Use slides to enhance your presentation, not cripple it

Dave Taylor cites Seth Godin’s ebook and makes a pitch for skipping the slides completely “or work hard to minimize your slides.” He provides a nice simple example of a simple slide versus a multi-bullet point bonanza.

Your Home Page Is Obsolete

These are emotion words and fits in Seth's six word maximum. Good post.

Simple = Effective Presentations

Many years ago I took a computer programming course that was crammed into a week. During the last day of the course I worked with a team to solve a business problem. You failed if your solution required the use of a computer. The lesson was that technology is not always the answer.

Seth Godwin wrote “Really Bad PowerPoint and How To Avoid It” as a 10 page pdf ebook in 2001. Several million presentations later this is still a good read. He states that you don’t need all of those wizards built into PowerPoint and that they just hurt your efforts to communicate. Instead, “make slides that reinforce your works, not repeat them. Create slides that demonstrate, with emotional proof, that what you’re saying is true not just accurate.” He recommends no more that six words per slide. Yes, six words.

And why only 10 pages?  If he “hadn’t spent so much time on it, it would be longer.” Same for your presentation: simple=effective.

zlides and JavaScript (Ajax Experience) Fest

The consensus of the speakers at JavaScript (Ajax Experience) Fest is that one should use libraries or frameworks for Ajax work. While I agree in principle, I’m having a hard time agreeing for everything in zlides.com. Sometimes compactness is better. And sometimes machine language is better, but it is rarely used any longer. So I’ll keep an open mind on this.

Two positives for zlides

I’m just starting to show a few people behind the curtain of zlides.com. So far two positive comments. Remember execution is key and “the devil is in the details.” But those comments are enough to tell me to keep on working. 

Beta signup for zlides.com starts

Tonight I got the front page of zlides.com to accept email addresses from those people who want to participate in the beta program when it is ready.

Zlides is about displaying and creating presentation blogs. Examples will be available in early June.

May Bowling Night

I lug my laptop to the bowling alley most Thursday nights. One issue I tacked tonight was how to provide a URL to get directly to a particular zlide. On a standard web page you'd use an anchor to get you to a segment of the page. On the Ajax page that makes a real simple presentation we have to use a JavaScript solution. So I implemented a query string of ?z=slidenumber (e.g., ?z=5). So now in the RSS file for the presentation, each slide has a quid.

I also wrote the first draft of the Zlides pitch. Of course I used Zlides to write the pitch. Only missing projections, but who knows at this stage.

zlides beta soon

Just setting up the site tonight. More soon.