The new Drupal-based site is easier for visitors to navigate, and simpler for PNI to update and edit — and it looks pretty good, too.

• 1. Who is the primary target audience?
     What defines them as a group — their industry? Their job title? Or something else? Focus on describing this group as if they were one single person, instead of a bunch of generic labels.
  2. What action do you want users to take after visiting your site?
     Call you? Order products? Subscribe to a newsletter? Or invite you over for dinner? The answer makes all the difference in what sorts of things are included in the site structure, graphics, content, voice and tone.
  3. What preconceived notion or assumption about you or your competitors do you want to address or change?
     Do people think you’re more expensive than you are? Less reliable? Less nutritious? More old-fashioned? What don’t they know about you that would get them to take the action outlined in Question 2?
  4. What are you? To what “group” do you belong?
     Unless there literally is no one else remotely like you, it’s better to belong to an existing category (‘The world’s best mop!’) than to make up a new one (‘The world’s first and only flangentwerper!’). Customers feel more at ease when choosing among comparable products or services … and they’re not likely to give you even the extra few seconds it would take to educate them about your unique un-categorizability.

  

  5. If you chucked it all and ran off to Fiji, what would your customers or clients buy instead?
     Who are your competitors … and why should people buy your products and services instead of theirs?
  6. *

What happens if you don’t think these questions through first?

You could pay dearly in lost opportunities and increased design fees.

Lost opportunities: Your website is often the thing that most defines you to the outside world. A site that doesn’t seem to understand its own audience — offering the wrong thing to the right people (a new-members-only discount to loyal ‘frequent flyer’ customers), or the right thing to the wrong people (special case pricing on Pinot Noir to customers who bought one bottle of Chardonnay, six years ago) — undermines your credibility, disorienting existing customers and discouraging new ones.

Increased design fees: The ‘measure twice, cut once’ rule applies to websites, too: an ill-considered design can waste shocking amounts of time and resources, because what you don’t get right the first time, you invariably have to spend extra design cycles (and extra money) to correct.

* We’d love the chance to share the other five questions with you … so leave a comment below — or better yet, contact us.

This morning I received an email begging me to sign up for ‘the penultimate [sic] in social media solutions.’ What luck! It arrived just as I was about to head out and pick up a loaf of bread and a quart of solutions. I was down to the penultimate slice of the former, and fresh out of the latter.

Am I alone, or does anyone else out there think this ‘solutions’ term is over-overused and under-understood?  I had to go back to check, but it’s the twenty-sixth different email offering me some kind of ‘solution’ I’ve received just since the start of this decade… 24 days ago.

What is a ‘solution,’ anyway? I’ve been offered CRM solutions, Internet-based inventory solutions, electromagnetic solutions, sensor solutions, network solutions. I’ve been asked to ‘rely on the world’s most trusted solutions for business infrastructure virtualization,’ to ‘subscribe to custom systems solutions,’ to ‘sign up to the Microsoft home of online marketing solutions.’ Conjures up all these cute little ‘solutions’ wandering around, dressed in winter mittens, looking for adoptive homes. Trouble is, I have no idea what they’re selling at the Microsoft Home for Wayward Solutions.

So I force myself to dust off the OED, magnifying glass at the ready. Under ‘solution’ I find:

A homogeneous mixture of two or more substances, retaining its constitution, displaying no settling, and having various possible proportions of the constituents, which may be solids, liquids, gasses or inter-combinations.

A bucket of water with some Mr. Clean in it, for instance, is a solution.

And that’s the problem with the word. It sounds so pre-packaged, canned, one-size-fits-all, and facile that it implies the exact opposite of what its users think it does. It certainly doesn’t sound like the product of judgment, experience, skill and research. Just something you splash around to remove stains or kill the germs that cause bad breath.

To illustrate this last point: I swear, as I write this, I was interrupted by yet another email from someone purporting to be a ‘wine technology and marketing solution consultant.’ A consultant waiting to find a client that fits with their marketing solution… two parts buzz words, three parts hot air. I have half a mind to become a Marketing Problem Spotter. Sounds awful, I know, but at least people would know what I’m up to. Figuring out what’s wrong or missing — helping your clients identify their key problem, the one that’s actually holding their business back — is always harder than pouring some solution over everything, willy-nilly. (It’s also more rewarding for everyone involved.)

The word ‘solution’ as used in these emails simply confuses; it’s jargon at best, gibberish at worst. By itself, it solves — it means — nothing. Is that ‘solution’ they refer to in the header a website or a piece of hardware? Is it opinion or counsel? Is it software or a questionnaire? Or is it just the handiwork of a lazy brain, unwilling to decide what the ‘solution’ really is, or the compromises of a committee, undecided if what they’re selling is a computer or a new category or a note-taking solution?

The next time someone offers to sell me a solution, I’m going stop reading once I get to that word. If the word ‘answers’ doesn’t fit, and it’s not a blended liquid, please find another word. Then resend.

As my Swedish grandfather Svante used to say ‘uff da.’  Leave that word out of any emails you’re sending to me. Unless, of course, you are in fact sending me a solution. Free Woolite or mouthwash may not be glamorous, but at least it comes in handy every now and then.

Jemaine Clement. Mike White. Jennifer Coolidge. Jared Hess directing. ‘Nuff said.

1. The cheering of the home crowd affects the number of fouls called against the home team — more cheering, fewer fouls.
2. Our brains compensate for the lag in processing visual information by shifting objects in the direction they are moving. So we’re predisposed to see that baseline shot as out, even if it’s in.
3. Refs watching Tae kwon do footage awarded more points to fighters wearing red than to those wearing blue — even after the uniform colors were digitally switched.

The full (very brief) article is here.

If extraneous sensory information like cheering and uniform color can alter something as ostensibly cut-and-dried as a referee’s calls, how might it affect the way your brand is perceived?

It implies a belief that you have something to say that people will want to read.

So, we’ll see if that belief is justified.