Making a lens on Making a lens

There’s a lot of tips for newbies on Squidoo, a quick look at the Top 100 in Lensmaking Tips for Newbies gives us an idea of the competition. Pretty stiff!

It’s not a simple task to make a lens on lensmaking. The first thing you have to focus on is your audience.

Steven Vella came up with How to Create a Squidoo Lens

In this example, Steven chooses to describe to beginners how to create a lens from the ground up.

Let’s have a look at How to Create a Squidoo Lens

• How new is new? Steven concentrates on the very new and talks to someone who has never made a lens before

 

• How web-savvy are they? Steven talks of creating a unique Squidoo location. Does everyone know what this means? A few modules further down he explains – Set your Lens URL: This is a unique location for Squidoo to display your lens from It would probably be easier to say – this will be your address on the web.

• The second thing you have to get clear is what builder a beginner uses. Does the ‘create a lens’ button take you to that particular builder, the Wizard? Perhaps it does for newbies.

• Rate your lens – it’s not explained clearly here the difference between G and R ratings when it comes to Squidoo. R ratings significantly reduce the chance of a lens ever being found. If a lens is made with an R rating, no one can see it unless they sign up to become a member, and not too many people are going to do that just to look at a web page. If a surfer happens to already be a Squidoo member, then they must have their Safe Surfing button disabled. The best course of action is to make only G rated lenses

Steven starts off with

Welcome, please look around.

In this lens, see step-by-step how to create a Squidoo lens and the questions that Squidoo asks along the way.

Also, check out the related lenses (in the right-hand side margin) about how to:
choose a topic
optimise your lens and
get it search engine ready.
In this way, you can contribute faster to the Squidoo knowledge resource.

There’s a disclaimer here which gives the impression that this lens will remain static and not be updated to reflect changes in Squidoo

What I’d like to see here is

1. The image cropped and adjusted so that it’s 250p X 250p as requested by Squidoo HQ. This size isn’t mandatory but I always try to comply with their requests

2. Alteration of the check out the ‘related lenses’ – these change when the lens is reloaded unless they’re all chosen by the lensmaster

3. Length of the introductory module. The introductory module is just that – an introduction. This is where you catch the attention of the surfer, you have a maximum of 60 seconds to attract them to read further. Make it short and sweet.

4. That disclaimer. I would change it something along the lines of “Should the Squidoo process change, then the lens will be updated to reflect those changes” or, more simply, “If Squidoo changes the way to make a lens, I will update this lens to show the newest way”. Or leave out the disclaimer altogether. (Leaving it out would also make the introduction a better length)

Which brings us to the question of language.

People don’t read online, they scan. Language should be plain English. (Not everyone is a native English-speaker). Short sentences and old-fashioned everyday English are easier to read. For example, the subjunctive “should” can be replaced with “if”.

Let’s continue down the page on this lens

Tags - As we move further down the page we find a module about Tags. Steven is giving us a description of tags, but not really for Squidoo tags. The tags in Squidoo are for internal purposes. I would recommend here the Workshop Add-On for Firefox and Chrome from squidutils.com With this add-on, the tags are coloured and you can see which tags are popular (green) which tags are semi-popular (yellow) and which tags are orphans (red). Adding popular tags boosts your chances of being listed in other peoples’ Discovery Tools.

Some suggestions
Images. Most of the images of a lens in progress are fairly difficult to make out. They would be better linked to a much larger image

WIP There’s a good spot at the end of this lens to describe the process of WIP. The most common questions asked by new lensmasters is why their lens is red and why their lens has gone back to red.