[Sigia-l] site redesign sales proposals

[Ziya Oz]

Donna Maurer:

> IA: "Dear potential client. In preparing this proposal I visited your
> website...

When an outsider goes to a non-trivial site, one almost never knows just
what the original goal of the project was. The site might appear to be doing
one thing whereas the true purpose as defined by the site owners might be
something entirely different. It's thus very hard to measure its 'success'
or recommend something 'better', as in, 'better for what purpose'?

A quick example: in the Ms. Dewey, part deux example I posted, what appears
to be a search engine UI in Tafiti.com may simply be a time-limited
marketing campaign for a completely different product, Silverlight, that
happens to leverage MSN search as a vehicle. One would look silly to MSFT
when recommending, say, how to make the search part better, when all MSFT
cares at this point may be quick downloads of the Silverlight plug-in.

So things that are blatantly obvious may be fair game to point out as
needing re-design. But then again, if they are that obvious chances are some
other consultant can easily duplicate the effort. For stuff that's harder to
discover, more fundamentally broken and subtle, one has to have a contextual
understanding of the business model, goals, resources, etc., without which
professional embarrassment might ensue.

How a client and a consultant get together is subtle choreography. A
two-hour site critique would be like a consultant jumping on a table to do a
summersault just to impress the client.

(I guess it depends on how desperate the other party is...the client or the
consultant. :-)

----
Ziya

Respectable people do not write music or make love as a career.