[thelist] Email vs. E-mail vs. email vs. e-mail

Madhu Menon webguru at vsnl.net
Tue May 21 16:35:01 CDT 2002


At 10:32 PM 5/21/2002, Jonathan wrote:
>Wired thinks it is hyphenated, and goes into great detail about why.
>http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,39450,00.html

Amazingly, they take 3 pages to explain it, the first two of which are a
waste of space and bandwidth.
Verbosity at its worst. Oh, I forgot that they're part of the "split
articles unnecessarily into multiple page so readers see more ads" brigade. :)

I prefer e-mail too, because email looks, well, funny. Of course, now that
it's become a verb, it's not that bad, I guess.


I'd like to share an interesting observation about multi-page stories from
the time I was Webmaster of the now defunct CNET India.

There were many stories that we'd take from the CNET USA site and reproduce
them on the Indian site. Following the US site's convention, we too would
split up our features into multiple pages.

Our stats told us the painful truth. The number of people who'd click to
the next page in a multi-page story would drop by almost 50% for every
extra page we had. So on a 5-page story, only about 6% of the users who
read the first page would actually go all the way to page 5. Unfortunately,
with only minor deviation, this statistic was true for almost *all*
multi-page stories we published, regardless of the content.

We learned our lesson. Since then, we made them all one-page stories.
Traffic went up.

(If anyone would like to respond to the above anecdote, please do change
the subject line :)

Regards,

Madhu

<<<   *   >>>
Madhu Menon
User Experience Consultant
e-mail: webguru at vsnl.net




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