Dear Colleagues,

An entertaining and informative article on web site from
the current issue of Gerry McGovern's newsletter, New Thinking.

Gerry is one of my favorite writers on web design. His newsletter
comes once a week, and it's always worth reading. His site is worth
visiting at

http://www.gerrymcgovern.com

You can subscribe to the newsletter free at

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Yours,

Ken Friedman

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5 PERCENT OF YOUR WEBSITE DELIVERS AT LEAST 25% OF YOUR VALUE.
DO YOU KNOW WHICH 5 PERCENT? FIND OUT HOW
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/mcgovern-carewords.htm

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WHY AWARD-WINNING WEBSITES ARE SO AWFUL

Practical and functional websites rarely win prizes for design
but they do win sales and make profits.

Recently, I did a masterclass on web sales with about 50 Danish
web managers. I gave them a list of issues and asked them to
choose the most important ones for them. The top 5 issues for
these managers were: Increase sales, Customer-focused,
Usability, Completing the sale, Serving customers better.

Then I asked them to look at the list again, and this time
choose the issues that were of least importance to them. These
were: Credit card fraud, More use of Flash, Award-winning
website, Wow factor, More animation.

The Danes (and other Scandinavians) are probably the most
sophisticated web practitioners I have had the pleasure to deal
with. When I deal with countries that are at the bottom of the
curve when it comes to web adoption and ecommerce expertise,
award-winning websites driven by Flash and wow factors tend to
be top of the agenda.

"I no longer enter my agency's layouts in the contests by the
art director's societies, for fear that one of them might be
disgraced by an award," David Ogilvy wrote in his 1963 seminal
book, Confessions of an Advertising Man. This legend of
advertising stated that "I wage war on art-directoritis, the
disease which reduces advertising campaigns to impotence."

Inspired by David Ogilvy's wisdom, I decided to visit
Ogilvy.com. There I was presented by another quote from the
great man: "You aren't advertising to a standing army, you are
advertising to a moving parade." And right underneath that
quote, Ogilvy.com is boasting about how it has just won 13
awards.

In fact, rarely have I come across a more vain, conceited
homepage. In about 110 words, the name Ogilvy (or Ogilvy &
Mather) is used over 20 times. Other phrases include "our work"
and "what we do".

Nathan Shedroff recently gave a talk at User Interface 11, where
he asked the audience to name areas of life where good design
has made a real impact. (Nathan is the co-author of a book on
experience design called Making Meaning.) Design innovations
such as wireless, voting systems, nutrition fact sheets,
starting a car, were mentioned.

Nathan mused that they could spend an hour mentioning really
important design innovations and have a very long list. In his
opinion, nothing on this list would have won a design award.
Nathan showed an image of the iPod, that he described as a white
block with rounded corners. Absolutely functional design. Just
like the Google homepage.

The Danes understand that a website needs to be designed for the
customer, not for the organization, and certainly not for the
web team. The most dangerous thing that web professionals can do
is assume that what they really care about is what their
customers really care about.

The Web is a functional, practical place. A great website drives
the customer to act. It uses clear, substantial language, rather
than clever, meaningless words. To quote David Ogilvy again:
"When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when
Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.' I'm
with Demosthenes."

The shiny surface wins awards. Real substance wins customers.

Gerry McGovern
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5 PERCENT OF YOUR WEBSITE DELIVERS AT LEAST 25% OF YOUR VALUE.
DO YOU KNOW WHICH 5 PERCENT? FIND OUT HOW
http://www.gerrymcgovern.com/mcgovern-carewords.htm
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NEW THINKING NEW THINKING NEW THINKING NEW THINKING
By Gerry McGovern - http://www.gerrymcgovern.com
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October 16, 2006 - Volume 11 Number 39
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You may quote freely from this issue once you give proper
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appreciated.)

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