In a recent meeting at work I had a real “self-worth” moment when talking about web sites, web software, and the making of said things. One person in the meeting was explaining their displeasure with a web site they had made by the internal web site department (not me). Their complaint: ads.
Web advertising is the root of all evil in design. I know I will always lose the Battle of the Philosophy of Money in Business, but there is a point when you cannot let dollars outweigh the benefit of the site (or tool) to the people that will be using it. This goes along with the age old, “it doesn’t matter how nice it looks if no one can use it.”
Although I’m (thankfully) in a position where I don’t have to worry about generating revenue with what I create, if I were, my strategy would be to make a good product first and then figure out how to make money with it.
For example (and in the case of this meeting), an employment web site where people go to find jobs. The first thing the site should do well is help people find jobs. Period. Once that goal is met, then you can worry about figuring out how to squeeze money out of it. But when you add advertising you cannot undo the first goal. Kind of like the Laws of Robotics.
It really amazed me that the internal web department managing and creating the sites for our company were managing to make both public customers and internal customers unhappy. But they are generating money with click-through banner ads and other methods, so ultimately it ends up being OK in the eyes of the company. If there’s a web page, they make sure it has an ad — funny — so are they the web department or the sales department?
Out of all this I realized that I really enjoy and take pride in making what people want. And I don’t just mean making it do what they want, that’s easy, but making it work how they want to do what they want. Figuring out how to make it work technically is easy and getting easier all the time, it’s figuring out how to make it work for the people using it that is the challenge.
The problem is a lot of people know that it’s hard and thus rely on the novelty of their program just “doing it” and taking advantage of the apologetic crowd. As the baker of the bread, you know when you’re dealing with the apologists. Don’t take advantage of them. Sure, they’ll be thankful that your product does what it needs to do, but they’ll be happy when the product is easy to use.
