CNN had a story, today, on a little Parisian teashop called Chajin (the name means tea master). The report pointed out that the little business gets half of its business from its online store. Knowing that my husband is very interested in tea, I decided to check out the website. Understandably, the default language is French but it was hard work finding the language translation button – I found it after looking for several seconds and trying a couple of buttons unsuccessfully. Finally, I finally saw a tiny blinking American flag link to change the language to English.
I consider myself to be a pretty savvy online navigator and I was having trouble, which makes me think I am not alone.
The point is that websites shouldn’t make their audiences work so hard. It’s a respect issue, but more importantly – it makes good sense to not risk losing a potential lifetime customer because of bad design. In our instant gratification world, people want to be engaged instantly and navigate the site to find the info they are looking for quickly.
The Firebelly credo places heavy emphasis on design – engagement value and intuitive navigation being some of the key components. Besides, the website is an online manifestation of the real world entity. Thus, there are no templates or cookie cutters – everything is customized to each individual company. We’ve been accused of “monetizing our client’s needs poorly”. You’re right. But it’s our long-term relationships and good design that matter to us. That’s our secret sauce. Pun intended.
We’re not a group of nerds or a group of design snobs. We’re really a mixture of design, pop culture geeks, techies, and people that like to do business with respect and passion. This cocktail approach to team building has given us a useful fluency that we’ve extended into planning for engagement on other web-based planes – social media! And so we’ve added a dash of Search Engine Optimization and some analytics – so we can measure results. Just having an online presence is not enough anymore – passionate engagement is the only way to win and keep customer’s hearts and minds.
-Angela
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