Dana VanDen Heuvel is looking for some names for his 50 greatest thinkers in modern marketing project. He’s planning to do a post on each of the great thinkers on his blog. Sounds like a fascinating project. He’s already listed the few who came to my mind (Philip Kotler, Seth Godin, Ries and Trout). Any ideas? Post ’em here.
Author: andrewcareaga
Former higher ed PR and marketing guy at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) now focused on freelance writing and editing and creative writing, fiction and non-fiction.
Failure to re-launch? Or ‘subtle evolution’?
Should organizations make a big deal about doing a major overhaul and re-launch of their web sites? Jared Spool, a usability design engineer who blogs at UIE Brain Sparks, thinks organizations would be better off making incremental change. In The Quiet Death of the Major Re-Launch, he writes that over his 10 years of work with web design, “if we’ve learned anything, it’s that redesigns rarely improve a site.”
“At best,” he writes, a redesign “just rearranges the elements. At worst, it frustrates the existing, loyal users without bringing anything valuable to all those new users the site is trying to attract.”
Spool wrote about this way back in 2003 (that was two re-launches ago for UMR) and urged organizations to consider “subtle evolution” as a way to incorporate changes on websites. He pointed out a few high-profile, real-world examples — Amazon, Yahoo and eBay — that have all benefited from this philosophy.
Andrew Careaga 