Filed under Strategic Design

We are often asked two variations of the question, “How long is my website relevant.” Both have the same answer.

The first variant is, “Our site is x years old, is it time to redesign it?” The other variant is, “How long should we expect our new site to last.” The answer is “it depends.” But let me try to offer a better response.

First, we identify an economic life of a website. This is a balance sheet issue. Few actually record the website as an asset, but it is not unreasonable to assume it to be fully depreciated after 5 years. Some choose 3 years. Whatever you choose for business reasons does not necessarily translate to the useful life of the resource and it certainly doesn’t answer the question as to whether the site is still relevant or if the technology still works just fine. But it is the best way to establish a life of your site while also managing its replacement cost.

We believe the non-economic variables that determine the life of your old website or newly launched one are strategy, message, technology and look & feel.

Strategy is simply the manner in which you satisfy your business objectives online. The brief historic nickel tour of website strategy migration starts with a) establishing an online presence (the brochure-ware model) (1993 - 1999), b) becoming interactive (2000 - 2004), c) Web 2.0, social media and syndicated content (2005 - ?), d) semantic web (200X - ?).

Message is the way you tell your story. In its simplest form, the message is something as simple as “recently merged/acquired/out of business” which tends to shorten a website life considerably :).  More commonly, the message is the outcome of an internal business review which re-prioritizes your services, service delivery and restates your unique value proposition. When the website is sufficiently out of line with the message, continual patching of the site may not produce a desirable outcome and re-imagining the site is called for.

Technology is merely an enabler of strategy. So technology is rarely the game ending culprit. Unlike our analog TV’s which the government is forcing us to abandon for new technology, websites built a decade ago will operate just as well (or poorly) as they did when launched. It’s when your strategy puts demands on your website technology that something’s got to give. Although it may look like the technology failed, in truth, look to your migrating strategy to determine the life of your technology.

And finally there’s the look and feel. Sometimes merely updating the accessories can do as much for a website as it does for the look of an old suit. While it is often the excuse for a new website, it is rarely the real driver.

Should you put a link to LinkedIn on a biography page of a law firm website? That was the question posed recently on the Legal Marketing Association (LMA) listserv by Gail Lamarche Director of Marketing at Henderson, Franklin, Starnes & Holt.

I opined that, for professional services firms such as this law firm, the attorney biography page is the best thing we have as a “money page” on the website. Therefore, driving visitors away from the money page was, strategically, a bad idea. Moreover, it seemed if there were really content on LinkedIn that was valuable to the site visitor, then that information should be on the bio page. And if it wasn’t there, the bio page was somehow deficient.

Smug I was in the righteousness of my response. But I got an earful of dissent from LMA listserv contributors. The arguments are worthy of consideration:

Jayne Navarre, LawGravity, presented these points persuasively:

• Branding – The LinkeIn link is like a hip badge of Web 2.0 awareness
• Connections – LinkedIn provides a transparent view to an attorney’s connections, arguably a value to any prospective client
• Authoritative - Access to the LinkedIn Questions & Answers provides additional proof of the attorney’s authority

Heather Milligan, Director of Marketing at Barger Wolen emphasized that LinkedIn:

• Human - helps make the attorney “dynamic, human, liked”( in case we have any residual concerns about their humanity) and helps the attorney pass the “known, liked & trusted” test of prospective clients.
• Dimensional - And in rebuttal to my “bio is deficient” comment, Heather notes that to maintain a certain appearance consistent with other bios and the overall website, “the firm bio is controlled for content, style, etc….(while) LinkedIn is the perfect place where an attorney can bring together their outside interests and professional careers, making them more human and likeable.
• Connections - Perhaps the most valuable feature, LinkedIn is fundamentally a connecting tool that might serendipitously reveal a third party connection to the site visitor which presents all kinds of opportunity for real introduction.

It’s not a slam dunk either way. The answer to Gail’s original question seems to be, “It depends.” The circumstances dictate the strategy. I’ll give it a nod of possibility and something worth trying.  Yes, I know, “first I was against it, now I’m for it.” Thanks to the enlightenment of my marketing peers.

But I’ll have this last (never!) word.  Think doubly hard about sending your site visitor from the most valuable conversion page of  your site to an information wasteland. Don’t do it unless the LinkedIn profile to which you are sending visitors:

• provides a rich set of business connections
• demonstrates some effort to contribute authoritatively to the online Q&A discourse
• otherwise expands on the website attorney bio page
• (if possible) provides a path back

And whatever you do, measure the results. Professionals keep score.

Now you can link away to my LinkedIn profile.

The Internet always has been and is becoming even more of a scary place. With all those unwashed masses contributing content, heck, even CNN has implemented “iReport.com: Your stories, unfiltered” Almost every CNN article invites reader contribution which often exceeds the original story in depth and thoughtfulness. But it also affords the opportunity for shallow, callow observations and attempts to advance personal agendas. Scary. And disruptive.

Remember the good ol’ days when only those with money and access could spin their messages to their hearts’ contentment?  When you could purchase a listing in a business directory and the biggest challenge was which one’s? They’re fading fast. The rules we learned to follow just don’t work as well as they used to. Time to learn the new rules.

Recently I was following an online discussion regarding Wikipedia. The issue was whether businesses, in this case, law firms that often have a broad public presence and handle newsworthy cases, should seek to gain a listing. The challenge or perhaps more accurately, risk, is that once the listing is successfully obtained in Wikipedia anyone might comment, add to or modify the original carefully vetted explanatory copy.

I believe that what it comes down to is not trying to control the top-down message. Rather, the task is to monitor and participate in the egalitarian conversation. It’s all about reputation management, not control.

It’s been 15 years (!!!) since Peter Steiner published his cartoon in the New Yorker, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”  It’s taken some time for all of us to figure out what his prescient remark was about. Welcome to the age of transparency. You’re on display and anybody can sharp shoot you.  And will.  Even if they’re a dog – or a disgruntled client, a competitor or the random crank.

So what does this mean for us little folks marketing our companies?  First, acknowledge that even the best companies with the finest reputations have their dark corners waiting to be revealed. Second, so what? The internet is ubiquitous, so it is time to come out of hiding; we see you anyway.

Wikipedia? Absolutely contribute your objective knowledge. But maybe your approach should be more about participating in existing subjects that are already published rather than treating the medium like it is another directory inviting your carefully-scripted-&-reviewed-3-levels-up position statement. It is no longer about you; it’s about us and what we want to know. Not what you want to tell us. And besides, if I don’t like what you say, I’m going to change it or respond. Like I said, scary.

It’s time we go back to our job descriptions and add “reputation management” to our public relations responsibilities. The great news is that there are lots of tools and tactics for managing reputation online. But it’s going to take some of our precious time to learn some new skills.

That’s revenue Google gets by focusing on the effectiveness of its advertising engine. “The Human Hands Behind the Google Money Machine” in today’s New York Times, shows the importance of analytics and how it is used by Google to drive revenue. The story reviews the genesis of the Googles AdWords program, five years ago when GoTo.com was acquired by Yahoo. GoTo was the first to pioneer advertising, but Google made a critical advance improving the system by actually looking at the click-throughs, not just what people were willing to bid for ads, that pushed Google ahead to stay. On the web it’s all based on metrics and analytics. At Duo we keep harping about analytics and how clients should benefit from studying what really go goes on with their sites – but few take advantage of that recommendation. The advantage there is there for those that do – and they are going to reap the rewards.

What is “standards-based” design?

In an attempt to end the “browser wars” of the late nineties and early 2000’s, the Web Standards Project (WaSP) was formed, which advocated the use of technology standards recommended by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These standards were created to help developers and designers expedite the production of websites, as well as serve as a guide for browsers to interpret and deliver website in predictable and consistent ways. Prior to this, each browser manufacturer deciphered websites differently and incorporated proprietary code that, more often than not, did not render or even function on the competing browser’s platform. Thus we had websites that worked in Internet Explorer and broke in Netscape and vice versa. Developers were forced to create elaborate detection scripts that had to be updated with each new browser release, or simply decide not to support the competition (e.g., remember the “best viewed in Internet Explorer” disclaimers?).

Why Should You Care?

All of this probably seems a bit esoteric to the average web surfer, and even the business power-user is probably saying “so what?”. After all, if it looks good in your browser, what’s the big deal? However there are a number of issues you should be concerned with if your company’s website is not adhering to web standards.

Accessibility

Your company may not be a non-profit, government-funded enterprise, or required by law to provide equal access to the disabled, including the blind, elderly and those with limited motor skills. However, it is not just these organizations who are subject to the scrutiny of lawyers. In one noteworthy case, Target was sued by a blind person who could not access their site with screen reading software. In addition to the litigation, Target is still recovering from the negative publicity generated by this case. Being viewed as ‘unfriendly’ to the handicapped is an image that very few companies can afford.

Beyond the chance of being sued, there is one “blind” user that almost no one can ignore. Google’s web crawlers, the ones that actually track and rank your site in search engine results, are essentially blind in the sense that they do not use traditional inputs (i.e., mouse, keyboard) to traverse your site. Navigation menus which rely on javascript (e.g, many drop-down or “fly-out” menus) as well as many flash based sites completely deter these crawlers from accessing your site, reducing your search engine rankings significantly.

Cost & Maintenance

With the ubiquity of broadband and online storage becoming cheaper it may seem that the days of optimizing your site to download quickly on dial-up modems are gone. However, while bandwidth is expanding, so are the media, content, and functional requirements that users expect. Streaming video and websites that perform like desktop applications are commonplace and require sophisticated development and delivery strategies. Standards-based development results in more streamlined code that is easier to troubleshoot and maintain, and more easily ported across multiple platforms and user-agents (e.g., PDAs, mobile devices, etc.). Moreover, bandwidth is still typically being charged on a per/use basis. The more hits your site gets, the more expensive it becomes to deliver your content, so having optimized code can result in huge cost savings over time.

How can we help?

The user-centered philosophy that Duo employs affects many facets of the interactive design process. Beyond simply making sites that are intuitive, easy and fun to use, the techniques we employ to construct sites is integral to the fulfillment of our vision. Unobtrusive javascript, progressive enhancement, and semantically meaningful markup will ensure that your site performs well and is available to the widest possible audience.

“The economy and a newly designed Web site are being credited for a dramatic increase in interest in the Chicago Public Library system,” WBBM’s Bernie Tafoya reported last month. In this interview, You can reserve a book, CD, or DVD online, and if it not available it will be delivered to the library branch of your choice and you will be notified by email.

The Chicago Tribune, in a recent article about this Find it, Chicago service appropriately labels it “NetBooks” because it offers the functionality of NetFlix without the subscription fee. At Duo we’re just glad that the thousands of hours spent learning about users needs, designing the new interface, and developing the enhanced functionality has paid off for the Library and citizens of Chicago.

You’re at the point in the discovery phase of a project when you learn your client has a limited budget and their site needs to be live in weeks. “Argh” you think to yourself - if they only had a longer deadline and more cash we could really do a knock out job and not sacrifice all the whiz-bang features.

Constraints are an unavoidable reality of every project. Instead of wishing your client had more resources, stop and embrace the project’s constraints. Having too little time and money makes you examine the goals of your project and helps you create simple and efficient ways to solve your client’s problems.

Possibilities are endless but constraints are knowns that force you to focus on core issues of the project while cutting out all of the extraneous background noise of the “bells and whistle” features that are usually non-essential to solving the problem.

We recently took on a project for the Illinois Institute of Technology who had an extremely tight deadline to get a site up to promote a new university-wide planning process aimed at reestablishing IIT as a major force in higher education. The site was intended to give background on the plan and solicit opinions from its faculty, staff and students. Here our major constraint was time. From project start to project completion we clocked in at just less than three weeks turn around, successfully getting a site up that would provide as a means to inform and gather feedback for IIIT. The site is simple and focused but most importantly it solves a problem for our client.

“Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.”
— Frank Lloyd Wright

I suppose website benchmarks are inevitable. They worry me. But everyone wants to know how they “shape up.” If you have benchmarks, people may come to believe a popularly quoted performance measurement is important even if it has nothing to do with their website. And worse, one might believe that a certain achievement level, usually represented by a number and often carried to two decimal places, implies a precision that is simply untrue. Benchmarks worry me.

So it is with some chagrin I found myself partying last Saturday night with Google Analytics and their benchmarking feature which is still in Beta (i.e. pre-release but available to the masses). The quid pro quo deal is if you agree to share your site’s analytics to an anonymous data pool, you’ll have access to a selection of website parameters and data aggregated from other sites in the data pool. And here’s the cool thing – in a web analytics geek kind of cool. You can benchmark your site against any of a selection of other sites that you desire. For a hobby site I manage, I benchmarked it against other Recreation > Outdoor > Hiking & Camping sites of similar size to my site.

Looking at the results for my hobby site against Google’s benchmark performance charts, I felt pretty good about the warm fuzzy green (not red) plus signs & numbers displayed to two decimal places. For a given parameter my results are 134.15% better than the benchmark. And that’s exactly the problem! You have to ask yourself, “So what?” Unless you’re a corporate dweeb who takes pleasure in reporting meaningless numbers to other people who are similarly clueless, benchmarks may lead you toward unearned complacency or needless distress. Benchmarks worry me.

I think the alternative to benchmarks – or perhaps the complement – is two-fold. First, identify the key performance indicators (KPI) that are important to you and to your website’s performance. If the Google Analytics parameters can inform your uniquely defined key performance indicators, then great. Second, think Personal Best. Keep working on your site to improve its performance metrics that you’ve identified to be important. Don’t just be better. Be the best you can be.

While your home page may not be from where most of your traffic comes it’s still important to direct users to the content that they want as efficiently as possible. After all, your web site has a purpose, and regardless of whether that purpose is to propagate information, encourage people to sign up for your newsletter, or to sell widgets, the content on your site can help to focus people’s attention toward solving their goals (and yours).

A great example of focused attention is the home page for SimpleTest, a PHP unit testing framework (tool for web application developers):

It’s easy to tell what you can do with this site by scanning down the large graphics on the left hand side of the page. You can download the code, get started writing tests (although maybe this should have been called “Tutorial” or “Documentation”), get support, or contribute to the project.

The upper right of the site even contains a callout summary about the latest version and what is important about it:

By offering these highlights, you’re giving your visitors options even if your site serves different audiences simultaneously.

Everybody wants to drive more traffic to their site, but few are willing to execute the basic strategy to make it happen. The Chicago Tribune in an article titled “Grabbing the search spotlight” clarified once again that it is all about content.

Matt Moog from Viewpoints.com couldn’t have said it clearer when he said that “70 percent of all Internet sessions start at Google.” To attract these surfers to your site you’ve got to begin with understanding the keyword phrases people use that you want to attract. At Duo we call this step Keyword Ideation. Next, use these targeted phrases within relevant content on your site, and update that content often. It’s really that simple, but hard to do because it takes discipline to focus on the basics.

At Duo we create websites that make it easy for you to integrate and update significant amounts of site content. We do this because it is content that acts as a magnet to attract relevant users to your site, and our mission is to improve lives by connecting people with the information they seek through technology. Learn more by attending our WebContent 2008 Conference in Chicago June 17 & 18.