All components of a website should be kept as simple as possible. On the web, the user is in the driver’s seat. If you confuse your users, they’ll do a quick u-turn and leave your site in the dust. Keeping things simple is not always easy. When I am writing marketing copy for a website, my tendency is to shove every known product benefit onto one page. When this happens, I try to step back and remind myself, "Too many words is as good as none. If there’s too much, they won’t read a single word." The way to present your entire message simply is to use links to connect small digestible chunks of information.
Everything Else Too!
Simplicity should not stop with the copy. Images, color schemes, and navigation should all be kept as simple as possible. If there are a gazillion links on a page, it requires a lot of effort to find the link the user is actually looking for. It’s analogous to a guy going to a Walmart Supercenter to buy a single item, a screwdriver. 99.9% of the items in that store are useless to him. To get what he wants, he has to walk a 1/4 mile negotiating shopping cart traffic, stand in long lines, and listen to cheapskates argue about a $0.25 coupon - all for a single screwdriver! The difference between Walmart and a complex website is that a web surfer can easily end an unpleasant experience with a single click of a button. Having invested so much time and effort, a Walmart shopper will most likely persevere until the end. A web surfer has no reason to tolerate a bad experience when there are plenty of sites out there that can provide a better one.
Business owners often think about new technology in terms they are familiar with. They think a website is like a brochure in their customers’ living room. A website is not a brochure! A website is capable of so much more. That is like treating your Blackberry like a simple calculator. Of course, a business should provide basic information about their company and products, but they shouldn’t stop there. A website is a tool that can do many things others cannot incuding:
establish a dialogue with customers
provide extensive amounts of information
calculate and perform complex tasks (applications)
build a community
provide a customized experience for individual users
gather valuable market data
A website is a versatile tool that can solve many kinds of problems, but most people think of the web in very narrow terms. Many business owners consider their websites to be an "Internet store" or an "Internet ad". A person who thinks like this will never consider the web as a tool that could help solve problems unrelated to sales and marketing (eg. employee collaboration).
When you begin to think about a website as a general tool, you will see that the possibilities are endless. Anytime I need to do something in my personal or business life, I always ask myself, "How can a website help me solve this problem?" I have found that a website can usually help me solve most problems. For instance, my uncle recently performed a couple songs on a local radio station. Several relatives requested a CD of the session. Rather than sending CDs via snail mail, I posted the mp3s on my website and e-mailed everybody the URL.
I used the web when I needed to get rid of some stuff before I moved out of my apartment. Living in a small community, Craigslist wasn’t an option. My only options were a garage sale or classified ads. I didn’t have time for a garage sale and you can only fit so many items in the 4 lines of a classified ad. Instead, I put pictures of everything on my website and plastered the community with posters advertising my "E-garage Sale". People checked out my site and gave me a call if they were interested. It was effective, cheap, and didn’t require too much effort.
What do you need to do today? I bet you can use the web to do it better.
The image in my header is a diamond being cut. I was lucky to have the opportunity to watch a master diamond cutter at work. The diamond is positioned at a specific angle against a spinning wheel that is encrusted with diamond dust and olive oil. The material is cut away VERY slowly. A round brilliant diamond has 58 facets. Each of those facets must be positioned at VERY precise angles to maximize brilliance. Even with the vast amount of technology available, most diamonds continue to be cut by hand.
I recently began to use Zoho Writer, a web based word processor. The advantages of using a web based word processor rather than a local one (eg. MS Word) is that I can work on my documents from anywhere. When I need to work on a document at a location other than my home computer, I don’t need to worry about putting it on portable storage. As long as the Internet is available, then my documents will be available.
The problem is that Internet connections are not always dependable. I ran into this problem a few days ago when I powered up my computer to find that my connection was dead. That crippled my ability to get any work done. There are two major concerns when it comes to documents - reliable storage and reliable access. I don’t want to lose documents due to hard drive failure and I want to be able to access my documents when I want to.
When it comes to storage reliability, I would trust a large company’s servers over my personal computer. A company who wants to maintain their reputation will make sure that their customers’ data is safe and backed up regularly. The weakness with remote storage is reliable access. My Internet connection is probably the least reliable service in my house. It’s not horribly unreliable, but I can guarantee that my Internet connection will go down before I experience an electricity outage. I am quite confident that when I wake up tomorrow, I will be able to access my documents on my home computer. Even if the electricity goes out, I know that the electric company is working on it and that my electricity will be restored shortly. I can’t remember the last time I couldn’t access documents on my computer when I wanted to. A week didn’t go by since I started using Zoho Writer when my Internet connection went down and I couldn’t access my documents.
Web apps that use remote storage have great advantages, but until Internet service is as reliable as telephone or electrical service, I don’t think the public will abandon desktop apps. In order to compensate for the unreliability of the Internet, web apps should store data both remotely and locally and synchronize the data transparently.
When I was in Korea, I wanted to make some music with a buddy who was back in the U.S. Obviously, we couldn’t get together and record a track. But we did manage to record a track together. I created and arranged the music track on my computer. I also recorded the chorus to the song. Then I called him up and played the music track through the phone. He did some vocals over the phone and I put the mic up against the phone and added it to the song. This was a crude way to do long distance collaboration. There should be a better way to collaborate musically using the Internet.
This is my idea. We need web based music software similar in functionality to Cakewalk’s Sonar that allows seamless collaboration with musicians. Sometimes, I am inspired and stumble upon a great guitar riff. I would like to be able to lay the guitar track down using this software and allow anybody else on the net to add to my song by laying down another instrument, lyrics, or a beat. It would be like Wikipedia, but the community would be building songs rather than articles. The great thing about Wikipedia is that anybody with specialized knowledge can contribute. Music is similar. Everybody has a specialty. A person who is a great flute player may have a hard time finding a project that they can contribute to. If this type of online community existed, they would definitely be able to find a project they could contribute to. A full fledged web based multi-track recording system would not be feasible. Instead, a company like Cakewalk could develop web based software that links users of their client-side software.
The Internet is changing everything. I don’t think we have even scratched the surface when it comes to the ways in which the Internet can be used to solve day to day problems. Imagine a "band" who have different band members for each song. Various people contribute to each song. Currently, there is a lot of talent being wasted. There is probably some amazing fiddle player in Notown, Iowa who has never contributed to any song. At the same time, there is probably some amazing folk song writer in L.A. who cannot find a decent fiddle player. The Internet could bring these people together with the right software.