The harsh truth about a corporate website
- Transfer
There are many corporate sites - few are good.
I thought that such a situation existed only in the post-Soviet space. The red directors, the few who still manage the remnants of the largest factories in Europe, will naturally fall under the tank better than give money, people and material resources to create “it is not clear what is in some kind of network”. New directors who did not really graduate from school in the late 80s, early 90s and certainly did not study at institutes (the glorious 90s) feel like a place where they are sitting that they are, to put it mildly, misleading when they offer to create a corporate site to attract new customers, maintain business reputation and image of the company. Moreover, when such a request comes your own programmer, often performing duties from a loader to a system administrator, and asks to allocate funds - the director’s eyebrows crawl up sharply,
I myself worked for 8 years at a large state-owned chemical enterprise (4,500 employees), 50 people have an IT department.
You know what our corporate website was. No, you don’t know what he was - he simply was not as a fact.
To my question to the head of the department - why actually? - followed a simple answer: “The director forbade (!!!) to do it”
Seeing in my eyes the boss was clearly misunderstood, and he understands IT quite well, the director said to him: “We have excellent sales of products, we do not manage to produce products already sold and are forced to refuse to conclude new contracts - why do we need a website?” That's the way the enterprise itself is still without a website, I really quit six months ago from there, but I don’t think that at least some steps have been taken to create a corporate website, especially the crisis.
It turned out that this problem worries and concerns not only me, but some foreign colleagues.
Website www.smashingmagazine.com published an article by Paul Boag (Paul Boag) under the name "10 The hard truth of the corporate website"
I offer my version of the translation, or rather the presentation (no, as a result, an almost literal translation turned out :) - my comments are in italics, there are not many of them).
Further from the author:
We all make mistakes by launching our own websites. The nature of these errors varies depending on the size of your company. Your company is growing - mistakes are changing. This article describes the most common mistakes of large organizations.
Most of the clients I worked for were large organizations: universities, large charities, community organizations, and large companies. Over the past 7 years, I have noted a definite return to lack of hope (aimlessness) in these organizations. This article aims to get rid of illusions and turn people face a harsh reality.
The problem is that if you read these lines, then you have probably already come across these things. But I hope this article will be useful to you to convince others in the company. In any case, here are 10 harsh truths about websites in large organizations.
Conclusions
Large organizations do a lot of things right when developing their websites. However, they face unique challenges that can lead to painful mistakes. The solution to these problems lies in changing domestic policies and changing the brand management style. This will provide significant competitive advantages and allow web strategies to become more effective in the long run.
About the Author
Paul Boag is the founder of Headscape web design studio , author of Website Owners Manual, and host of the web design podcast Boagworld.com .
Cross-post from my blog.
I thought that such a situation existed only in the post-Soviet space. The red directors, the few who still manage the remnants of the largest factories in Europe, will naturally fall under the tank better than give money, people and material resources to create “it is not clear what is in some kind of network”. New directors who did not really graduate from school in the late 80s, early 90s and certainly did not study at institutes (the glorious 90s) feel like a place where they are sitting that they are, to put it mildly, misleading when they offer to create a corporate site to attract new customers, maintain business reputation and image of the company. Moreover, when such a request comes your own programmer, often performing duties from a loader to a system administrator, and asks to allocate funds - the director’s eyebrows crawl up sharply,
I myself worked for 8 years at a large state-owned chemical enterprise (4,500 employees), 50 people have an IT department.
You know what our corporate website was. No, you don’t know what he was - he simply was not as a fact.
To my question to the head of the department - why actually? - followed a simple answer: “The director forbade (!!!) to do it”
Seeing in my eyes the boss was clearly misunderstood, and he understands IT quite well, the director said to him: “We have excellent sales of products, we do not manage to produce products already sold and are forced to refuse to conclude new contracts - why do we need a website?” That's the way the enterprise itself is still without a website, I really quit six months ago from there, but I don’t think that at least some steps have been taken to create a corporate website, especially the crisis.
It turned out that this problem worries and concerns not only me, but some foreign colleagues.
Website www.smashingmagazine.com published an article by Paul Boag (Paul Boag) under the name "10 The hard truth of the corporate website"
I offer my version of the translation, or rather the presentation (no, as a result, an almost literal translation turned out :) - my comments are in italics, there are not many of them).
Further from the author:
We all make mistakes by launching our own websites. The nature of these errors varies depending on the size of your company. Your company is growing - mistakes are changing. This article describes the most common mistakes of large organizations.
Most of the clients I worked for were large organizations: universities, large charities, community organizations, and large companies. Over the past 7 years, I have noted a definite return to lack of hope (aimlessness) in these organizations. This article aims to get rid of illusions and turn people face a harsh reality.
The problem is that if you read these lines, then you have probably already come across these things. But I hope this article will be useful to you to convince others in the company. In any case, here are 10 harsh truths about websites in large organizations.
- You need a dedicated web unit.
In most organizations, either a marketing (sales) or IT department is involved in a website. However, this inevitably leads to conflicts and the website becomes a victim of domestic politics.
In reality, the developed web strategy should not suit absolutely all groups, departments, and leaders. The IT department can do a great job building complex systems, but it’s not able to develop an online representation that is user-friendly.
The marketing department, on the one hand, is a little better. As Jeffrey Zeldman wrote in his article, Let there be Web divisions :The web is a conversation. Marketing is a monologue. And then there’s this mess with semantic markup, CSS, “unobtrusive scripting”, sorting, HTML, user engagement, and, ultimately, knowledge and skills that do not fit the requirements of marketers.
Instead, a separate dedicated team should deal with the website. Zelman notes this when he writes:
Direct them (people) to a unit that can determine that your site is not a miscarriage of your advertising booklets. Let there be a web unit. - Site management is a constant (daily) work.
But only if the website is not divided, as is often the case, between marketing and IT, it is not effective. Instead, with a dedicated web unit responsible for the website, you can expect the website to become their full-time “day job”. When a web unit is created, it is usually overloaded with personnel. They spend more time on site support, but not on its long-term strategic development.
This situation arises due to the fact that people are hired to support the website for the salary of a junior. They lack the experience and authority to promote the site forward, to develop it. So the time has come to organize serious investments in the website - you need to hire senior Web managers (full time) (I don’t know how to say thiswithout a piece of paperin Russian ) to move the site forward. - It’s not enough to do a periodic redesign.
Since corporate sites do not contain a lot of different information, they often do not update for quite some time. They are slowly lagging behind in relevance of content, in design and technology.
In the end, the website no longer meets the requirements of the times and needs to be reworked. This inevitably leads to a complete redesign and high costs. But this is a waste of money, because when the old site is replaced, the investments spent in it are also lost. It is also very difficult financially, as high costs will be required every few years.
The right way to invest in a website is to allow it to constantly evolve. This will not only reduce costs, but also better for site users. - Your website should not suit everyone.
One of the first questions I ask clients is: “Who is your target audience?” And I am constantly at a loss due to the extensibility of the answer. Often it includes a long and detailed list of different people. The next question arises from the previous one: “Which of these demographic groups is the most important?” Unfortunately, the answer is usually - they are all equally important.
The harsh truth is that if you develop a site for everyone, it will not work for anyone. It is very important to clearly focus on your visitors and create design and content just for them. Does this mean that you should ignore the rest? Of course not. Your website should be accessible to all and not offend or ignore anyone. However, a website should primarily target a well-defined audience. - You spend money on social networks.
I think it’s right that website managers understand that a web strategy is more than just launching a website. They are starting to use tools like Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to attract new audiences. However, despite the fact that they use these tools, often they do it inefficiently. A corporate blog on Twitter or product demonstrations on YouTube does not find its audience.
A social network is a person-to-person communication. People do not want to build relationships in brands and corporations. They want to communicate with other people. Too many organizations invest millions in Facebook apps and promotional videos, although they could spend this money communicating with people in an open and transparent manner.
Instead of creating a corporate Twitter account or corporate blog, encourage your employees to create accounts themselves. This will make it possible for community members to feel that they are communicating with live people, and at the same time can attract new visitors to your website. - Your website is not only about you and for you.
When some website managers want the site to be attractive to everyone, others want only them and their colleagues to like it. A surprising number of organizations completely ignore their users and build their sites according to their own preferences. This is usually reflected in a terrible design, satisfying the preferences of the manual and containing content full of jargon.
The website should not indulge in the preferences of management, but should strive to meet the requirements of users. A large number of designs are rejected, because the boss "does not like the green color." Also, many sites contain abbreviations and terms used only within the organization. - You do not receive returns from your web unit.
It doesn't matter if they have their own web unit or a third-party agency, most organizations fail, requiring everything from their web designers. A web designer is more than a pixel pusher ( pixel pushers - I understand the point, but I can’t translate it into Russian :) ). Designers have a lot of knowledge about the web and about user interaction with it. They also understand design techniques, including markup systems, empty spaces, color theory, and much more.
And therefore, it’s wrong to give them tasks such as “make the logo bigger” or “move it three pixels to the left”. By doing this, you reduce their role to operators and do not use all the baggage of their knowledge.
If you want to get the most out of your web unit, describe the problems, not the solutions. - Commission approval is the path to death.
A distinctive feature of large organizations in the approach to managing a website is a discussion in the commission. Usually commissions are formed because domestic policy requires that everyone expresses all wishes. All these wishes from the participants is a bad idea initially, but it is naive to assume that a large corporate website can be developed without such wishes. However, when these wishes come to design - for design this means a kiss of death (the author is a poet and romantic, however ).
Design is subjective. How we respond to design is determined by culture, age, gender, childhood experiences, and even physical fitness (such as color blindness). A design accepted by one person may be rejected by another. And that is why it is very important that design decisions appear as a result of testing by users, and not build on personal experience. Unfortunately, such solutions cannot appear during commissioned design development.
Commission design is based on compromises. Since each member of the commission has his own opinion, different from the others, they are looking for ways to find compromises. Unfortunately, this path leads to the creation of a design that will not suit anyone. - CMS is not a panacea.
Most of the clients I have worked with have completely wrong expectations for CMS. They believe that the CMS will solve all their problems, and become discouraged when they realize that it does not!
CMS of course has many benefits:- removes technical restrictions on adding content
- allows many to add and edit content
- speeds up the update
- and allows you to control
However, most CMS are not as flexible as their owners would like. They usually do not cope with the changing demands on the websites they manage. Website managers point out that CMS is hard to use. However, in most cases, this is noted because people are not sufficiently trained or do not regularly use CMS.
And finally, CMS of course allows you to simply update the content, but they do not guarantee the updating of the content or acceptable quality. Most websites built on CMS contain irrelevant low-quality content. This is because the internal processes in the organization are not focused on maintaining the relevance of the content.
If you hope that CMS will solve your questions about website support - you will be disappointed. - You have too much content.
Part of the problem with information on large corporate websites is that the amount of content is paramount.
Most of these sites in the process of "development" accumulate more and more content, while no one reviews the content and does not delete outdated and irrelevant content.
Many website managers fill their site with content that no one will ever read. The reasons for this behavior of managers:- lack of fear: by placing everything on the network, they believe that users can find everything they want. Unfortunately, the more information, the harder it is to find the right one.
- fear that users will not understand: due to a lack of confidence in their website or in their audience, they consider it necessary to provide endless instructions to users. Unfortunately, users never read these instructions.
- a desperate desire to convince: they are trying to sell a product or disseminate information, and therefore they inflate advertising text that contains little valuable information.
Conclusions
Large organizations do a lot of things right when developing their websites. However, they face unique challenges that can lead to painful mistakes. The solution to these problems lies in changing domestic policies and changing the brand management style. This will provide significant competitive advantages and allow web strategies to become more effective in the long run.
About the Author
Paul Boag is the founder of Headscape web design studio , author of Website Owners Manual, and host of the web design podcast Boagworld.com .
Cross-post from my blog.