The Blog of Kevin Glennon

Less attention should be spent on boob commercials while more attention is spent on good IA and efforts to increase the bottom line.  Bob can (and should) pick up on these once the IA is improved.

Information architecture is absolutely crucial to any campaign, not just interactive ones. When a key element is a web site, however, a significant investment in IA, both in terms of time and money, must be made. More importantly, it must be done well ahead of any other work, including design and promotions. Mapping out your services, user flows (and reverse flows), transaction processes, and interface elements are just some of the many key elements to good information architecture.

For example, long before anybody at GoDaddy was talking about their Superbowl commercials, they should have measured their web site and services twice before developing them. *Any* online business should go through an exhaustive IA process before any kind of designs are discussed. If there is a design comp being presented before the IA phase is finished, the process is already a failure.

To see a lack of thorough IA work, simply take a look at GoDaddy’s web hosting services. For $6.99 a month, you can buy the Deluxe hosting plan which gives you 100 gigabytes of space, 1000 email addresses, and UNLIMITED web sites. Such a plan is perfect for a web designer who has many small business clients (such as a restaurant up the street, and a local hardware store). The problem is that all of these UNLIMITED web sites can’t have their own domain email addresses. The 1000 advertised email addresses only work for one domain. The web sites are actually limited by the email.

In order to have customized email for each domain, they will each have to pay to buy additional email plans. In the end, 999 of the 1000 included email addresses cannot be used, and each business has to buy 100 additional email addresses.

Another example of terrible IA comes in the form of the way GoDaddy supports its customers. GoDaddy’s internal IA presumes that every customer using their services points his or her domain name(s) to the GoDaddy web servers. If they don’t point their domain names to the GoDaddy servers, some services don’t work properly. This is important because good web developers use development servers to build sites before they go live. If I were to open an account with GoDaddy to build a new site for a current client, many of the features GoDaddy offers (such as statistics) won’t function properly unless the domain name is pointed to that server.

This poses a problem because the developer cannot use the tools he or she is paying for. If the developer does point the domain name, customers are no longer looking at the official live site, but rather a construction zone.

Are these big deals? Absolutely. Have you tried to use the GoDaddy site? It’s confusing enough as it is. Even though they offer some of the coolest services around, they’re incredibly inflexible, and require you to jump through hoops. They’ve probably got the best customer service staff in the world, but the best customer service is when your customers don’t need to call for help.

I like Bob Parsons, and I think he’s doing a great job. I wouldn’t have written all this if I didn’t think he had the ability to fix everything and make GoDaddy even bigger than it is today. Still, current success is no excuse for the bush league mistakes GoDaddy has made, and continues to ignore. For the record, I wrote GoDaddy about this over a year ago, and these have yet to be fixed.

Former spam king Vardan Kushnir (shown here with a friend) loves OMMA and the IAB.

I just find this hysterical.

The Online Media, Marketing & Advertising (OMMA) folks send out so much email it’s beyond annoying. I tend to ignore them now, but it seems that every day they’re emailing me to attend some conference, seminar, or awards show. How many of these things do they throw, anyway?

What’s ironic and funny about this is the folks at OMMA are supposed to be teaching us proper and responsible online marketing, yet they’re spamming almost as much as the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB).

Victory from the Ford Challenge is not this sweet.

An archipelago is a group of islands. Examples of archipelagos include Indonesia, the Philippines, and the many walled-off sections of the Ford Motor Company marketing department.

After not being able to figure out what the Ford Challenge was (see my post from yesterday on the issue), I decided to call Ford’s Customer Relationship Center. My call was handled by Penny, arguably the nicest and most helpful customer service person with whom I have ever had the pleasure of speaking.

She told me she worked in the marketing department, and after I asked what the Ford Challenge was, she quickly told me that she had absolutely no idea!

I can’t make this stuff up!

Penny had to call her supervisor over, and the two of them flipped through the Ford web site, and called a few other marketing people over to help them out. That’s right, the customer-facing marketing department at Ford had no idea what their own company was doing. Mind you, this isn’t something that was just cooked up. The Ford Challenge campaign has been going on for at least two months.

According to Penny, the Ford Challenge is that Ford is challenging you to go on a test drive. She says you don’t win anything if you complete the challenge, and that there is no difference between their standard test drives, and Ford Challenge test drives.

She wasn’t 100% sure, as it was a different marketing department that came up with that, but that was her best guess. I kid you not.

This may be the Ford Challenge.

Honestly, I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

I decided to visit the web site for the Ford Motor Company today. I made may way over to the Ford brand, and was bombarded with language telling me to take the Ford Challenge. There was just one problem:

Nowhere on the site does Ford tell you clearly what the Ford Challenge is. Go ahead and visit www.fordchallenge.com — click on the Mustang like I did. You won’t see anything telling you what the challenge actually is! Is it a pie eating contest? What’s the prize if you win?

To get some more information, I filled out the online form signing up for the challenge. I also unchecked the box for the email opt-in, thusly opting out of any emails from Ford.

About ten minutes later, I got my first email from Ford! Obviously they are having trouble communicating, so I read the email, and sure enough on the bottom was a line saying that if I had any comments on the service, I should write to wecare@fordmotorcompany.com. I clicked on the link and sent them an email.

And the email bounced. The address isn’t set up at Ford.

Can you see where I’m going with this? These aren’t just some small oversights in the online marketing department. This is the tip of the spear of their new effort, and it’s completely blunted by shoddy work, and a complete lack of detail and quality assurance.

Obviously quality is no longer job #1, and they haven’t made any bold moves. Does Ford even know who they are?