Ten Reasons Why Brochureware Websites Continue to Fail to Impress

Brochureware - "websites or web pages produced by converting a company’s printed marketing or advertising material into an Internet format."  - Oxford Dictionary 2013

Do you have an organisation website? I am sure you do because everyone else does. Back in the mid 1990’s any organisation worth their salt decided to build a corporate brochure on the internet because everyone else was doing the same, hence the inevitable rise of the digital design agency. These old websites lacked any focused purpose and all too often were a mix of ubiquitous marketing messages that addressed nothing and no one in particular. Many organisations were stung with huge design costs for what were in truth rather lacklustre web brochures based on old marketing principles that were inordinately difficult for the frustrated organisation to manage alone.

That was the case back in 1997 so where do we find ourselves today? For many organisations unbelievably they find themselves in pretty much the same place as 15 years ago. Rather than commoditizing websites so that they are now highly professional and yet easy to manage and update, you only need to invest an hour of your time to run round the international partner internet ecosystem to see that things are very far from being okay.

This article summarizes ten primary reasons why so many organisational websites fail to impress, achieve their aims or sell the services of their owners. Whilst this article is aimed at the technology partner, many of the elements listed here can easily be applied to any organisational website to help you determine whether you are really on track with your web strategy.

 1. Great Websites Requite Time, Effort & Investment

“You will reap what you sow” says the old adage and this is certainly true of websites. If you put in little effort in terms of design, focus and content you will get little back. There are literally millions of websites that remain devoid of visitors and yet to the innocent eye, look great.  There are no short cuts to a rich and engaging website that fully represents your brand and reflects your full value proposition. Why then is it the case that so many websites are treated as if they are secondary issues with underwhelming budget and lack of business engagement?

Great websites do not need to cost tens of thousands of dollars to create and most of the websites I have created which have generated as much as 1.25 million visitors per month have actually cost very little in $ terms. What websites do require however is time and effort in terms of content creation and tuning, messaging, audience understanding and search engine strategy. These are things that do not happen overnight and are generally iterative.

Looking at a multitude of current technical organisation websites it is simply staggering how bad many of them are and how little investment they have gained considering the task that is being asked of them – to represent an entire organisation and its primary value propositions to a global audience of viewers. Far too many websites rely almost purely on an identity of original logo and brand colour scheme without any further thought or strategy. What is most often missing is up to date, fresh content, original and varied material and original thought. To a degree then this is why they offer little value to the visitor and simply a little investment in time and effort addressing the other points in this article would help enormously..

2. Websites Frequently Fail to Understand their Own call to Action

Brochureware websites are all too often built to tell the world that you exist, that you are here and that you have a website! To be blunt: so what? If the website isn’t offering something of specific and immediate value then do not be surprised if people exist after just a few seconds, never to return. Your value proposition should be clearly presented on the front page, immediately obvious and with a clear message or call to action.  

You must first set out exactly what you aim the website to achieve and then design it to underpin this or these objectives. If the website does not have a specific purpose then ask yourself what it is really there to achieve.

Let’s go back to basics, what are you selling and why are you selling it and what makes this thing or these things so different from your competitors and why should anyone really come to you? Maybe the fact that you are based in DC is the main thing or that you have a market differentiator that can’t be found anywhere else or that you have a packaged business solution that really does make a lot of sense to certain organisations.

Have you made the value proposition clear in the opening statement on the opening page. Have you cleared out the cluttered jargon and techno speak and useless logos and mapped out what it is you are offering and why? If you haven’t then your website just may be falling at the first hurdle.

 3. Websites Frequently Do Not Understand Who they are Talking To

Far too many websites try to be all things to all people or worse nothing to anyone in particular whilst no specific audience has been determined. It is perhaps rather harsh to suggest that many organisational websites primarily serve the ego of the executive officers of the company who commission these sites but it is certainly evidently the case that far too many websites read like CEO/Partner Owner resumes and celebrations of historical success.

An effective website should be built with a specific audience in mind to achieve a specific call to action. If a website exists to sell specific services then the site should aim to get people to pick up the phone and call to make a pre-sales appointment. If a website is selling a product then the site needs to offer a free trial or demo or other content that underlines the process of product sale.

If a website offers nothing more than general information with no call to action then why have the website at all? Included in this point is the speech being used to talk, otherwise known as the language of the website: Just cast your eye around the internet at tech firms and take a look at the phraseology in use by the majority of firms: “enterprise social”, “trusted advisor” and the plethora of single statements supposedly designed to inspire “the business of the future is today”. No one talks like that in real life so why put it on your website?!  Instead think about matching the language of your website to the audience of your website.

 4. Websites Are Failing to Scale and Render to Multiple Platforms 

Does your website work seamlessly by expanding on a 36 inch monitor and resolving on a smartphone or tablet? Or does your website simply work on your own laptop? Have you ever tested your website properly on multiple portable devices or are you hoping future potential customers will do that for you?

It comes as no surprise that over 70% of current organisational websites will not render correctly on mobile phones and yet we are seeing the largest drop in PC purchasing ever as they are replaced by portable devices so who is missing the point here?

If your website will not work whilst a potential customer views it on a train, in the airport or in the back of a cab then can you blame them for not coming back?

 5. Websites Frequently Lack any Search Engine Optimization Strategy

 

“Build it and they will come” states another adage rather optimistically; we all know this does not work. You can put a huge amount of effort into building a website but if no one can find it then what is the point of its existence? Whilst back in 1997 SEO may have been viewed as some form of black art, today there really is no excuse at all as all the tricks and tactics for search engine optimization have been extensively documented and are readily available and therefore require your investment and attention.

SEO isn’t a one-off task and neither is it within the normal skill range of your internal marketing team and may require planning like a military exercise. However the basics of SEO are extremely well known and easily followed and yet I would go as far as saying that 85% of websites have little if any search engine strategy in situ from the evidence of the websites visited recently.  

 6. Websites are Frequently Bland, Undistinguished, Lifeless & Dull

Actually many tech partner websites really are  some of the most dull websites you will ever visit which is why, when you look at your web stats you may be surprised to find the majority of your visitors refused to stay. There are fashions in website design and there are fashions in colour palettes (white for example) as well as (fly out) menu design and page structures but being the same as everyone else does not mean your website is original, refreshing and full of inspiration.

When was the last time you considered embedding video and audio, podcasts, blogs and animation or do you think it is better to stick to flat images and some text headlines? Are you using the very best collateral to appeal to the audience you determined in point 3? Variety is the spice of life and you can apply that cliché to your website to good effect.

 7. Websites Frequently Lack Engaging Content

It is a tough one but the reasons why blogs are starting to dominate search engine results is because websites lack engaging and useful content that is regularly refreshed. Of course one of the ways to solve the issue is to add a blog to the website but I would suggest that there is no reason why a website should not have plenty of fresh and rich information and article pages that are regularly updated.

Go one further and build the website using WordPress or similar so that it is in effect a blog at heart which then allows easy addition of new news articles and items of interest. I visit websites annually that fail to change one word year on year and most certainly do not contain informative articles.

With the easy access to YouTube there is also no reason why the website should not contain plenty of video material that adds a layer of engagement and infotainment that is still largely lacking in most sites today.  

Whilst I mention content it is also amazing how core content on website pages is badly written, lacks spell-checking and is grammatically incorrect. It may not matter to you, but it may matter to someone looking to spend tens of thousands of dollars with you.

 8. Websites are Often Guilty of Trying Too Hard

 

You know when you are being sold to and so do I. Therefore it should come as a surprise that many websites continue to be so unsophisticated, so overt if not clichéd in the way they overtly (over)sell their messages with over-the-top statements, outlandish claims and corny one-liners. Put simply, overt selling turns people off and audiences today are far more sophisticated than web marketers give them credit for.

It is not good enough to say we are the leading Office 365 partner, the number 1 Microsoft partner, the partner of the year or the award-winning…these statements are only minor underscore of a much larger value proposition and its sadly the larger value proposition that is rarely stated in plain English and without marketing lingo.

Go and read the jaded comments for YouTube video ads for an hour or two and digest how today’s jaded audiences actually react to cheesy one-liners and audacious statements, you will find plenty of thumbs down. If you allowed a bunch of tech savvy teenagers onto your website would you gain many thumbs up or thumbs down, be serious. Objectivity regarding web collateral is hard but you will do yourself a great favour if you do use an objective focus group to assist you in removing the worst of your web marketing sins.

 9. Websites Follow a Formulaic Structure

Do you know why Contact Us appears to the right hand side of the menu on most websites? Do you believe people work across a website menu from left to right? Have you any evidence of this yourself? Too many websites are designed using a painting-by-numbers template formula whereby everything from the home page structure to the menu wording is via a design that everyone chooses to employ.

What this really means is not that people will find your website easy to access and use but that it looks just like everyone else’s and therefore fails to distinguish and differentiate itself in those first crucial seconds. More time needs to be spent at creating a website structure that underpins your specific call to action rather than whether it contains the same elements as found on other websites.

 

10. Websites Lack Proactive Tuning

That’s it done, the website is built so we will come back and visit it again in a few years. That is all too often the problem with websites. In designing and building a website, it should have metrics that can be measured and monitored and tuning of page design, content, messaging and other elements to drive the call to action by the visitors. If this is employed then there is a far greater chance that the website is a valuable asset that underpins organisational growth rather than being an expensive albatross round your neck. As with point 1 in this article, investment is required and this means continuous investment by those who are skilled in web design and strategy.

If you do not know what the website is specifically there to achieve and there is nothing measurable to check success criteria against then there is no way of knowing whether any investment in a website presence is required or is gaining a return.

Conclusion

Of course, many organisations have become side-tracked by building a social network presence, presence in Facebook (cheap and fast), Linked-in (cheap and fast) together with other social outlets. Whilst these certainly play a part in brand expansion, most user information searches are still performed via the primary internet search engines.Therefore whilst finding your website in search is critical, once found, if your website fails any or many of the points featured above then your web presence may achieve anything from maintaining the status quo to turning potential clients away. The task is to impress your visitors but you really need to check whether you are failing.

I am sure that some readers will be reading this article feeling pretty pleased that the points raised surely cannot apply to them as they have recently launched a brand new website with lots of fresh new graphics and a glossy new look. I have only today viewed three newly launched websites from technology companies that in fact fail on most of the points above. They look expensive but they fail to impress and I won't be back.

Life & Death & Online Social Etiquette

I have taken time out to consider something rather poignant and relevant that has happened to me recently and one which we should all take a little time consider, the accidental discovery of the death of a friend as discovered first through the social ecosphere, on this occasion via Facebook.

Now I have to say that I have never been a great collector of online friends for a wide range of reasons, including the fact that headcount has been very far from important in my life. It’s the cliché of quality not the quantity don’t you know. However, those who have been fortunate or indeed unfortunate enough to merit befriending have gladly and gleefully shared the ups and downs of their existence. Their trials and tribulations (often much to my chagrin) have been copiously detailed in less than 140 characters including of course the joyous birth of new human beings in the form of literally thousands of online photos of innocuous and inane bald headed babies at the start of their beautiful lives. I have mastered the secret ability using online social etiquette of course to filter out every single photo of every little darling of any friend I ever had so that I can avoid the dubious appreciation of photos of ice-cream laden kids I will never ever meet.

Whether we like it or not, social networks ram the beginning of life down our throats, every single photo of it. I am surprised I haven’t yet encountered an online friend’s photo album entitled “Marie in various stages of Labour” followed by “Claire Gives Birth to Jack (32 Photos in HD Res) – click Like, Share or Comment. The truth is that in accepting and learning to live with any social network we choose to accept social variety, and that really means variety we cannot control and variety of life that is placed right in front of our eyes without asking permission. It just appears – in our news feed. We have learned the online etiquette of handling everything from dull workmates to smug parents which calls for mastering every single online tool enabling us to filter unwanted news until one day these people quietly and accidently slip off our friends list altogether. It may not be fair, but that’s life my friend.

It doesn’t end there. Once we have focused in on our personal, social connection list of more like-minded individuals and those we find entertaining or those we simply wish to stalk, sorry admire, we have to master their day-to-day foibles and whims, many previously never catalogued or unknown to behavioural science. This is of course known as life itself, where every single minutiae of mundane life is shared in excruciating detail due to social network news feeds that never ever, ever stop. We are in a blizzard of news inanity, from Giles going for a run with the obligatory timekeeper mileage report – like I care, almost hardly stopping short of Jeff reporting that he is now visiting the bathroom and what a visit it was. I seriously don’t care and I never ever did!

Consequently we started to invent rules for online behaviour and interaction and then tools when those rules were blatantly ignored and we needed to enforce our own selfish rules instead.

The day that Mark Zuckerberg shouted orders at his team to add the ‘Filter News Feed’ feature was the day he admitted this social thing has very real problems – and the day when we admitted to ourselves that we needed to learn further etiquette. In the beginning it started with too many friends or, just like college, the wrong kind of friends to get our friends-numbers up. Later, much later we learned the rules of how to stay friends with people online that we don’t actually really like very much but ones we need to stay above zero on our friend-counter, stay friends with those that are active socialites or ones that may occasionally fill up the social news feeds with something other than Farmville or photos of a family weekend on an Underwater Basket-Weaving holiday in the Ural Mountains. Who wants to readily admit they only have 5 real friends! We have in short, learned to extend our social network in rather passive ways and live with those we want to live with and we have applied new online social ways of achieving this.

Over the last, relatively short, decade of online social interaction we have also (re)discovered and developed some form of etiquette that covers the many eventualities of online social information leakage through social networks, be it the fact that your ex is now dating a golf coach, has run away with a clown from the circus or has taken off to roam Indonesia and posted a huge amount of heavily doctored positive online PR whilst insisting on remaining ‘connected’.

We have mastered the online social etiquette of be-friending, re-friending, de-friending & un-friending. We have learned when to do it, how to best do it and how to deny we ever did it. We have worked out that the truth is not the best path to enlightenment but instead heavily doctored versions of the truth certainly work best in our online social ecosphere. We have employed subtle online social etiquette (clicking on a button) to rediscover people long lost (I have ‘friended’ you mate), we have rediscovered old flames (I have ‘friended’ you babe) and we have rescued lost relationships (I have ‘friended’ you darling). We have worked out whether it is a good thing to have our family, exes, lovers, wives and husbands on our friends list and also followed new social etiquette to make sure they can or cannot see exactly what we are doing or saying, whilst remaining absolutely guiltless.

So, we have become masters of our own social universes, mini emperors in our own online PR empires and developed an entirely new set of parallel online social rules that purportedly shadow real life (when they seriously, really don’t my friend, but you knew that anyway) which have taken us from the day someone is born all the way through to……...ah yes.

And there you have it you see. What happens when we find out in a gentle casual, finger-click kind of way that someone we have known on and off for months, years, decades, forever, a real person, not just a headline and a profile photo with some creative PR has passed away, died, passed on, actually gone. What do we do then?  They are still there, they still have a profile, I can see them!

Now this isn’t as easy as one may imagine because of the very visible, shared connectedness of social networks. In real life we have made friends with people that other friends don’t know about and for reasons that other friends don’t understand or appreciate, after all, it is none of their business. On a social network, you are part of other people’s friends list, visible lists that are often shared with people you have never met and never will. You are by your very presence in a friend list, you are by its very definition a friend, whether you saw that person yesterday, two decades ago or even if ever. And the other people on the list can see your presence in that person’s life whether you like it or not. This means you have a responsibility to that person whether you like it or not, a social responsibility.

Social networks should not redefine what human friendship is and what it intrinsically means, not unless we have lost complete control of our senses.

So the need for online social etiquette suddenly zoomed into focus, quite urgently in fact. I clicked on my friend’s profile to see how they were as I thought they had been quiet for some time. I was greeted by a mysterious grey, spooky misty banner that could surely have been some kind of central Facebook team creative concept etiquette for bereaved profiles; it frankly gave me the creeps.  My now deceased friend was strangely still there as if they had never departed. I could scroll down and see their last posts in a macabre kind of way. I could see their photo albums of their holidays and their conversations as if they were still there. My friend had a populated friend list and yet some sad announcements that really didn’t feel like they belonged there and some memorial comments that frankly didn’t do the person real justice, but were heart felt all the same. It felt the wrong place to publish these things – it was as if a social network profile was purely for the living, for fun and not for the reality of life and death. I pondered on this and other issues.

The questions started and kept on coming. Is it better to write something on my friend’s wall like an epitaph that others who have no right to read but will read anyway. Should I make some kind of announcement as if they were still there, or is that rather trite? More poignantly but not heartless, were they now classed as  ‘friend’ in the online social sense, did I want a dead friend in my friend list with their visible image looking at me, should I remove them from the friends list now or should I wait for the funeral and then de-friend? Would this be a terrible thing to do? But then if I de-friended a dead friend it is like admitting there is no longer a friendship just because the person has passed on? So should I wait for the administrator of the deceased’s profile to close the profile down so I will be removed silently from this dilemma without having any online guilt and if so how long will that take and what happens if they do not and instead turn the profile into a memorial or shrine, what then? Maybe I could end up over time with a small friends list with more than one dead friend, then what! Would Facebook become like a cemetery where I visited all the now-deceased people I had previously known whilst alive!

Life takes its course from birth all the way through to death, that’s how things are. We are now starting to witness the first phase of entire lives passing through the social network ecosphere from beginning to end. Consequently we must all recognise what this may mean and how we approach it. Are social networks just for the good times and for the living? There are an ever increasing number of memorial pages after all. Perhaps we must start to face up to the fact that whilst death (of others) has always been something inevitable (to others) though many of us choose to pretend doesn’t exist (for now), or can be avoided (for now), or stepped round or be just plain ignored until it is pushed into our faces, social networks have the ability to make death something rather more visible than we may have previously learned to deal with.

It is for this reason that if we truly wish to embrace life in an online social world, we must also learn to embrace the inevitability of death that follows life with the appropriate online etiquette and dignity that retains our humanity and our compassion and is not reduced to the click of a finger. After all, we are all worth more than our profile page, aren’t we?

For those that wonder, my friend remains on my friend list.


Copyright Genius! by Morgan & Wolfe. All Rights Reserved 2013