[thelist] RE: [thelist] Re: [thelist] This site will make yo u cry (to the tune of £1 ,000,000)

Simon Willison simon at incutio.com
Wed Jul 10 18:54:00 CDT 2002


At 08:46 11/07/2002 +0900, Shashank Tripathi wrote:
>     | Enough
>     | blogger interest usually attracts the bigger media sites,
>     | and this thing deserves all the bad press we can throw at it.
>
>
>One thing to note though is that bad press or good press, more press is
>usually defined as "success" in marketing circles because it draws
>eyeballs to their website. Once they are well known, even negatively so,
>then they can redesign in the future and say "Look, we're much better
>now". Which will be heard by a lot more people than if they had not been
>publicized at all in the first place.

You're absolutely right, but I don't see that that's a problem. I like the
idea of a well designed communications site - if they redesign it with
standards and accessibility in mind due to bad publicity it could do
wonders for the web standards movement - sure they'll get a lot of traffic
out of it, but if they redesign it properly that traffic wwill be well
deserved. If you want to be really cynical you could argue that such a
scenario would only cause other less scrupulous companies to deliberately
design pathetic sites so they can get publicity and praise when they
redesign, but I don't think that's very plausible in the long run. The
absence of a whole bunch of companies deliberately emulating boo.com
demonstrates this nicely.

Simon




More information about the thelist mailing list