Vacation for Brains

I'm going to take a break until the New Year, and then either start all over again, or maybe start a new format (still focused on interactive advertising/marketing). Happy Holidays!

/.chow.\

Gray Matters #3: Jekyllism

Bringing a close to the Web Ailments series is a multiple personality disorder that could possibly be the father of both the Atlas Syndrome and Sectionitis. Jekyllism is a war between the rational and the emotional, and it’s older than the web.

Jekyllism affects all advertising creative, from TV to Web. It’s a war where one side wants every bit of information about the product in a commercial, and the other wants to infuse an emotional connection to make the spot memorable. The battlefield is the limitations of the medium, whether it’s 60 seconds, or the size of a piece of paper. More often than we’d like, the advertising produced is merely the outcome of the war. It takes intelligence, patience and sometimes a strong ego to hold Jekyllism in check.

You would imagine that if you took away the 60 second limitation, or the dimensional restraint of a printed page, then we could reach a blissful dream land where anything is possible. The website,with it’s potential for a hundred million doorways, and cubby holes, and the ability to offer doorways within doorways…could very well be the promised land.

But it’s not. Because the disorder that has affected traditional advertising for so long has it’s hands all over our websites. There is no better or more obvious place to see this then the homepage of most sites.

Jekyllism is trained to fight in a finite space, so it’s dug trenches in the one crucial page to any website. It’s made a website finite by deciding that everything that is needed to be said, should be said on the homepage. and “Above The Fold”. For those who aren’t familiar with the Fold, it’s the area that a visitor views before they need to scroll down.

We’ve taken a multi-dimensional space and built a box.

On homepages you’ll see Mastheads with multiple messages, accompanied by Promo-Boxes with multiple messages, with Text boxes of multiple messages, you’ll see Navigations drop down with multiple ways to get to every page on the site, your head will spin with all the options, pictures and words. All crammed together, fighting for your attention.

If you want to see a great example of this – visit godaddy. Or visit a site with products that have a lot of features.

In mediums with finite space, Jekyllism will continue to be a problem. Online media with it’s little boxes will be subjected to the battle. But when it comes to your website, the figurative drive needs to be reformatted.

Peace can be achieved for Jekyllism because there is space enough for both sides on your website. The website is not a store, it’s not physically limited, and it doesn’t have just one doorway. In fact, your visitors will enter from all sides at any time. The answer will not be to put as much content as possible on every page, but to take a step back and let both sides of Jekyllism decide the best possible way to achieve their goals..across the entire site.

That ends the Website Ailments series. While Jekyllism, Sectionitis, and the Atlas Syndrome are all still found on the commercial web, I find that it gives me great hope. These are ailments either inherited from old think, or a result of just trying to figure this web thing out. Which means, to me, that the truly great stuff is still to come.

/.chow.\

Grey Matters #2 : Sectionitis

The second ailment in commercial web today is Sectionitis. From About Us, to Photo Gallery, the Section has been the de-facto way to organize a site. While the Section itself has been a solid solution for organizing content, the side-effect, Sectionitis, has led to the dilution of great ideas and a thought process that demands you create content for the sections, instead of ideas that makes sense for your goals.

Sectionitis says, we have these 4 sections, how does your idea fit into one of these sections? If your idea doesn’t fit neatly into one of these sections, you must either mold it to fit, or create a new section. If your idea is bigger than a section, then the only answer is to make it a completely different site.

What if you have four great ideas? Sectionitis would lead you to creating four sections for your site, one for each idea. Organized, yes. But now you’ve split your budget four ways, and the result is four ideas quarter-baked.

I’m going to provide an example for this one. Mountain Dew has a “Green Label Art” initiative going on where they have independent artists create bottle labels. The website has 8 sections total, ranging from Artists to Events to Gear. And of course a landing page that binds them all.

One section of the site is a Draw Your Own label. Very cool idea. Not ground-breaking, but perfect for what they are doing. It allows a visitor to “paint” their own label design. However, the interface and functionality is lacking. It feels rushed, and an after-thought. The signs of Sectionitis.

Instead of creating a section-based site, why not make this idea the site. Spend your efforts in creating an environment that encourages the visitor to express themselves while learning about the other artists participating. Allow the visitor the ability to change the canvas to other Artists renderings, while giving them the ability to draw on it as well? Is “Events” a section that needed any part of the budget beyond a easy-to use and post RSS feed?

Sectionitis makes every section equally important, so that no section is important.

If you are in the business of conveying pure information, then neatly packed boxes is possibly the best solution for you. But if you’re in the experience/emotional business as well, then it might serve you better to keep in mind that it is more likely that a structure for site will be the by-product of great idea, rather than the other way around.