OK, so there are a Billion Surfers online, a Hundred Million websites, with only about half of them active, so you wonder where the 10 or 20 visitors to your site are. Become part of the Magic Middle:
The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere.
Recently we came across this clip about Chris Anderson’s book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More. The clip has the SciFi Horror feel of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and made us laugh out loud.
Often presented as a phenomenon of interest primarily to mass market retailers and web-based businesses, the Long Tail also has implications for the producers of content, especially those whose products could not – for economic reasons – find a place in pre-Internet information distribution channels controlled by book publishers, record companies, movie studios, and television networks. Looked at from the producers’ side, the Long Tail has made possible a flowering of creativity across all fields of human endeavour.
We’ve previously posted on the idea that “the future of marketing is being able to create stories other people will want to tell.” When someone comes to us asking for Web Design, we ask what they do, how long they’ve been doing it, what do they like most about it, what do they like least about it, and so forth. We are asking them to tell their story as best they can. Then we ask them why do they want a website. Then we ask them how much do they want to invest in their site. And so the adventure begins with the Design Ninjas!
Bill mentioned in a previous post that we are going to be taking shots of signs and posting about them. This sign in the picture isn’t terrible, but the logo has caught the Feature Creep disease. As some of you know we do logo design so we understand that sometimes the customer wants to include every aspect of the business in their logo. In this logo, it appears, someone actually attempted to include all ideas and form them into one logo. My guess on how the logo creation conversation went:
Owner #1: “We want to have a house in the logo because we do in-home care”
Designer: “Ok, good”
Owner #2: “Well, just with a house, people won’t get that we do in-home care, we should add people walking up a path to show that we go to the person’s house.”
Designer: “Ummmm, alright then”
Female Employee: “Oh, and we should put a heart to show everyone how much we care!”
Designer: “Well, I might be able to get that in there and make it still look ok.”
Owner #1: “Oh, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to have a hand reaching out and holding the house up! That way people would get we are offering a helping hand.”
Owner #2: “Yes! Yes! And we should copyright it all because what if someone wanted to steal all of our wonderful ideas.”
We are currently setup as resellers with Sonicwall. We love the Sonicwall CDP appliances, but the problem is they make the process of purchasing an extended warranty and updates complicated.
Here is their current process:
You buy a CDP unit and you get a one year hardware warranty and 90 days of software updates. After the 90 days of software updates they send a notice and try to sell you another year of software updates that also extends the hardware warranty by a year (well sort of). It doesn’t actually increase your hardware warranty another year from the beginning of the hardware warranty……it extends it a year beyond the software update expiration. Ok, so this isn’t more than a rocket scientist can figure out, but it doesn’t make it easy to understand what I’m paying for. In the end I didn’t purchase the updates because it felt like I was being ripped off by not getting my hardware warranty extended a full year.
An easier process would be:
Sell the unit with a standard warranty and updates for the same time period. I would say one or two years. When it is time to expire sell the customer on extending the updates and warranty both for another year. This way it makes it clear what the customer is paying for and it makes it clear when things begin and end. People hand over their money with greater ease when they understand exactly what they are paying for.
As we drive around town, we see a lot of signs, and almost all of them are bad. From time to time we’ll spotlight one, rip the snot out of it, and tell you what would have made it a better sign design. And every once in a while we’ll spotlight a sign that’s well done, and tell you why. Where will the Design Ninjas strike next?
This morning a cat came up to our back door and we let our dog Buster out to meet him. There was barking and a claw to the nose, but they made friends and Buster shared a saucer of milk with Sam the cat.
If you have recently visited TLCmagic then you know we have been moving in the direction of Design, and this site is where we are now. We do custom crafted web, brand, and process design. We are Ninja because we use Stealth — It’s about You, not us — and we are Guerrilla — Small is the new Big.
If you have not visited us before, let the barking and clawing begin so we can make friends!
