We had a new client come to us that was recently divorced and had been out of the workforce for two decades while raising a family. With the employment picture in its current state, and with employers often not interviewing prospects that are currently unemployed much less unemployed for 20 years, our client realized that her best chance for gainful employment was as a solopreneur.

She had a gift for interior design and had done a few projects for friends and family, so a new business was born. We worked together to create a brand image, logo, engaging website and compelling content. That was followed by a few rounds of search engine optimization and our client was off and running.

The beauty of online marketing and branding is the ability to spin a story and paint a picture of your business and reach a large audience at a fraction of what it would have cost 20 years ago. (When our client had last been gainfully employed.) If you have a friend or family member that has been out of the work force for years and is contemplating diving back in, have them give us a call to discuss how they could parlay their passion into a career.

Oh, and back to the first sentence. Kerfuffle is one of our favorite words at Bleeding Edge. It’s an alteration of carfuffle, from the Scots car – originally the Scottish Gaelic cearr meaning wrong or awkward, and fuffle – meaning to become disheveled. Some believe the word is related to the Irish cior thual, meaning confusion or disorder but they are in the minority. Now you know. There is also a UK folk band named Kerfuffle whose music we find rather pleasant.  http://www.kerfuffleonline.co.uk/

Under the law, useful and legal sites could be blacklisted while offenders will circumvent the rules. Congress is on the verge of requiring censorship compliance as a design requirement for innovations and move us in to the censorial environment that China, Iran and other totalitarian regimes impose on their citizens.

While watching C-Spam coverage of the hearings, what is most galling is the attitude of several representatives discount the technical evidence that they don’t comprehend regarding the implications of their draconian legislation – including Rep. Mel “I’m not a nerd” Watts.  However, my favorite committee member, and recipient of the prestigious Nancy Pelosi “We have to pass the bill to see what’s in it” Award is Rep. Maxine Waters of California, who opined that any discussion of security concerns is “wasting time” and that the bill should move forward without question.

That doesn’t make any sense, but what does make sense for a new SOHO business (Small Office – Home Office) is putting your best foot forward from day one. At Bleeding Edge we work with several very large companies on a regular basis, but are always looking at ways to help small startups get a foothold and thrive during their first years in business.

A scenario we’ve seen time and time again with small startups is do-it-yourself-itis. A new business owner will sign up for one of the free or low cost site builders online and attempt to write the content for that site themselves. The result is usually sub-par in terms of the impact on site visitors from a visual perspective and from a content perspective. The new entrepreneur will have spent hours and hours learning to use a content management system and hammering out content only to find that their new site is getting few visitors and the visitors they do get bounce off of the homepage after giving it a cursory glance.

One of my favorite sayings is “how you do anything is how you do everything.” The danger in having a do it yourself website being the online face of your company is having visitors believe that the slipshod approach you took to building your website is not an anomaly, but your way of doing business. Do a random search of websites and you’ll find a carnival of errors, from layout issues to typos and glaringly bad color choices. (Check out the blog post “Pretty is More Profitable than Ugly” to find some interesting stats on user experiences, emotions and buying decisions.)

Here I’ll insert a shameless plug. RockitWeb is our answer for clients that can’t yet afford a custom designed website, but have tried some of the free and low cost sitebuilders on line and found the result less than dazzling.

The RockitWeb experience involves simply picking a template from the RockitWeb site, choosing a domain name, spending a pleasant hour on the phone while we ask a range of questions about your business and then taking a few days off while we write the site content and build the initial iteration of your website.

We’ll have a site up for you in three to five business days. The cost is $399 for setup and $19.95 a month.
Do you know someone that is starting a new business on a shoestring? We can help them get off to a flying start with a RockitWeb site that gives them an online presence with minimal effort and minimal expense!

Oh, and back to presidential quotes. Gerald Ford was agreeing with two previous presidents, Richard Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower who also strongly believed that “Things are more like they are now than they have ever been before.” That doesn’t top one of my personal favorites from Bush the Senior: “For seven and a half years I’ve worked alongside President Reagan. We’ve had triumphs. Made some mistakes. We’ve had some sex…uh…setbacks.”

The discussion on specificity shall wait for another day. Today I’d like to take aim at other words that have lost their power. My personal favorite? Passion! What are you passionate about? I can certainly understand, as a musician, being passionate about music in general, or passionate about a genre of music, or even in a particular musician. You can be passionate about art of course. Either viewing art, creating art or reading about art. I’d venture that you could be passionate about particular academic areas of interest. To be sure, Stephen Hawking is passionate about cosmology, and Edward Witten is passionate about theoretical physics. (As an aside, if you’re passionate about all three you should read Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter for a mind-expanding experience.)

The point of this from a marketing perspective? If a company says they are passionate about supply chain management, maximizing ROI in your add campaign or diversifying your core competencies that’s a little, well, sad. Let’s all take a step back and regain the power of passion by only using it to refer to things you’re actually passionate about. As a public service I just scoured our site for use of the word passion and found this sentence: Our clients can expect… “A passionate group of creatives that mix technical expertise with an uncommon dedication to customer service that informs every project that we undertake…” OK, passionate about what? Creativity in general? Did I write that? As an example to others I’m changing the word passionate to talented. You’re welcome.

I’m passionate about snow skiing by the way, though I’m not particularly good.

That’s not a value judgment about experiences with employees. It’s a judgment about what does, or does not, make for an effective website, advertising campaign, or new technology. It’s a judgment about the importance of aesthetics. Not just for the sake of aesthetics, but because aesthetics influence usability.

Does this prose spark a glimmer of recognition?:

It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic,
Of all things physical and metaphysical,
Of all things human and all things super-human,
Of all true manifestations of the head,
Of the heart, of the soul,
That the life is recognizable in its expression,
That form ever follows function. This is the law.

- Louis Sullivan, Architect 1896

Louis was a terrific architect but “This is the law?” Puhleeeeze.

At Bleeding Edge we’re creating marketing and advertising campaigns, building websites and shooting videos. Building skyscrapers is not currently in our wheelhouse – so let’s move the analogies from Architecture to Web Design.

If form followed function every e-commerce site would look the same – Target and Walmart would have identical layouts. Kroger’s online pharmacy would look the same as Walgreen’s, Google would be identical to Yahoo, Bing and Ask. At Bleeding Edge our programmers have an impressive track record of coding elegant, functional, database driven websites, but the ultimate success of a project is dependent on features beyond functionality. Aesthetics, emotions and usability are inextricably linked to the success of a website or application.

In other words, Pretty Things Work Better.

Don Norman in the book “Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things” writes about a Japanese study:

Researchers in Japan setup two ATMs, “identical in function, the number of buttons, and how they worked.” The only difference was that one machine’s buttons and screens were arranged more attractively than the other. In both Japan and Israel (where this study was repeated) researchers observed that subjects encountered fewer difficulties with the more attractive machine. The attractive machine actually worked better.

The distinction between how something looks and how it works is artificial.

How do people respond to a website? To their first impression? To layout, colors and font?

How do the choices we make as designers and programmers influence a users understanding and emotions? How do those emotions influence behavior? How does the predictability of layout influence user psychology?

One of our clients asked us to put the navigation for their site on the right side of the page and we let them know that would be a mistake, not just because their website would start showing up in web developers blogs under “what not to do” examples, but because of user expectations. Users expect to see main navigation across the top of the page underneath the header, or possible underneath a banner, either horizontally across the page or vertically down the left side. If expectations are not met, they are gone in the time it takes to click the back button in their browser.

From assuming that a red “X” in a form field is bad and a green checkmark is good, the brain is constantly interpreting non-textual information on a site. Colors, shadows, shading, images are all reinforcing a brand message or contradicting it.

Researchers led by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard at Carleton University in Ontario wanted to find out how fast people formed first impressions. The result? In the blink of an eye – or only 1/20^th of a second, web visitors form an opinion of a company. Through something called the halo effect, subsequent interactions on that site are colored: Judgements of credibility, usability & purchasing decisions. (Click here for a more in depth look at the study.)

From a study out of the Stanford University Persuasive Technology lab (read a complete summary report here in PDF format) we find that “The appeal of the overall visual design of a site, including layout, typography, font size and color schemes is the number one factor we use to evaluate a websites credibility.”

The bottom Line? Attractive things work better: We want things that are pleasing to succeed and are more tolerant of any issues.

Neurobiologist Antonio Damasio:

“…emotion is not a luxury: it is an expression of basic mechanisms of life regulation developed in evolution, and is indispensable for survival. It plays a critical role in virtually all aspects of learning, reasoning, and creativity.”

We have consulted with clients time and again that thought their sites were failing because of functionality that was not user friendly. Time and again the problem was not functionality but rather butt ugly graphic design. Things are not enjoyable because they’re easy to use. Things will be easy to use if they are enjoyable.

How we think cannot be separated from how we feel. Referral marketing expert Wendy Kinney preaches that “specific is always more profitable than general.” I’d like to add an addendum to that and say that pretty is more profitable than ugly. At Bleeding Edge, we build pretty websites!