The Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page is the red-hair stepsister of most websites… a place to cram all the information you couldn’t fit anywhere else (and that you want people to stop bothering you about). I’m here to say that if you do treat your FAQ page that way, you’re missing a great opportunity to communicate your message, and connect with your customers.
To write an effective FAQ page, treat it as another dynamic connection point with your customers - a place not only to disperse important information, but to get to what’s really important… communicating who you are, and what you do.
Here are a few tips to help you do so:
- When you give answers to questions, speak not only to to what, but why. For example, if you have a certain policy that effects your users, tell them what it is, and then tell them why you have it. If you do this, you’ll provide more context to not only help your customers better understand your policy, but also understand the company culture that produced it.
- Answer questions directly and casually. Just because you’re providing important information, and just because you’re answering questions that aren’t being asked right now, doesn’t mean you can’t answer them like you’re talking directly to a human. Answer them that directly, and your answers will be more clear, and you’ll establish a friendly, conversational tone (that will payoff on other pages).
- Have fun with it. People are expecting a dry, fact-based presentation. Why not surprise them? Go ahead and ask youself: “Jeez… it seems like you guys really rock. Is that correct?” Or go ahead and answer a Frequently Asked Question about your taste in Ice Cream (if not women). Let your personality shine through, and give your customers a chance to connect over a laugh.
Take another look at your FAQ page… and ask if it’s really serving your website (and not just dragging it down). If it’s the later, take a try at rewriting it, and try out some of the ideas here.
YOUR INPUT: Did you find this helpful? Do these tips apply to your FAQ… or is your company an exception in some way? Did I miss any important points here?
{ 7 comments }
Intense Debate commenting system - FAIL
by brianlburns on 1 January 2009
in FAIL, commenting, startups
The headline says a lot. But let me start off by writing this - I like a lot of what Intense Debate is doing… they’re a Boulder company (part of the Techstars incubator program), and as far as I’ve seen, they’re good guys. They’ve gotten some good attention, got acquired by Automattic, and even do a decent job with support (follow @mkoening to see what I mean). There’s a lot to like.
And I do want to like them. I want threaded comments to work, whether they come from Intense Debate, from their main competition, Disqus, or from someone else altogether. The point of comments in general is to use one-on-one interaction to build a community around your blog - it only makes sense to build the comment structure to reflect (and encourage) that.
However, while I want threaded comments to work, I’m seeing that the reality of an effective system for having them might be a little way off. The recent case of my blog redesign serves as good enough evidence why. Here’s the story:
I used Intense Debate here, for the 4 or so months before the recent redesign. I liked the system, I liked how it fit into my style, and I didn’t ask it to do a lot. When I redid the blog, though, I needed to some different things - I wanted a cleaner look, and I wanted the plugin to appear only on pages where comments were enabled (which seems like a valid request).
I got in touch with Michael, and though he was helpful, it became clear to me that I was on my own - I would have to do the customizations myself. With my own code. Which is fine, really… I don’t mind that too much. But I also didn’t want to spend a ton of time on it. So I decided to go with a standard system.
The problem with that, I learned, was that my comments from the last few months weren’t stored with my blog content, but in the Intense Debate system. They were gone. If I wanted them back, I had to reactivate Intense Debate, import them, then Deactivate it again. After 2 plugin upgrades and 8 hours of importing (which was still in progress at that point), I gave up. I moved on, without my comments in tow, which is why you don’t see any on any post for the last few months (which sucks).
To me, that’s an Intense Debate FAIL. I’m ok, albeit bummed, with the fact that their user interface is so inflexible. But the fact that they basically own your content, and make you go through that interface to get it back, is just silly.
Until they make the system and its workings more accessible to the average blogger (a person who is not going to spend a day custom-coding their commenting system to make sure it fits their blog design), Intense Debate is going to have problems making the jump from early adopters to universally adopted.
Maybe Disqus can do better. Or maybe, with Wordpress integration, Intense Debate can do better. Maybe it’ll be someone new. Either way though, I hope it happens.
YOUR INPUT: what do you think about threaded comments, and about the future of the companies that are pushing them? Will one emerge? What will it take for that to happen?
{ 12 comments }