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Gerry McGovern
Content Critical
Gaining competitive advantage through high-quality web content
The Web
Content
Style Guide
The essential guide
for online writers, editors and managers
November 28, 2005
Nino Doll: great web design and a great cause
By Gerry McGovern
It’s always refreshing to come across a website that communicates its purpose clearly and concisely. Ninodoll.org does that.
When you arrive at the homepage of Ninodoll.org, you read the following:
12,000 Sri Lankan Children were killed in the 26.12.04 Tsunami
12,000 Nino Dolls have been commissioned to commemorate them
12,000 Passports to Education will be funded by sales of the Doll
Enter our site to buy a Nino Doll now!
The booking process is simple and straightforward. The whole site has this leanness and sense of clear purpose. Aside from the fact that this is a great cause, this is a great website.
There has never been a clearer need to get to the core of the matter than today. Management is increasingly becoming a discipline of what not to do, what to take out, what not to present, what not to offer.
People tell me that they have very complex organizations. The customer doesn’t care. The complexity of your organization is not your customer’s problem. It’s yours. That’s the challenge of management. That’s what leadership demands, and you must be a leader if you want to have a successful website.
If you try to please everybody you serve nobody, and ultimately you fail. If a department or group gets onto your homepage because of political clout, you fail. If you are not making tough decisions, not stripping away the deadwood on your site, you’re not doing your job properly.
It’s not easy to be a web manager today. That’s because it’s a very challenging job, with huge potential rewards if it’s done right. If you make a stand for quality and simplicity and relentless customer focus, you walk the right road. You lay the foundations for a great career, because let me tell you this, the professional web manager is going to be in huge demand.
Simplicity can be deceptive. Ninodoll.org could have created a very cluttered website. It took good management to focus on the essentials and create a clear call to action for the visitor.
Don’t bring your organizational complexity onto your website. Look at Google. What do you see on the Google homepage? A very big search box. And is this all that Google offers? Of course not.
Here’s what else Google offers: Alerts, Local, Answers, Maps, Blog Search, Mobile, Book Search, News, Catalogs, Scholar, Directory, SMS, Froogle, Special Searches, Groups, University Search, Images, Labs, Web Search Features, Blogger, Picasa, Code, Talk, Desktop, Toolbar, Earth, Translate, Gmail.
You can’t administer a website; you have to manage it. If Google administered its website, then every time it released a new tool or service, it would add it to its homepage.
If you don’t have genuine management authority for your website today, you must carefully build the business case for why you should be given that authority. If you let your website grow wild, you destroy rather than create value. That’s not good for your organization, and it is certainly not good for your career.
What’s the hard core of what your organization can offer on your website? Relentlessly strip away the clutter. The Web rewards those who do a little well—and become known for what they do well—rather than a lot poorly.
Nino Doll website
(The Nino Doll website was designed by Webfactory.)
Gerry McGovern
You are welcome to republish this article once you place the following text and link at the end of the article:
Gerry McGovern provides website content management solutions
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