We're now in full force Web site re-design mode at Percussion.  I've been hinting at this for a while now, but today made it official - the project is under way.  I've taken on Percussion.com personally in this, not just a manager.  So for the first time in a while I've been down in the trenches of Web site design, reviewing assessments of the current HTML, CSS, and other site functions in preparation for (thankfully) throwing most of them out.  It was refreshing but also telling.

A bit of history first.  I was the guy who built our first 16 page Web site back in 1996, less than a year after starting at Percussion.  It was done purely in Notepad and the biggest technical achievement was that the pages all had "background images" which was a new and controversial thing back then. That version of the site is so old you can't find it on any of those nifty web archive sites because the Web was still too new for anyone to bother archiving it.  (I was also the one who told my bosses "dude, you guys have to go get Percussion.com as a domain name NOW because these things won't last long!" but then somehow totally missed the significance of that statement and made zero money for me or Percussion from that whole Web thing that went on from 97 to 99.  Ok, enough history, we got there eventually.)

Anyway, at one point I found myself casually asking "do they still use spacer.gif?"  I was looked at like someone who'd asked how to put a cassette tape into an iPod.  If you missed the era, "Spacer.gif" was the first form of organized hackery that I experienced.  The early Web frowned on specific spacing elements (ask the SGML purists why).  Since humans actual respond well to spaces, Web designers just routed around the priests of SGML to get around it.  Designers would just make blank images of the various pixel widths you desired, for everything from tabs to even table like structures and then place them wherever you needed to force the issue.  There were often scores of "spacer.gif" images of various lengths all over the better looking Web sites back then.

Today of course we have CSS, and layers, and DIV tags and JavaScript and everything else. I wasn't actually that naive. What I was really wondering is, "do you still pretty much have to hack stuff all over the place to get the Web to work or look like you want?"  After a short tour of the CSS and JavaScript on any decent site I was comforted to know that - yep - pretty much, you do.  

This is because the unique Web embrace of things like "spacer.gif" was never about technical immaturity (witness Web 2.0's "perpetual beta" as the most recent example).  The attitude embodied in spacer.gif was much more a fundamental attitude of "who cares if it's not elegant, as long as it works?!"  The Web is fundamentally about "incrementalism."  Try it. If it works, good, do more.  If not, stop it and move on (and be glad you didn't put too much effort into it).

What's even more exciting is that this revolutionary embrace of "whatever works" is starting to creep up everywhere, from online marketing to the hard sciences.  Call it the "Wisdom of Crowds" or "emergent behaviors" - it is everywhere.  It seems even the purists now understand that elegant centralized "omniscient" systems, don't drive things nearly as well as massive decentralized "behavioral" systems that don't try to understand so much as test, react and respond automatically.  Spacer.gif truly deserves a spot of it's own in some progress hall of fame.

Oh, by the way, I did keep a backup copy of that old 16 page Web site.  I'll post it somewhere for fun - as soon as I can find a computer that can still read a floppy disk.

 

Some years back, folks my age all laughed at the "12:00 AM" blinking on our parents VCRs.  Here these folks had a great piece of technology, and they couldn't even set the clock!?!  (Today, even knowing what a VCR is probably dates us.) Well, today it's our turn to be laughed at - because all too often, the corporate internet is a giant blinking 12:00 AM blaring away for all to see.  Only today, it's blaring at our customers and prospects.

It's not like those of us with "brochureware" sites want them to be this way (cough, cough, we're working very hard on ours too right now).  But then again, our parents knew it wasn't 12AM all day long either.  The reason they never bothered to set the clock, wasn't really the complexity or the time. To them the reasons were simple:

1. It was new.
2. They already had a clock that worked just fine and was probably easier to see from the couch anyway.

In short, it was seen as some kind of minor annoyance that didn't add much value. It was something they could wait for the kids to fix when they dropped by next.  The problem with this was that the clock wasn't there to be a clock. It was there to let them record shows and watch them later at their leisure.  By not setting the clock they were missing out on capabilities.

Now, for those of you about to jump up and proudly point to your leading edge Web presence, ask yourself first - who did these features for you?  Remember, if the local neighbor's kid set your parents clock for them, it would only work until the next power outage.  The Web is even worse.  If you are dependent on some crew of young "kids" (e.g. outside experts) you're just waiting for the next shift in Web usage to pass you by.

The solution requires first hand experience.  Because like that VCR clock, some of this stuff probably is ready for prime time anyway (it took the DVR to finally get it right).  You need to know what works and what doesn't.  There are no excuses either.  A 13-year old is NOT "more technical" than you.  Chances are, if you were one of those people setting your parent's VCR clock, you got it wrong a bunch of times until you finally figured out the right way to set it.  The difference is always in having the motivation to see the value in plugging away.

So before you dive in on that Web revitalization project, or harangue someone else over "your" site, do a bit of self examination first.  Have you posted a comment to a Web site lately?  Participated in an online forum?  Created a Blog? Clicked "edit" while visiting a Wiki? Clicked that RSS thingy in the address bar? Set up a Facebook page?   Not your staff, or your Web team, or that kid you hired out of college - but you - the manager, the executive, the decision maker, the one about to authorize that purchase?

Time to get up off that couch and set that blinking clock yourself.  The 13-year-olds are watching.

 

The mantra today is how the Web is being embraced and integrated into every aspect of the business -- no longer some separate "other thing" that marketing departments do along side of their other campaigns and initiatives.  Sounds good on a PowerPoint slide right?   But like so many changes, this is both subtle and profound.  Sometimes you just need to see it to really get it.  

A colleague sent me this clip, I think as an aside from one technologist to another. (Maybe because I like to remind people how I hand-built Percussion's first 16 page Web site in Notepad way back in 1996).  But I think the point here is well made even for those who have never peeked at the source "underneath" a Web page.

The Web has gone beyond technology.  The Web is us.

Just got back from Percussion's UK User Group meeting.  It was a great meeting, and I'll have more on that in a bit, but first, this important nugget that emerged from one of the discussions.  The theme of the day was on how much the role of WCM is changing - from automating and streamlining site updates (circa 2004), to today's role as the central tool for optimizing the Web presence to improve customer experience.

There were a lot of heads nodding as we went through the keys to optimization: adopting a "change is good" mentality, questioning everything, measuring everything, increasing investment only in what works, stop doing what doesn't work.  Nothing Earth-shattering there, right?

But it was then that I stopped.  It's easy to miss.  Measuring and accountability? Check. Doing more of what works? Check. But that last point?  

STOP what doesn't work.  

I hadn't planned to use our own Web site as an example in the presentation, but as I read these, this last point hit me like a ton of bricks.  See, we're in the midst of adopting our own rhetoric here at Percussion.com; embracing community and social media marketing features, personalization, new process and content models, even the "human issues" like usability and adoption rates.  The site is planned for dramatic change.  However, with all that, easily the hardest challenge in keeping this project going forward has been to simply stop doing all the stuff that people just assume has to keep going.  

It's ironic how it happens.  EVERYONE yearns for all the latest community features and communication modes, optimization based on usage analysis, personalized promotions and all the rest of it.  But when it comes down to it, what are these same folks working on or asking about?  Press Releases, routine site updates, and any number of "well we have to have that" type content.  It's as if people think this round of useless updates are the last, and as soon as they finish those, they'll move on to the stuff that actually works.  Until the next round of useless work clogs the pipeline.  I've realized the only way to really move the new project forward is to focus on cutting out as much of the "old" work as possible.  I've taken to questioning everything, all the time.  Hopefully, we'll see the results of that here on Percussion.com as the weeks and months unfold.

But while we're on this topic of change, just remember this human trait: change is not about starting the new, it's about stopping the old.

 

As part of all of the buzz about new "interactive marketing" methods, a colleague forwarded me this article about the evolution of the press release. There's a lot of good stuff in there about the evolution of marketing online, moving towards a more "social" experience between company and customer and so on. I've blogged here on Contentions about some of those trends already. But I have to say, the moment I saw the title, my first thought went to a slightly different direction: the press release as a bane of WCM product demonstrations.

The Press Release has amassed such a bad reputation as WCM demo fodder that recently, when Percussion showed up at a prospect site and started to show a fairly specific example from their site, one of the viewers blurted out "Oh thank God, because if we had to sit and watch another Press Release getting published we'd have to shoot you!" We all laughed but it's true. Why would anyone care about the press release approval cycle today?

It may be a surprise to learn that vendors like us have to tread lightly on this issue. We can get just as exasperated when prospects ASK to see "the press release" scenario or a use case just like it. How do we tell folks tactfully that these use cases are so vanilla and unimportant to the success of their Web site that they can't possibly showcase anything different or interesting about the investment they are about to make?

There seems to be an interesting dynamic at work, where everyone thinks they are doing everyone else a favor by "focusing on a simple use case we all understand" - the dreaded press release. Not surprisingly, the result of most of those types of "simple use case" demonstrations is "gee, all the vendors looked the same" or "ok, but why I am spending so much on that?"

The moral of the story here is: simple use cases don't help you make tough decisions. Ask yourself what you want your Web site or larger Web presence to be known for. Then ask to see THAT in the WCM demo. We at least, will be more than happy to oblige.