4M

Sometimes our clients get a little impatient with the website process. This may be because they have hired “putter-uppers” to create websites for them in the past and “putting up” is a very quick process.

What’s a putter-upper? This is a phrase that Gerry McGovern uses and I think is very appropriate. It describes webmonkeys who take the content their clients give them and simply throw it onto a website and walk away. They have no consideration for Information Architecture, User-Centered Design or editing the quality and quantity of their content so it actually meets the users’ needs. There are a million of them out there, and they’re very cheap and very fast. This is why so many websites look and read as though someone crapped out a bunch of content and threw it against the wall … because they did.

By contrast, here at YVOD, we spend weeks developing and refining user personas. We stay up late nights worrying about whether a link in the global or persistent navigation really and truly deserves that top spot. Will anyone click on it? Is it meaningful? Is it fluff? Can we get rid of it?

We crop the pictures they give us just so. If they’re too dark, we lighten them. If the background is hideous, we delete it. We make special little images that have their logo on them that display when they haven’t given us any pictures for that item. If all their pictures are terrible, we gently tell them that they need to cough up the money for a professional photographer. The ones that follow our advice end up delighted.

We read clients’ copy that they give us, shake our heads and then quietly edit it down so that actual people might actually be tempted to read it and - gasp - want to purchase the products or services our clients offer. Often they don’t even realize that we perform this service for them, because we generally just don’t make a big deal out of it. We don’t really expect them to care as much as we do about the user’s experience. All they have to do is worry about their business and keeping their customers happy, their lights on, their employees fulfilled and the IRS off their backs.

It’s our job to care. It’s our job to give advice about copy and then edit it. It’s our job to strategize, plan, argue, ditch the strategy and come up with a better one that makes more sense. It’s our job to follow their customers around their store and notice how they behave and what they say. It’s our job to dig and dig and dig some more until we find their core differentiator and to make damn sure that their truest message is expressed on their website, their chief marketing tool.

Sometimes people who own small businesses come to us and they like our products, and have heard awesome things about us, but don’t think they can afford our prices. We smile at them and politely refer them to a putter-upper. We don’t mind losing the business, because we know they’ll be back next year after they’ve realized they cannot afford to have a website that doesn’t meet their customers’ needs.

Want a putter-upper? You can outsource them from third-world countries for about $3 an hour. They’ll put up your content quickly and you’ll have your website and it’ll be done. You won’t be able to edit it easily; your website may look just like your neighbor’s since they’re all template-based; your text will be long, boring and unreadable and your pictures will be ugly. But you’ll have your website.

Just remember: When you’re ready to move past mediocrity and into excellence, we’ll be here waiting for you.

marisa@yvod.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 1st, 2006 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Rants & Raves, Project Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.