Tag Archives: Flash

Design for the results you need

There are a ton of beautiful websites which have been carefully constructed by skilled web designers and yet their  owners are not getting the service or the results they expected.

There are some basic axioms about results: You have to specify what results you want beforehand. Then, you have to measure what you achieved or it is all guesswork.

Let’s take a look at the kind of website that needs to show current content to attract visitors. One of the best examples is the website for a restaurant. The owner wants to show off the unique features of the place, the menu, and upcoming events. When the website is first constructed, it usually does a great job in all three areas.

One month later, the menu and the list of events is out of date. Two months later, the site is up to date for a week and then the list of events and the menu is stale.

Over a period of a year, the website might actually present correct information for ten weeks out of fifty two. The website may be graphically interesting, but it is not useful as a source of information.

Whose fault is this? Not the web designer necessarily, he can only update the site when new information is available. The restaurant owner? Perhaps. She has many fish to fry and updating the website is not at the top of the list, even when a crisis-free moment actually occurs.

Updating the site requires writing copy and taking pictures, sending an email to the webmaster with the new information and specific remarks on what has to be deleted or revised.

The webmaster has to schedule the change and then do it. If he is really organized, he will send an email notifying the restaurant owner that the changes are made.

When the restaurant owner finally gets around to looking at the site again, she notices that one of the changes is not right and the cycle starts all over again. Two people are involved in a cycle that can take several days.

Doesn’t this remind you of what it took to write and send a letter in the pre-wordprocessing, pre-email days? This old-fashioned approach is no longer necessary with some of the web publishing tools that are now available.

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