OT: OMGwebsites

[Jeff Reynolds]

Mark,

Welcome to the new world of websites... I've gotten out of the business as content is now an evil thing in websites. It's being tossed out right and left and what's left is being rewritten into three sentence paragraphs of garbledgook separated by large full width photos and repeated 10-20 times down a page in the longest scrolls I have ever seen these days!

Websites that were all about content are even doing this. One client actually said why do we have all this content, let's dump it. When I asked where the visitors will get the content on the community (chamber site), they said we can just do external links to get that content. I then asked where those sites would be and they listed a few, but all these sites linked to us to get that content, we were the only ones who had it. When I pointed this out they first did not get why the external links would not work and they said the content will appear. I can only think this comes from the fact that most folks under 30 have grown up with the internet and all it's content just being there magically and when they get to a point of having to produce it they just think it is always out there and they don't have to really deal with it even when their job requires creating good content for their companies or orgs needs. I have been bluntly asked many times why should I bother creating the content. I keep asking well where will folks get it? Call you up, lord no that costs too much money and we don't want to answer questions that way!

Order and organization is also now forbidden. Things are arranged with pictures and statements and the condensed content bits are then sprinkled in after this with no real thought as to order and organization.

It may also come from marketing. There is a strong camp in marketing that I've run into for decades in working with marketing both internal and external that feels you never want to be really clear about what you are selling. Use to drive me crazy as we would have the top rated product but the marketing materials really did not clearly show what we had and emphasize the main points we were rated so highly for! On the marketing materials we looked just the same as our lowest quality competitors! 

I've been finding it harder myself to get basic information on things in my own web research as well due to all the above, it's sad as you would think it would get easier with time here but most of the basic information for companies and products is getting dropped and fuzzier. The worse thing is this has been translated over to content focused sites as being the new cultural norm to follow. Very sad...

Jeff

> On Sep 27, 2017, at 6:00 AM, use-livecode-request at lists.runrev.com wrote:
> 
> I gotta say I feel better about the LC website after reading this:
> 
> https://hackernoon.com/for-the-love-of-god-please-tell-me-what-your-company-does-c2f0b835ab92
> 
> -- 
>  Mark Wieder