JeffGu
Been here much more than a while
- Location
- Osceola, Nebraska
For anyone that mastered HTML, CSS, and the early days of MySQL and PHP database driven website technologies, the advent of CMS (Content Management System) products were a mixed blessing. Site design and development with early versions, like WordPress, were simplified to the point where people had a largely WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface that would let them pump out a web presence with not too much effort and a short learning curve. The products, however, put a lot of small site developers out of business.
These things got much more sophisticated, elaborate and powerful... at a price. The learning curve for real site development with them got very steep. It got to the point where designing anything that didn't have a cookiecutter look and feel to it, was a lot of work. Right on a par with developing business software products on a RAD (Rapid Application Development) platform like Visual Basic or Kylix. Still, managing all of the modern content resources typical of a big, corporate site was easier and more efficient than doing this with pure HTML/CSS, with a simple database implementation to handle information like products, prices, etc. that allow visitors to get the information that they need.
Somewhere along the line, though, it is that basic requirement (from the visitor's perspective) that got lost in the shuffle. The real need for a website is to provide information that is quick and easy to access, in a manner that is intuitive and that doesn't require any expertise in any web technologies, other than knowing how to use a mouse. The problem with this came about because advertising companies, with a lot of expertise in printed media, were quick to jump onto the web presence thing with both feet and a metric fuckton of money. They quickly influenced the industry to the point where the customer's actual needs fall way down the list of priorities. The result is visually appealing, beautiful websites that are rather like a nice highway that ends abruptly in a swamp, no matter which way you turn.
No matter what the big players in web development want their customers to believe, the very best sites (when the real customers are able to voice their opinion) are the ones that give them the basic information that they need with only a click or two, and that are so easy to navigate that they are able to find out detailed information about any product without swearing or giving up within a few minutes.
Clearly, the site must have this detailed information for it to work like this. Pretty pictures are nice, but in an industry like ours, there is a huge amount of detailed specifications and information about each product that needs to be included in the site's design from the beginning. And this is exactly where so many of them fail. Tree care people like to have all of the nitty gritty details about the products they want, in order to make intelligent choices about the equipment they buy. This information needs to be easily accessed and displayed in a manner that is geared toward such customers and their need to know the finer details.
Perhaps the best example of a good looking website to nowhere, is SherrillTree.com with their convoluted navigation and endless deadend roads to the Swamp of Meaningless Sales Drivel. It shows an utter disregard for the very nature of their customer base. Why develop a site that looks this good, using technologies that allow infinite possibilities for the management and access of the information we want, only to attempt to distract us with pretty colors and pictures with absolutely no useful product information? This is what happens when corporate sales interests supercede what real, working class people want and expect from a company that has the financial and technology resources to provide them with a great website... but instead, end up with this pile of crap. The very good visual aspects of the site can't take the stink out of the shit that is its content.
A site also needs someone with very good language skills to manage the content. Someone with a very good knowledge of the products, how they're used, and what information the customer needs about them. Not a rehash, or simply a reprint, of the sales crap description provided by the OEM, but meaningful information about the products that will allow us to figure out the advantages and disadvantages of all these products. From people who should know.
What a site does not need is ghetto, backwoods hillbilly editors whose command of spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation are so pathetic that the site looks like it was produced by some teenybopper, highschool dropout who learned his language skills in a Yahoo! chat channel. This seriously detracts from the credibility of the company the site purports to represent. A well maintained site doesn't let horrible editorial mistakes reside intact for years on end. This is especially true when product descriptions contain so many mistakes and outright wrong information that one suspects that somebody put an entirely unqualified person in charge of site creation and maintenance.
A good example of a site that needs a lot of work in this department, would be the TreeStuff.com site. It is easy to navigate, simple, and certainly not flashy... but in most regards, infinitely more pleasant to use for the purpose of buying gear than the previously mentioned site. It's a bit rough, and falls short on meaningful product information. For a company with great access to real world tree people and their product evaluations, it is almost criminal to reprint a single, short paragraph of meaningless drivel from the OEM and pass it off as a product description. It is a mortal sin to leave wrong and outdated information nesting on the site for years and to update the site only during a full moon on the second Tuesday of a week falling in a month of Sundays.
There you have it. A lovely rant, fully worthy of any clown who happens to have internet access and numerous chainsaws.
These things got much more sophisticated, elaborate and powerful... at a price. The learning curve for real site development with them got very steep. It got to the point where designing anything that didn't have a cookiecutter look and feel to it, was a lot of work. Right on a par with developing business software products on a RAD (Rapid Application Development) platform like Visual Basic or Kylix. Still, managing all of the modern content resources typical of a big, corporate site was easier and more efficient than doing this with pure HTML/CSS, with a simple database implementation to handle information like products, prices, etc. that allow visitors to get the information that they need.
Somewhere along the line, though, it is that basic requirement (from the visitor's perspective) that got lost in the shuffle. The real need for a website is to provide information that is quick and easy to access, in a manner that is intuitive and that doesn't require any expertise in any web technologies, other than knowing how to use a mouse. The problem with this came about because advertising companies, with a lot of expertise in printed media, were quick to jump onto the web presence thing with both feet and a metric fuckton of money. They quickly influenced the industry to the point where the customer's actual needs fall way down the list of priorities. The result is visually appealing, beautiful websites that are rather like a nice highway that ends abruptly in a swamp, no matter which way you turn.
No matter what the big players in web development want their customers to believe, the very best sites (when the real customers are able to voice their opinion) are the ones that give them the basic information that they need with only a click or two, and that are so easy to navigate that they are able to find out detailed information about any product without swearing or giving up within a few minutes.
Clearly, the site must have this detailed information for it to work like this. Pretty pictures are nice, but in an industry like ours, there is a huge amount of detailed specifications and information about each product that needs to be included in the site's design from the beginning. And this is exactly where so many of them fail. Tree care people like to have all of the nitty gritty details about the products they want, in order to make intelligent choices about the equipment they buy. This information needs to be easily accessed and displayed in a manner that is geared toward such customers and their need to know the finer details.
Perhaps the best example of a good looking website to nowhere, is SherrillTree.com with their convoluted navigation and endless deadend roads to the Swamp of Meaningless Sales Drivel. It shows an utter disregard for the very nature of their customer base. Why develop a site that looks this good, using technologies that allow infinite possibilities for the management and access of the information we want, only to attempt to distract us with pretty colors and pictures with absolutely no useful product information? This is what happens when corporate sales interests supercede what real, working class people want and expect from a company that has the financial and technology resources to provide them with a great website... but instead, end up with this pile of crap. The very good visual aspects of the site can't take the stink out of the shit that is its content.
A site also needs someone with very good language skills to manage the content. Someone with a very good knowledge of the products, how they're used, and what information the customer needs about them. Not a rehash, or simply a reprint, of the sales crap description provided by the OEM, but meaningful information about the products that will allow us to figure out the advantages and disadvantages of all these products. From people who should know.
What a site does not need is ghetto, backwoods hillbilly editors whose command of spelling, grammar, syntax and punctuation are so pathetic that the site looks like it was produced by some teenybopper, highschool dropout who learned his language skills in a Yahoo! chat channel. This seriously detracts from the credibility of the company the site purports to represent. A well maintained site doesn't let horrible editorial mistakes reside intact for years on end. This is especially true when product descriptions contain so many mistakes and outright wrong information that one suspects that somebody put an entirely unqualified person in charge of site creation and maintenance.
A good example of a site that needs a lot of work in this department, would be the TreeStuff.com site. It is easy to navigate, simple, and certainly not flashy... but in most regards, infinitely more pleasant to use for the purpose of buying gear than the previously mentioned site. It's a bit rough, and falls short on meaningful product information. For a company with great access to real world tree people and their product evaluations, it is almost criminal to reprint a single, short paragraph of meaningless drivel from the OEM and pass it off as a product description. It is a mortal sin to leave wrong and outdated information nesting on the site for years and to update the site only during a full moon on the second Tuesday of a week falling in a month of Sundays.
There you have it. A lovely rant, fully worthy of any clown who happens to have internet access and numerous chainsaws.
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