Common Website Mistakes 1: Printing Culture
In my 15 years of supporting websites for all types of customers I have seen a lot of mistakes that people make. I want to point out the most common issues I have experienced and how you can mitigate them.
Printing Culture
In many big companies, website owners are marketers with a printing background, meaning they were predominantly responsible for brochures, factsheets, and flyers before they took over the website. Someone like this seems a logical choice given their experience with layouting, typesetting and imagery. A website is design heavy after all.
Unfortunately these competencies come with baggage. Many website owners struggle with the ambiguity of website design, desperately trying to fix design and typesetting issues through content. Significant effort is wasted because text "wraps weirdly on an iPad" or "has too big of a margin on a Galaxy S10". The truth is: Few people experience these issues and hardly any visitors ever notice them.
Another drawback is the lack of experience with interactivity. Too "printy" layouts often lack a clear call to action or show too much information that should initially be hidden or placed somewehere else. The main reason is the linear storytelling approach in print media, while these limitations do not apply to websites.
Last but not least, printing culture leads to incredibly sluggish processes, typically including extensive approval workflows. This derives from unnecessary perfectionism towards arbitrary content on the website (I agree that there is content where it does make sense, it just does not apply for everything).
What you can do
Management
Give website ownership to someone with digital marketing experience. Do not blindly assign responsibility to someone who produces nicely looking brochures - the necessary competencies might be very different. Even more importantly, give power to your website owner. Trust your marketers and encourage them to take decisions on their own.
Website owner
If you realize that you are susceptible to these pitfalls, try to liberate yourself from the printing paradigms. Accept the fact that the website will not look perfect in every case, especially taking into account the possible combinations of resolutions and languages. A general rule of thumb - not only for websites - is the 80/20 rule (Pareto principle), meaning that 20% of the effort will give you 80% of the results, while the remaining 20% will consume 80% of the effort. In many cases, these 80% can and should be spent in other areas.
What do you think?
Do you agree? Did you experience situations where printing culture slowed down your publication process? Is this article helpful and would you enjoy similar content? Let me know in the comments.
Aknowledgements
Photo by Amador Loureiro on Unsplash