|| Return to On The Road... ||
July 12, 1996
Cleveland
Dear Web:
Netscape announced earlier in the week that it plans to turn its browser into a form of an operating system; call up what you want, when you want, and it works. Funny thing is, Microsoft announced the same strategy a few months earlier; the only difference is, they are turning Windows into a browser.
All of this involves looking in the magical crystal ball, searching for what the future will be. And if you keep reading the newspapers and trying to following the latest marketing whim, you'll spend all your time putting together Java, VRML, Shockwave, and all the latest tricks, hoping that the one that hits will mark you as the person who was ahead of the learning curve.
Come on! The high tech promise is intriguing and will provide amazing experiences. The key word is "will"; right now, for people creating sites for less than $10,000, the idea of focusing on such high end technology is sucking the wind out of the market. Sites with enough funding and staff to keep progressing with such efforts will do well. But for small businesses, especially for the people I teach, the appeal undermines the effectiveness of a good site organized around headlines, text, and graphics.
The problem is, headlines, text, and graphics aren't glamorous. They won't win you the oohs and aahs of those who aren't online. And for a certain portion of the online audience, you will also lose them because you are not cutting edge. But being on the cutting edge means you bleed....alot. I know, having worked on CD-ROMs and multimedia until the bleeding got too profuse. That's why I went online and warn against early efforts using these technologies.
Look around the Web and you'll see sites doing cool things with the new technologies. But is it cool for the end user, for someone using AOL, someone who is simply looking for information? While the appeal of the high tech race for supremacy is appealing, you are playing into the hands of a major marketing campaign for the hearts and minds of the Internet. If you have the budget and time to build a site using all the latest tricks, more power to you.
But in all the research I read, people are still coming online to find information, to get their kids educated, to browse through their hobbies. All the bells and whistles in the world can't feed that interest. It's easy to get caught in special effects, but good content still wins out.
In one workshop a gentleman informed me of his love of Netscape and how I shouldn't put Java down. I don't put anything down, I just tell it like it is; if you are creating a site for a small budget, then focus on content and marketing. The sites making money do, they avoid the production-intensive and low return tricks. They don't want to bleed on the cutting edge of technology.
Look around at who is making money and you find one common link: they make a Web site real. They make it usable and easy to get around. They allow the audience to fill their site with the winds of interest; like beautiful yachts, they find their strength and power not in the physical tricks, but in the winds of interest that propel them. Every site making money relies on the interest of the audience and fulfilling that interest to generate money. The high tech sites rely on tricks which become outdated within a month. That kind of cycle will kill many more businesses than it will allow to prosper.
Like boats without sails, these sites are spending all their money on creating the hull of the boat, but they forget about the sails. So they drift in the ocean of the Web, buoyed by a few hardy passers by who swear by the beauty of the boat floating in the ocean, which few can reach. They like being the few, the select, who can appreciate your site, who have a fast enough modem and enough patience to weather your storms.
But the majority are out there, looking around. When the site breaks down for whatever reason, they leave. They don't want just the boat, they want a boat with sails. One that knows the best way to sail is to allow the audience to push you in the right direction.
So forget if Microsoft or Netscape will be the winner, or if it will be a Java world; I root for all of them to succeed, because if they do they bring more customers to my door. Customers I can entertain, entice, and provide valuable information too. People who want special effects in certain places, not as a distracting Web site without content.
People who want to fill the sails of their own interests because they are the experts, they are the future you should be betting on. Not dependent on programming, multimedia, or hype; they are the future consumers and visitors to the World Wide Web, looking for intriguing, engaging, and entertaining content, wrapped in a package that is easy to use.