Author Archives: Josh Kinal

About Josh Kinal

Josh makes things on the web easy to use and understand. Sounds simple, but it’s not. His understanding of developing engaging content comes from many years of writing for print and radio. You might have heard him on Boxcutters, his popular weekly podcast about TV or years of appearing on Triple J, Radio National and 3RRR. He also holds a science degree and in 2012 was one of Australia’s few panelists at SXSW Interactive conference in Austin, Texas

Business: Why We Sold Out

At the start of this year, Soupgiant started discussions with Floate Design Partners about a plan they had to acquire us. We’ve been doing this on our own since 2009. Running our own business wasn’t as much our dream as creating great website the way we thought they should be built. Striving for high levels […]

Content Strategy: Clout by Colleen Jones: book review

Colleen Jones lays the premise of influence firmly on the table and discusses ways to begin thinking about content strategy as a means of influencing audiences on the web. The title of the book is explicit and confronting but how does the content itself stack up?

Quick Notes: How Google Damages Its Own Brand

Google Reader allows me to send to Twitter but not Google+. What is this doing to Google’s own branding?

Content Strategy: Check Your Content

Testing content before publishing is important and there are many quick and cheap ways to achieve a good result that will save your brand. It’s all about having a content strategy in place and keeping to that strategy.

Quick Notes: Website Policies and SEO

Looking through the RACV website policies I noticed this item: 7. linking to this web site 7.1 If you wish to establish a link to this web site you must, in the first instance, use the Contact Us link at the top of the page and provide the following information: a) the URL of the […]

Content Strategy: Vodafone, Confusion, and Content Strategy

Recently, Vodafone Australia sent its customers an email that caused a great deal of confusion. We have a look at what it could have done differently and how a simple rewrite and a bit of content strategy could have saved the brand a lot of difficulty.

Design: Usability, Trust and the iPad

Apple are known for their beautiful design and their “it just works” mentality. It’s one of the things I love about my own Apple products. My parents, on the other hand, are known for not being me.

The only computers my parents have ever used are Windows machines and English is their third language.

I wanted to see how easy it would be for them to set up an iPad 2 for themselves.

Design: Details Prevent User Paralysis

User paralysis is a horrible side effect of lack of attention to detail. Recently I saw a TED Talk by Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman for the Ogilvy Group in the UK. In it he describes how it’s the small things that make all the difference.

I saw, first-hand, how simple it is to both bring on and avoid user paralysis.

Quick Notes: Branding is hard

Making a great brand starts with having a great name and that means being able to buy a great or, at least, good domain name as Jason Calacanis explains.

Quick Notes: How @font-face loads in different browsers

Why do you sometimes see the fonts change on a website after it loads? This is just one of the many ways browsers behave differently, as explained in this quote from Richard Rutter.