crazed monkey

Last Wednesday I made my web traffic presentation, which received positive feedback and made some excellent impressions. In retrospect, the agreed upon speaking fee should have been a lot higher. I ended up putting quite a lot of time into the content of the talk, possibly resulting in an hourly rate of less than minimum wage. Not to worry, as I learned a number of things about delivering effective presentations, some of which I mentioned in my last post. One might say that I even came out on top.

One of the more important things I learned from my talk is that presentations should not have the same format as essays. I prepared my talk much like I used to prepare my university essays. This wouldn’t have been so bad except that in my introduction I outlined my forthcoming main arguments. With written essays, this is fine because the reader can immediately see how long the essay is and that these points will be discussed later. Not so with a presentation, where the viewer expects whatever is on the slide to be discussed then and there. After a few incantations of “I’ll get to that later” my mistake was fixed but it still generated some confusion and interrupted the flow of my talk.

In addition to touching on content management, HTML, search engines and marketing, my presentation also brought in aspects of usability and web design. I had previously planned to leave out those last two topics due to time constraints and “obviousness” but I’m glad that I chose to include them. Not only did my presentation last precisely one hour as intended, but I was able to pick out several key areas of the newspaper’s website which were lacking in usability or comprehensibility. Amazingly, there were a lot of pages where it wasn’t obvious what was being presented.

People were impressed, not only because of the content of my presentation but also because of how it looked. Keynote can take a lot of the credit for that as I only gave a passing thought to layout, which is how it should be. I even got compliments before I began, purely based on my title page. How many Powerpoint presenters can say that? Keynote made any layout changes outside of its standard templates quick, easy and intuitive. The only problem I had with Keynote is that it forces the presenter to click through old bullet points on a slide after launching a web page from that slide. Was that ever annoying, and something that I will have to work around for my next talk.

Will there be another talk? Who knows. I’ve been realising these past few years that I have accumulated bits and pieces of important knowledge from various domains that have become second-nature to me and yet which others seem to have failed to grasp. It’s not enough expertise to fill books, but digested in hour-long or half-hour long talks it’s bound to have some effect on someone. They just have to pay.

Posted on July 18th, 2006 in computers - No Comments »

I’m scheduled to deliver a presentation to a national newspaper next week on how to increase their web traffic. Apparently I am something of an expert on the subject. Who knew? My presentation will focus on traffic from search engines but will also contain some pointers on attracting repeat visitors. I was originally asked to act as a consultant but evidently I’m too expensive, so instead I get to talk for an hour.

For me, one of the most difficult parts of a technical presentation is finding its starting point. I often forget how much I know and usually assume the same level of comprehension from the audience, overlooking why I am speaking in the first place. This time I am presenting a fairly technical topic to a non-technical group so I am finding myself starting from first principals then building up (or down) a point. Hopefully I can avoid getting bogged down with too much detail. My presentation right now looks like a crash course in content management, HTML, search engines with a dash of marketing thrown in for good measure.

My talk makes use of slides and, like anyone relatively new to presentations, I quickly found myself dumping as much information in as many bullet points as possible. Stepping back, I realised this would make for a dull talk as I knew I would just use the slides as a crutch. I then changed my tack and instead put as little information as possible on my slides. This will allow me more freedom to speak without being tied to my slides, which are now more punchy as a result.

It’s amazing how easy presenting appears compared with how difficult it actually is. It’s just talking, how hard could that be? People like Steve Jobs make presenting look as effortless as breathing. We as the audience don’t see the hours and hours of preparation, agonising and practice which go into those keynotes. Everyone thinks they can present well, but few actually can. I won’t be able to present like Steve Jobs, but at least I have his tools.

Posted on July 7th, 2006 in computers - 1 Comment »