When Cute Site Names Go Wrong OR Why You Should Test Your Ideas with Broad Demographic Audiences

HuffingtonPost.com debuted a redesign earlier this week that incorporates a “Digg”-esque feature, where logged-in members can vote on stories, indicating if one is of interest to them. The most popular stories appear in a special section of the site.

This model works very well on websites; users like to know what others are reading.

But HuffingtonPost.com chose an unfortunate name for this new feature: “Huff It” (huffit.huffingtonpost.com).

“Huffing” is slang for inhaling intoxicants like glue, paint or aerosol products. Gasoline, lighter fluid, and paint thinner are other common items that get “huffed.” [wiki]

This unfortunately renders much of the new functionality on HuffingtonPost.com rather humorous: “Register or sign in below to start huffing!”

Screenshots

Take Home Message

Cutesy abbreviations for site functionality can confuse readers. In a worst-case scenario, you may unintentionally be incorporating slang into your redesign. Testing your designs out with a broad demographic group is one way to make sure this doesn’t happen to your latest site feature.

More web.aan.org on Arianna Huffington

Illustration by Ben Millen, arcticsounds.com

“Is it Ginger or MaryAnn?” Arianna Huffington rhetorically asks the audience at the 2007 American Society of Newspaper Editors [ASNE] Convention during a panel entitled “Lessons from the Digital Revolution.” The panel was filled with top execs and writers from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post - and the conversation turned to Arianna’s theory of web publishing promiscuity.

“I say, let’s have a three way!” she flamboyantly declares.

Visuals aside, Huffington is addressing one of the major issues in digital publishing: whether to restrict all of one’s content to an individual website - or whether to permit cross-publishing or cross-posting.

Cross-publishing is the practice of allowing other websites to re-print the full text of your content (text, images, etc.) with full attribution to the original author/publication and a link to the original source.

Advocates believe that publishing their content on other websites exposes their work to wider audiences, and drives traffic back to their site when interested readers click to read more.

Detractors prefer to publish all of their content solely on their own site, both to build up their paper’s site as a destination, and in order to sell ads around that content.

HuffingtonPost.com co-founder Kenneth Lere echoed Huffington’s proclamation by stating that “Ubitioquity is the new exclusivity” and that is “the way we manage our business” at the HuffPo.

Perhaps predictably, Donald Graham, CEO/chairman of the Washington Post Co., is not an advocate of web publishing promiscuity, stating: “No newspaper or one site will do everything in this time, but what the Post can do that is special is to produce something that people want to come back to.”

Read Editor & Publisher’s coverage of the same session

What does this mean for alts?

The cross-publishing debate is a massive one - especially for alt-papers. On the one hand, there is the opportunity to gain new audiences through links. On the other hand, there is the potential loss of traffic-based ad revenue and loss of branding identity.

Here in the AAN offices, I had a healthy debate with a staffer about the promiscuity theory. What’s your take?