Good websites have something in common.
Ditto for bad ones.
Good websites allow the typical person to quickly and efficiently do what they came
to the site to do without feeling like an idiot, or the victim of an idiot.
Bad websites don’t.
Regardless of everything else. Like strategy, content, and functionality.
Or the technology used to build them. Or whether they handle ten million hits a
day or ten a week.
What makes a site good or bad is this: How well does it work for human beings?
Why everything else is secondary.
We can build sophisticated real-time database-driven sites. We can build encylopedic
informational sites. We can build highly secure transactional sites.
But that’s the “everything else” — and putting any of that first kills or
cripples 99% of websites.
How we build sites that people are willing and able to use.
We do this by having real live human beings test the site at every stage
of development.
When we’re done, the site will perform so well that ordinary people hardly notice
they’re using it, except to say to themselves, “Wow, why aren’t all websites like
this?”
What guarantees you'll be delighted with the result.
While other companies are burning up money to make laborious fixes to inhuman sites
that real, live people despise, or dread, or simply avoid, you will be using the
web for other things, like:
- Reaching out a hand and welcome a prospect into your showroom
- Reassuring a new customer that they made the right purchase—and
strengthen their bond to your brand
- Dynamically tailoring web-page content to each visitor’s unique
identity or moment-to-moment behavior
- Continuously offering new content--relevant, useful and fresh—without
going broke
- Quickly swapping information among clients, vendors, and employees
- Supporting the sales cycle, streamlining service, keeping close tabs
on customer attitudes, and boosting employee morale
- Impressing prospective hires, investors, and the media—and discouraging
competitors
Who we probably can't help.
After all, no one does everything well. Specifically, we probably aren’t the
best choice for:
- Keeping up with “thejoneses.com.” If a company
only has a website to demonstrate a tech-savvy corporate culture, they’ll have a
hard time cost-justifying professional development and would be better served by
solutions from hosting companies or freelancers.
- Maintaining your sole lifeline. If a company
lives or dies by a web site’s daily activity, they need to manage it in-house. Even
if 100% of a company’s sales and service are at retail outlets, the web may be mission-critical
to the relationship with prospects, vendors, employees or investors. Companies like
this may use us for a particular development project to be hosted online.
- Winning a hip award for high art. If
you are designing a site for other designers, we’re not your best choice. On the other hand, if you
are designing a site for 99.9% of web users, you might be better off skipping the high
art.
But we are the perfect choice for companies needing a dynamic, efficient site that
does at least two things very well:
1) makes users happy
2) makes you happy
That means regardless of everything else you want your site to do, first
and foremost you would say to us,
“We want the site visitor to leave with a good feeling that they just dealt with
an informed and caring human being."
“And while we’re at it, we want to use the web to reduce labor, avoid errors, satisfy
demand, learn about our customers, and help them learn about us — and we want to do
it all in real time.”
If that’s you, you’ve found a perfect match.