Today the team met with Brandon, the programmer scheduled to build the new site, to review the current design comp. Brandon had a concern about two columns being used in drupal and recommended he hand-code the site. I asked the team if our two main business cores going forward are content management systems (CMS) and e-commerce sites that shouldn’t we build the site in a CMS? They advised the site is more impressive to the web dev community if it is hand-coded. “Ok” I said. You have to pick your battles.
Recently I was reading an article in Forbes magazine: 21 Top Twitter Tips and couldn’t agree more with the following:
“Congratulations for getting to the end of this sentence.” As an online culture, people are not reading; they’re scanning,” says Dell Computer’s Stefanie Nelson, voice of @DellOutlet. “The shorter and more direct your message is, the more successful you’re going to be.”
At today’s meeting, I repeated the above and advised that the current website design comp was copy heavy and the home page specifically should be pared down. I recommended the home page feature the line about websites being like sharks (they have to move forward or die) and the artwork should accentuate this tag line. I recommended that John lose the “rinse and repeat” tag line as this is confusing when used in conjunction with the second tag line referencing sharks. I provided John with a link to a site to be shark inspired.
I advised that the top and side navigations are confusing as currently presented. The top navigation should be used as a utilitarian bar with the about and contact navs moved elsewhere with training and client log-in taking their place. Courtney advised that she also thought it was confusing but thought the Twitter and Facebook navs should be moved since they are taking the visitor off-site. I requested John to rethink the top navigation as two team members both thought something wasn’t quite right and needed fine-tuning.
I also recommended that John review his contact page calls to action and streamline to one clear call to action. Currently the page has three calls to action and is confusing what the potential client is supposed to do.
We agreed to comb through the copy for next weeks meeting for John to make edits.
Cary advised that the PR firm he hired would have the final version of the first press release ready by this Friday. I mentioned that by using our original idea of writing and distributing via PR Web that we were going to control the message and now it is out of our hands. We requested a press release review before it is sent out.
Lastly, the team agreed to update the eClick 2010 blog to have easier navigation to the start of the project.
Next week it is back to refining the copy and possibly viewing some initial artwork. In two weeks we will meet with the back-end programmer to discuss the client log-in functionality.