> Right, but most people don't know about Adrian's page. I send them
> there, usually after they've already bought the fish
>
Hi Eileen,
this is a big problem - how do we educate the fish-buying public before
they get into the trouble that brings them to specialist groups like
ANGFA and lists like this one? I say trouble because it is sometimes the
problem of "I love these fish! Where do I buy more?" - and other times
it is the trouble of "How 'dwarf' is a 'dwarf' rainbowfish anyhow?" or
"what do I do with this cloud of babies that appear every morning when I
turn on the light?".
Every so often people pay me lots of money to sort out problems like
this under the guise of information architecture. The two biggest
findability (yes, it is a real word!) issues are:
- people can't find the right information, and
- people can find incorrect or unhelpful information.
On the web, you can probably blame Google AdSense - people started being
paid real money for any old content that they wrote, and anyone elses
that they could swipe. People always wrote stuff for the web because
they loved it, or even got paid a salary to do so, but now it is content
for content's sake, and so the signal to noise ratio has gone totally
out the window. We can't bump off all the other sites (legally), but
maybe they will respond nicely to an email if you offer to provide them
with more content (they love content, it pays their bills).
I know that there are good people on this list who work in the fish
trade who do their best to educate the fish-buying public. One way that
we could all help in this effort is to print some flyers for our local
fish shop. What should they contain? Anything you like, as long as it is
true and helpful. The shop owner will probably be glad to give
information away for free (although this is not always the case).
Organise a local Rainbow study group, swap fish and eggs, network with
other groups.
Best regards, Andrew
-- ----------------------------------------- Andrew Boyd andrew at friendlymanual.com Web Development/ePublishing Solutions http://www.friendlymanual.com http://www.successadvances.com -----------------------------------------