The interesting thing about Empire Building & Marketing, is that to be successful, you have to get into the mind of your customer. You literally have to think like them, and in all honesty, I doubt if many webmasters do that. I honestly don’t think we actually get into the mind of our customers, but instead rely on figures to say, yeah, we did that right, or oops, we gotta do that differently.
Take the whole concept of Porn. It is there not to educate people, but to entertain them, and we forget that. We also forget, just like mainstream media has forgotten, that endless repeats do not build customer loyalty. So stale overused photo sets, video clips, and sales jargon will have the same impact on our customers.
IT WILL MAKE THEM LOOK ELSEWHERE.
Now, I also believe that we design our sites, to please our tastes, not our customer’s taste. I mean look at how successful the big box stores have been, but notice too, that the little mom & pop stores have thrived as well. They haven’t been driven out of business, as many thought, and in return, the big box outfits, are trying to gobble them up, to expand beyond what an ordinary person can comprehend. And yet, the smaller outlet still survives, still grows and sprouts up.
EVER WONDER WHY?
It is because first off, you can access them easier, and most of the time, the staff is more trained, more astute when it comes to what is being sold in the smaller outlet. The huge box outlets, well, the staff is helpful at a minimum, and when it comes to knowing where something is, well good luck. The sheer size makes it hard to know where anything is, because well, there really isn’t a lot of rhyme or reason to the placement of departments.
Same holds true with huge mega sites. They offer 100,000 pictures, and just as many videos, but try to access them in a proper fashion, try to find that kind of guy or girl you want to see naked. Not quite so simple, or easy, and that is our fault. We forget, that what is simple ordinary navigation, is not so simple for the MAJORITY OF OUR CUSTOMERS.
WE CREDIT THE SURFER WITH KNOWING THE TERMS WE USE DAILY.
Truth is, they really don’t. My wife, David is not a stupid guy. He’s pretty smart, yet he too, has problems comprehending the terms I use, such as ‘header navigation’ or ’sidebar’. Granted, a lot of that is changing, thanks to the enormous popularity of blogging, of myspace, but we still need to design for the common element.
There too lies a conundrum. We aren’t surfers, and things change rapidly, so unless we can plug into some honest surfers, pick their minds, we can only guess at what they know, or don’t. We have to forget that fancy stuff, like drop down menus are common. If we are lucky, and they mouse over one, they might explore it, but if they don’t? Then we are shit out of luck, so we need to take those things into consideration when building our site.
Bottom line is that we can make guesses based on stats, but the reason for some sales, or retention of members, is simply due to the content, not how well we designed the site, or how good the navigation is. We forget, that while we think its easy, the stats may even make us believe that is true, bottom line is, we don’t know.
So when you are building your empire, take into account that the person who is paying your bills, may not be a whiz on the computer. Keep in mind that how you layout your site, will greatly influence whether you are successful or not, and doing that AFTER THE FACT, just won’t cut it.
In other words, while knowing stats forwards and backwards is nice, it isn’t always accurate. It can lead to what is called False Positives, and that can give us a false sense of how things really are. That is my biggest beef, with those who quote a lot of stats. It is like they are trying to justify something, that common sense says isn’t so. And there, is the pitfall.
You have to come to a decision, at some time. Using stats is a help, but not the end all to it. Common Sense is just as important, if not more so.
Feb 24th by Malcontent