What I particularly like is how the flow of it, despite being a single column, is organic. The eye keeps being surprised by new touches like a bar chart following a pie chart (as compared to two identical styles), images moving from one side to the other, icons like checkmarks next to bullet points and so on. Engaging enough that you want to read all the way down to the bottom. The colors are coordinated with those of the brand, and are always legible where they need to be.

Overall a good job. Here’s what it looks like:

The response in the SEO community has been to tell web designers to modify the links used on each page in your site, often to extremes. For example, Scott Smigler says we should remove site-wide navigation on sections like product listings.

This is where I get upset.

Web site design is first and foremost about usability. If people get frustrated with navigation and their ability to quickly get to the information they want, all the SEO tweaking in the world won’t help your site.

Navigation is a very sensitive issue. You can’t remove site-wide navigation from any page on your site, regardless of how important you think that might be for search engine optimization. This navigation acts as a road map, guiding people through the site. It must be consistent at all times. There is no other option! Studies since the web began have pointed out the importance of consistent site-wide navigation in user satisfaction. Even as people have become more familiar with the web and have taken some things for granted, this dependence on consistent navigation has, if anything, become even more critical. Competitor’s web sites are just a mouse click away. You can’t afford to frustrate or annoy your visitors.

To be fair to Scott, whom I respect, he does say that it might not work. I’ll go further than that and say this solution can’t work. It’s so bad that it has no place on the list.

I’ve encountered this kind of aggressive off-the-hip tactic before, and it was ugly. When a Google loophole allowed page ranking to be increased by using keywords in image file names as well as “alt” tags, an SEO consulting firm talked one of my clients into letting them optimize the website. The result was an unholy mess, in which every image file name and “alt” tag became a long, cryptic flow of keywords. Not only was it unmanageable from a web design standpoint, but it was unusable for visually impaired people. As they would mouse around any page on the 1100-page site using the aural navigation tools, they would hear long nonsense sequences of hyphenated words that made no sense at all. Changing this later took dozens of hours of unnecessary work.

Allowing an SEO tactic like this to be employed at the expense of navigation reality is no different from people who ignore other realities of marketing communication. I recall one young art director showing me a brochure he had created. He was sure it would win awards, because it was so “creative.” Unfortunately, it ignored the realities of usability. The entire brochure was printed with nothing more than high gloss varnish on a solid black background. To read any of the copy, you had to hold the pages just so in the light, moving the paper so that each new line would catch the light. I asked him, “How many prospective customers do you think will take the time and effort to read this?” He hadn’t thought about it that way.

SEO is a science, and deserves respect from the marketing community. At the same time, we need to be careful to understand that online communication is a symbiotic relationship between a number of expert elements. SEO is only one of them. Another element is usability and navigation. Equally important are graphic design and the science of eye flow. Still another is copywriting. We should never take any one of those elements by itself and place it on a pedestal, looking down on all the others. You can’t sacrifice any one of them and still have an effective end result.

Problems exist in SEO and we’ll have more of them down the road. It’s nasty out there, with unscrupulous players making things more challenging for everyone else as the search engines try to maintain order. But sudden, extreme solutions cause more harm than good. Clients will hear about them and make demands that end up being unreasonable and unworkable. Let’s have clear, meaningful dialog with all the parties to make sure that we build truly successful web sites for our clients.

What do you think? Post your comments below.

“At first, it was pure passion,” she whispered with a silky voice I was still getting used to, her sapphire-blue eyes flashing in the shadows. She leaned forward, glancing around before continuing. “I couldn’t help myself,” she added lustily. “I’d never experienced anything like it. Nothing else mattered. I just wanted more and more of the same.”

Her face slid back into shadow. Silence, except for a sultry jazz tune working its way from table to table as I pondered her confession. Blue smoke curled slowly in the air like the lazy circles she made with her finger in blonde locks flowing to her shoulders.

“How long did it last?” I asked. Her eyes drifted away, remembering, then came back to mine.

“It was a couple of years until the magic stopped. After a while I realized my needs were no longer being met. Now I was more concerned about time. I wanted it faster.”

“Faster?”

“Faster or not at all,” she responded. “Ten seconds or less was the magic number for me now. It began to feel so superficial. Meaningless. Maybe I just got bored, but it no longer seemed to be about satisfying my needs. It was just motion and sound for the sake of entertainment.” She downed the rest of her drink in a single gulp. I waved for another round.

I was investigating the disappearance of web animation. What had once been proclaimed the future of advertising on the Internet was now a mere shadow of it’s original promise. It had all but disappeared from the landscape, especially from corporate or brand-related web sites. Yet there were few answers. Flash designers didn’t think anything had changed. Corporate marketing types didn’t want to talk about it. Nobody wanted to share their experience, or were too busy to give it much thought. Then I found her, someone who valued the ability to interact directly with the brands that mattered to her. We had met in the rain outside the bar and went in without a word spoken.

“I began to resent splash screens and animated intros,” she sighed, leaning back against the hard wooden frame of her chair and twirling a plastic swizzle stick between her fingers. “They no longer seemed honest,” she explained. “All that razzle dazzle. It was too often manipulative. It took extra time and seldom added anything of value to our relationship.”

“I no longer cared,” she said. “We saw less and less of each other. I thought the relationship was over. All that mattered was the information. I wanted it fast and simple. Flash was dead for me. Forgotten.”

She suddenly leaned forward and gripped my arm. Hard. Almost hard enough to hurt. “But I was wrong,” she exclaimed passionately. “It’s back!”

That got my attention. She must have noticed the look in my eyes. When she spoke again, her voice was barely a whisper. I strained to hear.

“Flash MX,” she gasped.

A computer monitor throbbed in the corner. She continued. “Just when I thought life was returning to normal, it’s starting again. Flash is back. Now with video. And an application architecture that can give me everything I ever dreamed of in a brand relationship. More interactivity. Database management. All combined with the motion and streaming audio that started it all.”

Flash MX. So Flash wasn’t gone after all, I realized. Just the victim of inappropriate use. Instead of using its power to provide an experience that mattered to the audience, Flash had typically been used as a self-serving instrument that wasted people’s time offering nothing of value in return for their patience. Flash revived. Would it now be used the way it should have been all along? Would it truly enhance the brand experience? Would it make the experience worthy of the extra download time? What would the future hold?

A saxophone wailed its plaintive notes as a drop of condensation slowly traced its way down the side of her glass. Her blue eyes pierced mine, the same question deep within. Have marketers learned? Will it be different this time? Outside the rain slapped at the windows with streaky wet fingers. The waitress brought a new drink.

Alfred Korzybski, who developed the concept of general semantics, explained it this way: Insane people try to make the world of reality fit what is inside their heads.

Someone who thinks he’s Napoleon makes the outside world fit that notion. He filters and interprets the events and signals around him to fit that belief. There’s no room at all for facts.

But the sane person is exactly the opposite. She constantly analyzes the world of reality and adjusts what is in her head to fit the facts. In other words, while the insane person has only opinions, the sane person never has opinions or feelings. She would be totally unaffected by colors, shapes, other people’s viewpoints and so on — using only cold, hard facts to make every decision. She would buy a mustard-colored sports car called the Slug on the same emotionless basis as a bright red Viper because issues of color or semantics have nothing to do with actual performance. What friends think wouldn’t even be an issue. Indeed, a completely sane person would be like a computer, and in many situations would be unable to make any decision at all! If you were truly making your decision on logic alone, you would often be unable to make a decision for lack of sufficient input.

Most people are somewhere in between. You make up your mind about something you like based on input from many sources, including visual appearance and emotion. A lot of it comes from your gut reaction, how you feel about it overall. You might like the color of the red car, causing you to prefer it over the brown one, even if other aspects of the car are less favorable. Once you start to form your opinion, you look for additional pieces of information proving that you are making the right decision, despite the fact that many aspects of your decision are not based on fact. You may even find the nearest expert (or non-expert) and accept his or her opinion. That way you don’t have to bother with too many facts. In the advertising business, that’s called “word of mouth.” So how did the ‘expert’ you went to get his or her opinion? The same ‘unsane’ way you did!

A good marketing or advertising strategy makes use of this psychological process. A good strategy must be simple, fitting easily into the mind of the prospect. It must be memorable. It must provide just enough facts to be believable. And it must strike an emotional chord to satisfy “unsane” people.

So how does this actually work in the real world?

Strategies and brand positioning are used to appeal to the emotional part of our decision-making process. Very rarely, if ever, are these designed to appeal to logic.

When Apple computer said, “Here’s to the crazy ones,” it was talking about all of us. That “think different” campaign was entirely pointed at our emotional response to being seen as leaders and innovators in a world of followers. This claim had nothing directly to do with whether the computer was better than the competition, because those arguments would have had no impact. People don’t want to hear that they made a bad choice. They want to be inspired by their association with one brand because it is cool, or thoughtful, or daring, or whatever.

Here are a few other historical examples of unsane marketing at work:

Pepsi: The Choice of a New Generation

This campaign used emotion to trigger existing feelings of rebellion in young people, giving them an option to drink something different from what their parents were used to. Does this have anything to do with taste? No. But it worked wonders with an unsane audience.

Coke: The Real Thing

This campaign stood on Coca Cola’s position as the “original” soft drink. The factual side of this strategy combined with the implied perception that any product that has been a leader for so long must taste good. Personally, I think it’s a weak campaign (there’s no product definition), but it served the need Coke had to re-establish its position as the “original” cola.

BMW: The Ultimate Driving Machine

Despite the fact that this car doesn’t look anything like a true sports car, this campaign effectively positioned the BMW as a driving enthusiast’s automobile. A certain amount of factual information had to be used to make the statement believable, but I wonder how many people make a sports-car buying decision without ever trying a Porsche.

United: Fly the Friendly Skies

This campaign ran for many years, and was very effective. Yet while it ran, I flew many different airlines and found staff at most of them equally friendly and courteous. This ad campaign worked because people want to believe that there’s a difference. Of course, success with this type of approach means you better be as good or better than others in the area you’re talking about, or you could crash and burn (it won’t be pretty).

Budweiser: King of Beers

Now, Bud may be a great beer, but exactly what makes one beer a “king” compared to another? Nothing, except the image of that bottle cap turned upside down. A brilliant campaign, directly targeted at the “unsane” nature of how and why we make buying decisions. It has nothing to do with logic and everything to do with emotion. Long live the king (of beers)!

Have you noticed how textures have become popular? We see this influence in the kind of papers used for brochures and packaging, to interior decorating trends, to the strong textures showing up in clothing styles. I believe this trend is directly related to the growth of Internet communications — a flat, untouchable medium that looks pretty but never offers any real tactile essence.

This isn’t the first time a communications trend has affected us culturally. The growth of television in the late 1950′s had a similar impact, though in those days it was checkered tablecloths, wrinkled chiffon dresses, silk shirts, and corduroy pants.

People have had enough experience with the internet and interactive presentations by now. The excitement that characterized the 90′s is fading. The internet is now an everyday tool. Meanwhile, people are getting tired of the pretty pictures behind glass. They are yearning to touch something real. They want to feel blind embossing and corrugated cardboard. They want to watch the shadows interplay from die-cut openings and edges. They want to run their fingers along unusual bindings and shapes of annual reports that look more like packaging than business documents.

Advertisers who wish to maximize the psychological impact of this trend should combine their internet strategy with extra effort on production of collateral materials. The most effective strategies will probably involve the use of highly tactile print communications combined with highly interactive and informative online communications. Especially if one requires or supports the other to complete the message.

Watch as social media continues the transition in our expectations. We now want our brands to interact with us, not to talk to us in a one-way message, but to demand a two-way dialog. Ignore these developments at your own peril.