Here’s a link to Manny’s post-
Affordable Housing Downtown Site Plans
(I put captions on there for those that thought otherwise)
I’d love to say I’m surprised that people made comments to the effect that they thought the plan that Manny Simoes put on the blog were the actual finished architectural drawings but I’m not even a teeny bit surprised.
I didn’t even see the post til the following day because I’ve been prescheduling my weekend blog posts and putting the blog on autopilot during the weekends lately.
But here’s what people may or may not know about the interwebs (and anyone that has read GMG for more than a year has read my countless rants about people’s reluctance to use or know how to perform a simple google search). Read a handful of my previous frustrated rants about how people still in this day and age refuse to use google or a search engine here-
People that refuse to use Google are maddening!
Internet 101
It’s never going to sink in is it? ARGHHHHHH!!!!!
How much could I charge for a seminar to teach people how to look for things on the internet using a search engine?
It used to be worse but we’re probably still at about 50% of people that use the web that take EVERYTHING LITERALLY, do not know what a hyperlink is or that if you click on a blue sequence that the link will take them to another online place.
I’ve had dozens of conversations with our contributors saying that if you want to make sure the 50% of not-so-saavy internet people click on your actionable link that you should spell it out for them.
So say I wanted someone to click on a link to the blog, instead of doing this- Good Morning Gloucester To capture the people that don’t know that’s a link I would suggest that they take the extra time to write out-
Click Here To Go To The Good Morning Gloucester Site- http://www.goodmorninggloucester.com
Peter Van Ness told me a long time ago that you have to build web sites using The Grandmother test. The Grandmother test being that if they could figure out how to navigate it then you’re alright.
We have over 6000 email subscribers that receive an email around 8PM with a compilation of that day’s posts on the blog in an email. I’d conservatively estimate that 70% of those email subscribers do not understand that the blog is not the individual emails that they get sent but an aggregation of the daily posts on the blog itself. Many also don’t realize that if they couldn’t see a photo because it didn’t come through in the email that they could click on any of the hyperlinks in the email and go directly to the blog which resides at www.goodmorninggloucester.com
There are a ton of people that think the blog only exists as what they see on the front page. That the over 22,000 previous posts that we’ve done are gone and can never be retrieved by doing a search or scrolling to the bottom of the blog and clicking the button that says “OLDER POSTS”.
I probably have explained to my mother 1000 times to do a search using the search box on GMG and she will still say to me something like “I missed that post your sister put up about the zucchini fries the other day.” And I tell her again did you type in zucchini in the search box, because I guarantee you’ll get your desired results.
Even people that I am close to days later that I think are reasonable intelligent folks made comments to the effect that they couldn’t believe that they were going to build an orange and green building with no windows on Main Street. When I asked if they were serious, they told me they were dead serious.
The point is- no matter which way you fall on the proposal for the Camerons site, if you are a developer at a meeting and presenting plans, you might want to put a huge semi transparent watermark over the plan saying that the green and orange shading is only being used for placeholding and that these are not finished architectural drawings.
Because as internet saavy as you are as a developer or person presenting the plan having years of college and experience with computers under your belt- THERE ARE A SHIT TON OF REALLY NICE PEOPLE THAT ARE STILL VERY CLUELESS AS TO THE WAYS OF THE WEB.
THERE ARE A SHIT TON OF PEOPLE NO MATTER HOW OUTRAGEOUS YOU MAKE A POST THAT WILL TAKE IT SERIOUS AND NOT REALIZE THAT IT’S BEING SATIRICAL.
THERE ARE A SHIT TON OF PEOPLE THAT THINK IF YOU PUT UP A PLAN OF A BOX WITH NO WINDOWS AND SHADE IT IN A HIDEOUS GREEN AND CONTRASTING ORANGE THAT THESE WILL BE THE FINISHED LOOK OF A DOWNTOWN GLOUCESTER PROJECT.
That’s just the way it is.
Good Morning Gloucester 