Your website is about them, not about you
May 30th, 2009 | By Ara | Category: Content ManagementDave Pollard talks about how to avoid the mistakes that so many corporations have already made online. He refers to “some very large and expensive lemons, three in particular:”
- Public websites that don’t reach customers
- Intranets (internal content management systems) that serve up content almost no one uses
- ‘Groupware’ tools (like SharePoint) designed to improve internal collaboration, that actually discourages collaboration
Sharepoint is a particular crime that I would like to see prosecuted more efficiently. It is heinously over-engineered with proprietary features. Only a rocket scientist could understand it all. It require full-time IT support. It creates bottlenecks by requiringcomplex “authorizations” to put anything up in the system. So in the end, only a tiny fraction of people ever use it — and even fewer people understand it.
IMHO, a good content management system should not only make it easy to find stuff but also make it easy to share stuff. The fact that Sharepoint actually has the chutzpah to put the word “share” in it’s name is a cruel joke on buyers and users.
But I digress. Back to Pollard:
What’s the best model for a corporate website? If it’s for customers, that depends on what the segment of your customers who actually research or shop online need and want. If you make the effort to identify this segment, and go out and talk with them, I think you’ll be surprised at what you learn.
You might discover that the best thing you can provide is a directory of names and direct line phone numbers of real individual people in your company that your customers can talk to, without having to go through your god-awful automated switchboard (“if you know the extension number of the person you’re calling…”).
[…]
And if you want to…index your products and services so that people can browse online (if in fact they tell you they want to), design the taxonomy around the problem the product or service solves, the job it does, not by its industrial category.
[…]
And remember, your website is about them, not about you.
Amen, brother.
Read Pollard’s article, especially if you are in the process of designing your corporate website, intranet or [shudder] if you are considering shelling out the dough for Sharepoint.
