What I learned from my kid’s preschool website
March 17, 2010
My kid goes to a really great school. I love it, and he loves it. It’s exactly the right place for a 4-year-old: the kids and the teachers work as a team to decide on activities, it’s fun, diversity is celebrated, the teachers are genuine and enthusiastic. It’s just great.
The school’s website, on the other hand, is not great. There’s too much text and not enough pictures. I’m fairly sure a lot of the information on it is out of date, but the site’s so uninspiring that I’m not compelled to actually read any of it to find out. It doesn’t communicate to any particular audience effectively – parents, educators, donors. There doesn’t seem to be much reason for its existence.
There is one part of the site that I visit every day. Religiously.
And that’s the private forum for parents. It’s a window into the school-world of my son that I would otherwise have no access to. Every day the teachers post stories and photos of the day’s activities, and every day, like all the other parents, I come back to see what our kids have been up to.
I’m positive that the private forum is the part of the school’s online presence that gets the most traffic. By far. From the school’s perspective, that’s not necessarily a good thing. They went to the effort of building an entire website, and it mostly fails as a communication tool, except for one part, which is not publicly accessible. But for me, that’s irrelevant. I’m a single user, and I get a lot of value out of that one part of the site. For me, it works, because that one part of the site is relevant.
A website should be relevant to the single user.
That’s the point. A website should not address a large audience, it should address a single person. This is almost universally true, and definitely true for this school’s site.
SFGate Experiments with Branding (and Fails)
March 16, 2010
When the sfgate.com (website of the San Francisco Chronicle) home page loaded I thought I must have entered the wrong URL. It was obviously a travel site with a whole lot of text on it. Was that an advertisement on the top right for SFGate?
Nope.
A good proportion of their home page was given over to a Hawaii promotion, and I found it visually arresting. It made me think about a Hawaii vacation (and a Twitter background).
Problem is, this isn’t a travel agency site, it’s a news site. These are tough times and this approach smacks of desperation. Like those cable TV channels with their logos that consume the bottom right corner– and then rotating ads on top of it, all while you’re trying to watch a movie. It seems so insulting and disrespectful (I always wonder what the filmmakers think). Your movie is nothing more than a place for us to hang our logo.
This SFGate home page feels the same. All that news stuff, it’s really gets in the way of the advertisement. I applaud them for the experiment. I hope they don’t repeat it.
Harelips and Haute Couture: NYTimes Brings You the World
March 8, 2010
Style and substance collide in an unfortunate combination of high fashion, birth defects and rotating ads.
I’ve never been accused of being a fashion plate but the other day visiting the nytimes.com homepage I was inspired to click on photos from the Paris 2010 Fall Collections.
I was shocked by what I saw. It wasn’t just the emaciated stick figure wearing what looked to my cretinous eye like thrift shop finds. It was the advertisement showing a young boy with a cleft palette.
The sad pair of big brown eyes stare out from the right side of the page in silent protest. A click of a mouse can save his life, but the cost of the handbag alone would pay for his corrective surgery. Yet it’s the model whose life force seems precarious if she doesn’t eat something soon.
This bizarre juxtaposition of images and the resulting mixed messages would never happen in the print publication. Unless The Times is suggesting that cleft palette is a fashion trend maybe somebody (other than me) needs to start paying attention to the rotating ads.
How To Annoy Your Customers (II)
March 1, 2010
This is a classic example of what NOT to do to potential customers who visit your website.
I found White Flower Farm’s site when I did a Search for “Bulb Garden gifts.” Their page showed 7 different options, one of which was clearly labeled “Sold Out.” So I selected “Here Comes the Sun” which is “New!” Surely that’s available…
Nope. Clearly I was too late. “Sorry, this product is sold out.”
Sorry? Why didn’t they tell me that before I clicked on it?
We suggest the following item(s):
Nothing. NO suggestions.
But I don’t give up so easily. I try “Roses of Winter.”
Sold Out.
I click on “Ice Blue Elegance.”
Sold Out.
They’re obviously doing OK because everything seems to be sold out. But this is a terrible online experience (and the more I look at their site the worse it gets). These usability problems undermine the strong White Flower Farm brand. They could be easily fixed if somebody was paying attention to the customer experience.
But things get worse. I return to my Search results and click on an ad for Burpee.com. They paid for the click, which brought me to a “File not found” page.
Granted, it’s a fairly nice file not found page, but still, this is hardly a good experience.
Only Google benefits from it.
