My company is re-building the web-site for Ultralase at the moment, we are lucky as they are a pretty brave company and leave us to pretty much run their whole Internet strategy and as a result they are the dominant force in their marketplace. That’s nice, but recently I have wondered what it would be like if we had to explain to them everything we did. It would be damn near impossible to value it, sure we keep timesheets for programming and project management but so much of what we bring is measured in cleverness but not in the huge ideas. We had that huge idea (VITES) back in 2003! No, this is about the small, tiny, clever ideas we come up with day to day - our leading clever-idea bloke is John Hyde who has just immigrated to New Zealand. John will carry on working for us when he settles there but for the moment I am back in the harness working on these ideas and I came up with a corker today, a simple you have UNREAD mail link that appears on the web-site to all returning visitors who have not left any personal details yet.
Simple, yup! When it was tested in the office everyone said they would click on the link out of (either) curiosity or simple conditioning. We are used to seeing those 3 (4 in this case, it makes is more compelling) little words at places we stop at frequently. So, we’ve made a (as yet) unresponsive visitor click a link we wanted them to click…anything else whilst we are at it? How about a login/register screen….
Please enter your email address and password to retrieve your message(s)
Email [ ]
Password [ ]
Excellent, we have a way to let someone register and login at the same time and, for a bonus, we get his/her email address and we have closed the relationship gap slightly as they are now part of the family, they have opted-in to our love-generator!
I’ll keep you posted on the outcome - behavioural and conditioning are wonderful on the web and with the ever-changing landscape it should prove to keep us all on our toes.