If our Web site design isn’t serving readers, they won’t be back. Does it need to be pretty? Does it need lots of links? Does it need to be simple/complex/long/short? What?

Media design evangelist Bill Ostendorf of Creative Circle Media (see his site at www.creativecirclemedia.com) offers tips "to fight the ugliness," spelled out during a Society of News Design session Tuesday in Las Vegas:

Are we content to share the same billing with everyone who can post any form of story on the internet and call themselves a journalist?

We scrunch up our noses, stamp our feet and say, “They don’t do what we do. They don’t know what we know. They don’t share our commitment to accuracy and fairness. They aren’t us.”

But we say that only to each other, as we Google Angola and a Wikipedia entry tops the page.

The people we need to tell are those readers/page viewers we want to draw, Google Senior Adviser Richard Gingras told APME 2008 conference goers Monday in Las Vegas.

Fighting for Journalism's Future - Associated Press Managing Editors are ready for battle.

I will blog daily from the APME conference Sept. 8-11. Please check out the conference schedule and alert me to sessions that grab your attention.

Writing coach Paula LaRocque in her The Book on Writing, lists second in her “dozen guidelines to good writing” tips aimed at clearing out, cleaning up and clarifying. In short: “Avoid Pretensions, Gobbledygook, and Euphemisms.”

One mistake writers make, says LaRocque, is to assume educated readers prefer bafflegab to clarity. Another is to assume that “ma and pa on the farm won’t understand anything very ‘intelligent.’”