be given to current and past GWA clients, so sign up now at info(at)globalwireonline(dot)org.  

Why Creating Your Own Book Club is Great!

knowledge-1052010_640Between running my various business ventures and taking care of my household, I am constantly juggling a very busy schedule. However, I always look for ways to have some down time, like jogging or doing yoga. As you may have guessed if you have been reading this blog long enough, I like to read a lot as well. I try to read three or four books a month.

About six years ago I started a book club with some of my bibliophile friends who also have busy lives and wanted to find an outlet to participate in a fun, shared activity. The club is still going strong for many reasons:

Bringing diverse people together: All the club members come from a wide variety of life experiences and have different perspectives and opinions on topics, which make the book conversations more interesting. There are currently seven people in the club, which is a good number to have for discussions.

Meeting time and place: About half of my club live locally, while the other half live in other parts of the country. A couple of new members live in Europe and West Africa. Because of this, we do a lot of video conferencing for our monthly meetings via Google Hangout. For those of us locally, we usually rotate meeting at someone’s home and the host provides a computer for video conferencing and food.

Book choices: At the end of each meeting, we all present books we would like to read to each other and then vote on the book to read for next month. We like to read a wide variety of books. The only criteria is that they have to be thought-provoking, informative and takes us out of our comfort zone. We are all history buffs and political junkies, so most of our book choices tend to be nonfiction works dealing with history, current events and international affairs. Recent books have included Ta-Nahesi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and Malala Yousafzai’s I Am Malala, and Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.

Reading habits: We agreed at the beginning that we should finish reading the books before the meetings so the discussions will be more enriching. But sometimes life happens and we can’t always finish the chosen book. We are okay with non-finishers, as long as they have read enough of the book to participate in part of the discussion.
Participation: We ask that all members tell the group at meetings what their reading experience was like and discuss specific themes and passages from the book. They should take about at least one thing they learned or took away from the book. We also want members to ask each other questions that don’t just generate yes or no answers. We really want to dive into the book with serious consideration.

Respect: Differences in opinions can lead to some heated discussions. So we have a rule to respect everyone’s opinion, no matter how much we disagree.

Keep notes: Every meeting someone is designated to take notes on what was said during the meeting – plot summaries, discussion highlights, and members’ opinions. I like reviewing notes because sometimes people say things I wouldn’t have thought of on my own.

I have learned so much from the book club over the year, chief among them, how to be a better critical reader. Being in the book club has also helped me reduce stress, by allowing me to take myself out of my head for a couple hours a month.

This is a great social activity for those of you that like intellectual stimulation. If you don’t want to start your own book club, there are many clubs already in existence both online and in your community that you can join today!

Who is Fela Kuti?

felaI was at my friend’s dinner party last Saturday night, and the music of the late, great Fela Kuti started playing on the sound system.  Of course, everyone started grooving to it!  However, one of my friend’s relatives who was at the dinner asked what is this song and who sings it.  I told him it was Water Got No Enemy by Fela Kuti.  Then he said who is Fela Kuti.

Everyone looked at him in shock!  But then we realized that he was younger than us, so it is possible for him to not know anything about this wonderful Nigerian musical genius.  (He is a millennial who listens to 2 Chainz)  We proceeded to give him a brief primer on Kuti’s life, music and politics.

I was actually intending on writing a longer blog post in the near future about his political writing.  Back in the 1970s, he wrote a column called “Chief Priest Says” for a couple of newspapers in Nigeria.  The column topics ranged from religion, government corruption, sex (or misogyny), and Western cultural imperialism.   His columns abruptly stopped getting published in the newspapers, possibly because of censorship by the Nigerian government.  Lucky for me, I have a friend in Nigeria who acquired many of his old columns for me and I will be delving into them and writing about his columns in the near future.

In the meantime, if you haven’t heard of Fela Kuti’s music, then you are really missing out on life. Enjoy!

On Civility and Presidential Politics

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Donald_TrumpI have to say that this presidential election cycle has been a mess, to say it delicately.  I have never seen so much incivility among the candidates and their supporters before, namely from the Trump campaign.  I think it speaks more to the current state of American culture.

I will say upfront that I am a supporter of Hillary Clinton.  I also support many of the principles that Bernie Sanders has presented, which, I think, will help Clinton be a better president.  With that said, if either Clinton or Sanders were engaging in the type of toxic rhetoric Donald Trump was doing, I would be calling them out too.

With him saying that Mexicans are rapists, all Muslims should be banned from this country, and numerous verbal assaults on women, I really don’t think Trump is actually a racist, a xenophobe or a misogynist.  He is even worse.  Trump has always been an opportunist first, and will say and do what he needs to say and do to get attention.  In this election, his behavior is no different, except that his potential presidential victory could be very dangerous for the country, from both a domestic and international policy perspective.

There are many factors to why Trump is doing so well at the primaries so far.  Some of them include traditional Republicans who are disillusioned by the GOP “establishment” and other people who are simply unhappy about the direction the Obama administration has taken this country.  

But let’s be real here: a good number of Trump supporters are only voting for him because of his celebrity, not necessarily for his political acumen or success in business.  A couple of weeks ago during the first Super Tuesday, I was watching the news and a reporter interviewed a voter as he was leaving the voting area.  The reporter asked him who he voted for and why.  

“I voted for Donald Trump because I like how he ran the Apprentice show, and that is how he should run America,” he said.

Are you kidding me?

Welcome to the new America, where low-information voters are now mainstream and acceptable.  What amazes me more is that this guy doesn’t seem to realize that The Apprentice might be a reality show, but, like almost all reality shows today, is scripted.  But this comes as no surprise when 10 percent of American college graduates think Judge Judy is on the Supreme Court, and it is totally acceptable to believe everything you see in Google search results, especially among his supporters and Trump himself.    

Because he knows that many Americans today don’t invest in basic civics education and are not getting most of their news from anywhere beyond what they see on TMZ or People magazine, it seems like Trump is using this to his advantage to rally support.  This is most likely why when he is in debates or speaking at his rallies, his policy positions lack any substance.  I have even taken the time to read up on his policy “positions” on his website, which all look like smoke and mirrors.  Immigration: build a wall?  Terrorism: ban all Muslims?  Immigration, terrorism and a plethora of other pressing issues can’t be solved with simplistic solutions.

Thank goodness for great people like John Oliver who keep it real on Trump’s sham Great Wall of Mexico.

What makes this worse is that a good deal of Trump supporters are openly bigoted.  There are known KKK members and white power supporters who are actively campaigning for Trump.  This is 2016 and we are still talking about Hitler, Nazis and fascists?

Lets not forget Trump was the instigator of the birther movement against President Obama and more recently Ted Cruz.

As a result, we are starting to see all this violence at his rallies, and Trump seems to be okay with violence against anti-Trump supporters and reporters.

For the last few days I have been talking to friends and colleagues around the world and they can’t believe this is going on in America.  One of my good friends Kofi from Ivory Coast told me in an email that the United States no longer has a right to criticize “backwards elections in third world countries since it now seems hypocritical.”

He’s right.  The United States used to be a standard bearer of political civility, and now that is going to the wayside.

This is a very scary time to be living in, and I am very fearful for our country’s future.   

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