[thelist] What do clients look for?

James Aylard evolt at pixelwright.com
Mon Jan 19 17:53:10 CST 2004


chris wrote:
> If the target market wants to do business with an overtly american
> company via their website, how trashy must the website be to attract
> them?

    Trollometer on, calibrated, and pegged... Please.

> To what extent does a web developer have a responsibility to say "no
> that's too trashy" if it's what the client wants?

    It depends on how willing you are as a developer to work on a project
you may not like personally. Ultimately, if you want the work, you can only
advise and suggest alternatives.

> With that in mind, http://www.americancustomercare.com/ would be a
> brilliant marketing strategy for any large non-american corporation
> that wanted to generate "local" U.S. business by masquerading as a ma
> and pa.

    The question is, does a site with a design of this nature -- let's call
it heavy on the kitsch -- actually appeal to the company's target market? It
apparently apealed to the managers of this particular company. But does it
appeal to the customers (or potential customers) of that company? Do the
managers know how to communicate to their customers through the web, or are
they clueless? Who knows?
    IMO, most visitors to a web site will assume that a .com domain with
fluent American-English is American enough, and won't find
baseball-and-apple-pie animations particularly compelling. But then, many of
the "independently produced" pages on our company Intranet have more
animations and crawling text than the American Customer Care page, so who am
I to say what people expect?

James Aylard



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