Mint Digital

I felt embarrassed reading Knock Knock, Seth Godin’s new book. It says everything we’ve been striving for with Mint Digital but puts it a whole load better.

Two quotes I’ll steal for pitch meetings

‘Like it or not your website has a tone of voice.’

The Mozilla vs BlogBridge example demonstrates this perfectly. BlogBridge doesn’t look like like an successful open source project, it looks like a small business-to-business website.

‘All the cues that people rely on are muted online. There is no touch or smell or location. There is very little sound. So we obsess about subtle cues of typeface or colour or photography. It is hard to overestimate how much these things matter.’

I hope this is true, we sure spend enough time obsessing about these things. It’s strange, because many of the examples in the book are ugly. (I wonder if this is not chance. Direct marketing is the ugliest form of advertising and the mentality Seth is outlining is heavily direct marketing influenced).

But if I am going to pick bones:

Bone 1: The value of choices
Seth says choices are bad, but is it that simple? Choices are empowering. Take them away and users feel out-of-control. Tesco sells good, better, best. Three choices makes the customer feel like she is buying. Not being sold to.

Bone 2: Inverted pyramid structure
Seth suggests that the ‘inverted pyramid’ comes from the engineering mentality of early site designers. I’m not sure it does.

If you meet a prospective client at a networking event, you don’t force him to hear about your unique approach then your clients then your history. You let him choose the flow of the conversation. The ‘inverted pyramid’ is a structure that lets user choose their own path.

Having said that, we are starting on two websites that are going to be much more path-based. (Interestingly both sites are for new businesses. I think we’ve been able to help them simplify their proposition - by considering how to sell it online.) And one of my favourite websites of all time is this very directional one.

Mint’s experience
We’ve been advocating small, focused sites, closely tied to AdWords campaigns - the sort of sites Knock Knock advocates. Often, they just don’t seem to meet the clients’ needs.

Maybe it comes down to the type of client. AdWords isn’t half as effective for a capital allowance consultancy or a qualitive research specialist as it is for an online turf seller (our biggest AdWords’ success to date). And if you are not using AdWords, you’ve got much less idea of what your browsers want - so maybe it makes sense to lay out the information on an ‘inverted pyramid’ platter.