Is your Web site a needy child?

Web sites that scream for attention with useless images and self indulgent content will elicit little but impatience and skepticism

The needs of the organization are great, and the larger and older the organization gets, the greater those needs become. The problem is that the internal needs of the organization rarely match the needs of customers.

Organizations grow strong because they’ve done something right.

Dell is a good example. It grew as a customer-centric organization, but as it got bigger it began to lose that true customer focus.

Around 2001, you had two options on the Dell home page: navigate by product (laptop, desktop, etc.) or navigate by audience (home, business, etc.).

Every test I have done indicates that about 90 percent of people prefer to navigate by product in buying computer stuff. In fact, audience navigation makes many people cynical.

By about 2003, Dell got rid of the product navigation, forcing the customer to choose an audience. I am told Dell did this because the audience types mirror the powerful business units within Dell. These business units could not agree how to share revenue if someone simply selected “laptop.”