Don't Make the Mistakes I Did in Web Site Planning and Development
The new electronic interdependence recreates the world
in the image of a global village.
--Marshall McLuhan
When I started the 400 Year Project in 1995, I sensed that electronic communications about the project's goals would be important. But I was clueless about what to do.
The youngest people at Mitchell and Company assured me that we had to have a Web site for the project. They explained that a Web site was going to be the universal medium for finding important information. Although none of us had ever been involved in creating a Web site, I was told that there was nothing to it. If you believe that, I've got a bridge I can sell you.
I hired one staff member, Jason Breyan, to work full-time on the project, and he led the charge for developing the Web site. Fitting in with my preference for aesthetics, he located a designer who could produce intriguing looking pages.
We had a hard time figuring out what to put on the Web site. Someone had the good idea of using Tobi Kahn's paintings for the project to spruce up the pages. With Tobi's kind permission, we did exactly that. This arrangement worked out well for Tobi because he didn't have a Web site in those days, and many people came to know his work through our project's Web site.
However, being attractive wasn't going to be the most important factor for the Web site: We needed to decide what content to use. An early resource for helping with this thinking was our friend, Robert Metz, who had founded the Marketplace column in the business section of The New York Times and later served as New York bureau chief of Financial News Network, a cable news network that was later merged with CNBC.
From this collaboration, key concepts began to emerge. Perhaps the most important of these early ideas was that some forms of thinking and behaving delay improvements. After much discussion, we decided to call these factors "stalls" and to begin to identify the individual stalls. We weren't sure how to identify all of the stalls. Someone suggested we invite those who visited the Web site to share their ideas about stalls that they had observed or experienced. We decided to try that approach.
The hardest part of creating the Web site was figuring out how to describe why the project's purpose is a reasonable one. One of the key documents we created was "Time Telescope" that considered what a company might look like in 2395 if 2 to 3 percent a year productivity gains continued.
We focused on that aspect of progress because companies have been the most effective sources of improvements for the last few centuries. The bulk of productivity improvements have come in the fields of manufacturing, farming, mining, electronics, computing, and medicine though the directions taken by the companies that wanted to expand their sales by improving products and lowering costs. Governments, by contrast, usually experience negative productivity as do many nonprofit organizations.
Here are some of the projections we shared in that section:
-A well-run manufacturing company would have sales per employee of $1.5 billion in constant dollars.
-New products and services would be designed and put into production in less than a day.
-The cost of doing a constant computing task would decline by more than 99 percent within 20 years.
As I look back on those examples, I'm struck by how conservative they turned out to be. A company could already use a lot of outsourcing and reach revenues of tens of millions of dollars per employee. Many Internet marketers develop products and services now in less than a day and deliver those new offerings in the same day. At the recent rate of progress, the cost of a constant computing task usually declines by 96-98 percent in only 10 years.
Another key section of the Web site was called the "Buck Rogers Perspective". The idea was to encourage companies to focus on creating 25th-century performance in the early part of the 21st century. We argued that the advent of faster computing and rapidly expanding access to information would allow progress to be telescoped into a shorter time period.
Had we known about Metcalfe's Law (Robert Metcalfe's view that the value of a networked connection of computers and other communication devices goes up by the square of the number of connections) at that time, we might have cited that effect as evidence of the potential for faster progress. Clearly, in a copy-cat driven world, it was going to make sense for the Internet to allow ideas and facts that interest people to spread very rapidly and widely.
With that limited message, our Web site designer plugged away. A major lesson for me was how much time needs to be spent on writing, updating, and proofing material. Because of the many computer quirks among different machines, you also have to be careful or you create a very messy picture for some visitors. In those days of mostly dial-up telephone Internet connections, you also had to limit how much you put on a page or no one would ever stick around long enough to read what you had to say.
After more months and expense than I care to remember, our Web site was finally up and running in 1997. Then Jason pointed out that if we didn't do something to build traffic to the site, no one would ever know the site existed.
I next met dozens of so-called experts in getting search engines to place our site at the top of the search page. Every one who advised me on this subject described what to me were obviously unethical methods. In addition, these people wanted to be paid around $300 an hour and felt like they needed 10 hours a week to keep our site optimized. Forget it!
Instead, Jason went to chat rooms and other public sites where he could share his enthusiasm for the project and invite visitors to come and learn more. Visitor traffic built steadily from that point. We were finally getting the word out.
In the early days, we often had visitors who spent hours on the site. Clearly, we were fascinating somebody. We didn't know who they were because I stupidly overruled everyone who suggested that we encourage people to register at the site so we could send them new information from time to time.
I thought that requiring registration would discourage visitors. Perhaps that was the right decision then, but I should have captured names and e-mail addresses at some point. Undoubtedly many people who wanted to track our progress forgot about us as the weeks passed without hearing from us or seeing any new material on the site.
In addition, I didn't provide any way for visitors to communicate with one another, sharing valuable improvement-enhancing ideas.
I finally intend to resolve these issues in 2008 by using blog technologies, so I don't have to support half the Web design population of North America and India to get a conversation going.
I'm sure you'll do better.
Good luck!
About the Author:
Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Read about creating breakthroughs through and receive tips by e-mail through registering for free at
http://www.fastforward400.com
Article Marketing
5 people like this article
