| If you have a news site, deliver news. If you have an ecommerce site, do nothing but sell. If your site is supposed to promote a business, promote like mad on every page, with every word and picture on the entire site. During the latter part of the Net's initial boom-spasm, an awful lot of people running ecommerce and promotional sites decided they needed news of some sort on their sites in order to increase traffic. Some of them paid professional journalists thousands of dollars to write daily, weekly, or monthly columns. These sponsored news pages were great for the writers and editors who got paid to make them, but probably did nothing to increase anyone's sales. Now that the Net is settling down, this idea is gradually going away. This is bad for writers who have lost a source of easy money, but so it goes. The good ones will find other gigs, and the not-so-good ones will drift into public relations, time-share condominium sales, TV infomercial production, or some other field that gives them money without requiring hard physical labor in return. | As part of the research for this book, I turned to users of Jeffrey Zeldman's A List Apart Web site (www.alistapart.com) for advice. This is one of the most-respected online gathering spots for, as the site's tagline says, "people who make Web sites." I asked A List Apart members to share their pet client peeves with me. Boy, did I get an earful! Selected quotes follow: "Nothing worse than launching a site and then having to go back and revise it umpteen zillion times (especially when graphics are involved)." "Word to the wise: beware the client who says 'that price is too much,' then refuses to say what isn't too much." "Do not expect that we will work for free. We do not update your site for you for free. We do not make extra banners for you for free. We are not your technical support. We do not know why your computer crashed. (Or if we do, it's not our job to tell you.)" "Shop around and be up-front about it. It takes time in the beginning, but it will pay off in the long run. Follow the business rule of thumb of getting three quotes. We do it for our other business decisions, but somehow forget when it comes to the Web." "Check references. Get a good vibe from current and past clients. You wouldn't hire an employee without checking references, so do the same with your developer." "I find that a lot of clients want dynamic sites that are fresh. However, they haven't considered who will manage and create content. This task will be part of someone's job description, will take some time, and the content manager will need to be supported. We can build some great things, but we can't write your manager's daily message for you. I have seen many a great application gather dust because it is no one's responsibility to maintain it." "The common denominator in any design discipline is communication. Rubbish in, rubbish out." "Don't make me build you a high-bandwidth Flash intro for a site whose audience is mostly modem users." "…if these 'net business owners want everything for free or a professional, customized, e-commerce Web site done for less than $500, please tell them to quit their business and go work for someone else who runs a real business. A $200 Web site is not going to be successful." "I wish clients would concentrate on the question, 'What do I really have to offer?' instead of worrying about the way that stuff will be presented best." "I don't care if the project is your baby, if the CEO is the only one who can approve the deliverables, she should be present at a planning meeting. I know she's busy. So am I. I'll work around her schedule the best I possibly can, but trying to develop a site with no input from the person I'm ultimately going to have to please is like driving a car with a blindfold on. Coming back to me after the final deliverables have been presented for acceptance and saying 'Well, the strategy has changed' or 'The CEO wants these changes' doesn't cut it. I don't get to tell my landlord that I'm not paying rent this month because the CEO didn't approve it, you don't get a free redesign because you didn't get the CEO's approval before giving me the go-ahead to proceed." I got over 100 responses on A List Apart from professional Web developers who want to do great work but feel their clients hold them back. A recurring complaint not included above because it was expressed in words that would be improper in this book, was about clients who were late with copy or pictures for their sites, but expected developers to meet the timetable on which both parties had originally agreed anyway. Another theme was client changes; just as book printers charge to reset type once clients have approved their copy in final "galley"form, Web developers charge for changes made to finished sites, and get irritated when customers feel they should redo work for free. Site maintenance was another sore point, with more than a few developers upset that clients who tried to insert new text or modify old text on their sites accidentally messed up the HTML code and ruined carefully-designed layouts. There are, of course, many ways to set up a Web site so that copy expected to change frequently can be entered easily by anyone who knows how to use a text editor and a Web browser, but like everything else about a Web site, a designer will include this feature only if a client requests it in advance because it is cheaper and easier to build a site on plain-Jane HTML than to include backend forms for future text insertion. There were also notes about clients who hired a professional designer, then overruled their design decisions for reasons such as "blue is my favorite color, so use a lot of blue." Contracts generated a whole separate discussion thread; it seems many Web designers have been burned by not getting written contracts from clients detailing their exact tasks and payment terms. There was consensus that clients who want to pay "after the site starts to turn a profit" instead of putting up a 30% or 50% deposit in advance, with the balance upon completion, are almost always blowing smoke, and should be avoided. An awful lot of the speed bumps boiled down to poor communication between Web developers and their clients, with one side of the table as often at fault as the other. This is why I stress the importance of throwing ideas back and forth and getting everything settled before the design work starts, instead of sitting back and saying, "Do whatever you want," then having the whole project redone after the fact almost certainly at your expense because it didn't turn out the way you expected. |
Sure, doing away with extraneous writing was usually a budget-cutting move, with renewed site focus merely a side effect. But in this case the side effect is marvelously serendipitous; when you have potential customers on your site, you want them to concentrate on buying. You don't want to distract them with news any more than you want to distract them with whirling logos or background music. The original Sears, Roebuck catalog which begat modern mail order; which begat telephone ordering; which begat ecommerce had no news in it. Customers ordered from it because it offered plain and easy-to-understand descriptions of the merchandise, along with vivid product illustrations and a simple ordering system. That catalog was a pure selling machine, cover-to-cover. There are plenty of independent news sources on the Internet, so shoppers are unlikely to turn to a corporate promo or ecommerce site for news. Conversely, news sites that get involved in ecommerce beyond selling t-shirts with their site's name on them or similar impulse-purchase items that are directly related to the site in some way take a chance of tainting the objectivity of their news product or, at the very least, losing the appearance of the whole project redone after the fact almost certainly at your expense because it didn't turn out the way you expected.impartiality in their coverage. And on the Internet, where the news business is probably more competitive than in any other medium, this can be the kiss of death for a news Web site. During Yahoo!'s period of greatest growth, and for much of the time it was a profitable company, it was primarily a Web directory and search service. Now Yahoo! is trying to do many things at once, and is having trouble making money at most of them. Google (www.google.com), a site that is nothing but a search and information-finding service, is not only gaining popularity at a rapid rate, but started showing profits in 2001. Once again, the "Keep It Simple, Stupid" principle applies: A Web site that does one thing well is more likely to succeed than one that tries to do too much. If you want to run an ecommerce business, promote an unrelated offline business, and deliver online news, that's fine as long as you do it on three separate sites, with separate domain names, instead of trying to do everything under a single banner. |
