After my review of SEO Slides (they’re pie, not cake), someone remarked to me that my slide decks are useless because I don’t put all the information on the slides. They pointed out, correctly, that my slides are image heavy with, at most, a couple lines of text (with one notable exception: WordCamp Chicago 2012), except my ‘Who am I?’ slide. I told them “Yes, this is true.” and then Tweeted about it.
My belief (and this is shared by a lot of people) is that slides should accent and relate to my talk. If you just need to read the slides to get all the information, why am I there? Coming to a live presentation to just watch someone reading off slides seems counter intuitive to me. Heck. I could go pester my coworker and get the studies showing that when you have a slide with a lot of text, people read the text, then look at you. That means that they aren’t listening until they read, and if, when they’re done, they come to find you’re just reading what they read? They’re probably bored.
When I give a presentation, it’s usually on a topic I’ve written about before. Actually, that’s generally how I decide what I want to talk about! I picked “Don’t use WordPress Multisite” for WordCamp SF 2013 because it is still, to this day, the most popular post on my site. And it’s my most popular presentation. Some may ask “Why would you give a presentation on something I could read?”
People learn in different ways. I, personally, suck at learning from videos. However I learn well from presentations in person, where someone talks to the room, pays attention to our energy, and teaches, using the slides as an emphasis. I also learn well from a written post. Finally, I learn best by doing things. So for me, if I’m blowing up a site, it means I’m learning in a speed unparalleled. There’s a converse to this, and if I hit a blocker were I can’t do something, I get really upset.
What does this have to do with slides and why mine are mostly pretty pictures with a sentence for emphasis? I don’t write my slides to be a transcript because I’m going to write a much longer blog post on the topic, with the same pictures probably, if I haven’t already. So for the person who wants to read the content, I’ll have you covered. And for the person who wants to be inspired by looking at slides? Well I have that. Finally for the person who wants to watch a video, WordCamp does that for me, thankfully.
This is not a perfect system, of course. Like I said, people learn in different ways, so there’s probably someone out there who loves slideshows of text on pictures who is grumpy. They probably also like infographics. Which I don’t. You see a trend here? I don’t like getting my information from pictures. Because of that I suck at writing them, so I just don’t.
Meanwhile another store sells cows. All the cows live at Persephone, and are shipped out to Jiangyin and other stores. They’re doing well with everyone going to cowship.com, but they too want to have jiangyin.cowship.com and so on. Each store lists what cows are for sale that live well in each location because Holsteins’ don’t like Bellerophon, who knew? This way, someone on Jiangyin can order Holsteins but not Texas Longhorns. Obviously they need to control which product can be sold at each location, same as the Dollhouse, but they also have a different problem. Their product amounts must also be stored in one location and shipped out from there, so they want to make sure they don’t oversell their cows.
Because the core team who wrote the update script learned from their mistakes in the past. The changes made in WordPress may be bold and large, but they’re also done carefully. Instead of just saying ‘What’s done gets into the new version,’ 3.7 took the ‘feature teams’ trend started a few releases back to the next level. Only if the feature was done-done did it get into 3.7. This meant that while we did not have a major ‘feature’ this release (like we did with the Media Release in 3.5), we had the opportunity to make each feature rock solid on it’s own. And this worked better than many expected because of “features as plugins.”
Next I customize my ‘publicize’ lede. This has to be good and it has to be short. I know I’m using my helf.us yourls, so the URL itself will be tiny, but that doesn’t mean I should use just my title for Twitter. I customize it, trying to make it a little more witty and pithy, to reflect me and my readers. Finally I customize my excerpt. Oh yes, my excerpts are all custom written, and they are intended to grab you hard. Like Yoast, I feel the only well written description is a hand written one, and I do it. For everything.
