Trouble awaits if you do not have a solid plan to launch your web presence. Take, for example, Juicy Fruit’s new blog. Looks neat, huh? Well, the critics don’t agree. And when the critics have blogs that attract at least a quarter million (yes, thats million) visits a day, and they rip you a new one, things aren’t looking so neat.
As seen and read on Boing Boing…
How bad does Juicyfruit’s blog suck? Let’s count the ways.
1. You can’t enter the blog directly. You must enter through the main page.
2. You have to wait a long time for the main screen to load up its Flash garbage.
3. You have to wait another eternity for the “blog” to load.
4. The text window for the blog content is the size of a postage stamp.
5. There’s only one entry in the text window.
6. The navigation is as confusing as the zero-G toilet in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
7. The actual content is as bland as a piece of Juicyfruit with the flavor chewed out.
37 signals latest blog post on the Signal vs. Noise blog brings up a good point, as does some of the comments that follow. Showing the user visually what they are ordering at the confirmation screen can be a powerful usability feature that can instill confidence in a web shopper. But how much is too much? Obviously this will not work for some ecommerce sites where shoppers order many products at one time.
We are, really. We don’t just design pretty websites. We design pretty marketing websites. We don’t just implement ecommerce solutions. We implement ecommerce marketing solutions Everything you put on the web is marketing material. You are marketing to users. Whether it is just to get them to find info about your cause, your products, or to buy something from you, your web site is a marketing tool. Every decision we make about our projects should be thought of in a marketing sense, and how we can get the user to interact the way we want them to.
The old style of marketing doesn’t work as well anymore, thanks in part to the internet. Your users are your best, and cheapest marketing source. Hell, they may even pay you to market your product. They may fall in love with your product, or service, or cause online, buy it or into it’s theory, and start posting it on their blog. Then a few others pick up on it, and the ROI on your pretty marketing website goes through the roof.
The portfolio section is coming along, and should be up soon. Check back in the next few days. I know the content in some sections is a little lacking as well, which I am working on…
Seth Godin has followed up his first free ebook on bettering websites, Knock Knock, with the fittingly titled sequel, Who’s There. This version is more geared towards blogging, or should I say, viral blogging.