Re: FN-FORUM: Provocative content theory?

date posted 7th January 2005 17:18

At 16:04 on Friday, 07 Jan 2005, Paul J White wrote:

>
> From one of Tony's link dumps that I have been working through:
>
> http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/guide.htm
>
> "Beware of Flyer and Brochure Syndrome:

> I kind of see his point, but what does the panel think - especially the
> copy writers out there?

I think that the point is that when I'm looking to buy from the company,
I'm looking for evidence to confim my decision, I want reassurance that
the product will do what I want it to do, and not how successful the
company is. I think that's what he's driving at.

e.g. not selling the company in every piece of content, but selling the
benefit to the customer of the product they came to buy.

he's specifically referencing ecom & clicks and mortar, rather than info
sites.

Think of it this way, when you shop in M&S you don't have to read their
annual report first.

;o)


I picked something else up whilst reading all this stuff, it was about
users navigating sites:

The Move-Forward-Until-Found Rule

which comes from here: http://www.uie.com/articles/trigger_words/ and it
dovetails with what's being said above.

"a web page can do only one of two things: either it contains the content
the user wants or it contains the links to get them to the content they
want. If a page doesn't follow this rule, then the users stop clicking and
they aren't likely to find their target content."

The Seth Godin book - The Big Red Fez - says pretty much the same thing,
in that every page should have one thing for the user to do, that one
thing should be big, obvious and attractive and if you can't pick one
thing for the page to be, then the page visitors won't choose something
either - they'll click the back button.

lots of good stuff leaching out these days about web site visitors
habits. but one sure fire way to test the theories is to see what you do
when you visit web sites... monitor yourself closely. - I bet you're
scanning for something of interest and if you don't find it quickly enough
you'll try another page (or another site)

I'm giving serious thought to redesigning my offerring - even to the point
of fragmenting the stuff I'm "selling" into seperate domains...


Think about it - one page links to another, no nav required, each page
guides the user to their (your) goal.

I wonder....

;o)