It's All Marketing - Accessibility Is The Key
It's All Marketing - Accessibility Is The KeyWe're always looking for innovative tools to use online for our client's or our own web sites. Yesterday Anthony sent me through what sounded like a very useful online reminder service that, according to this news report, ".....will send alerts to people via phone, e-mail, text message, instant message or fax for any event or appointment they need to remember.
Users have to log on and provide the date and time of the event, choose the method they want for the alert, when they want to be alerted and how many times.
Alerts can go to land lines or cell phones and instant messaging applications from AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo."
But Then Disaster
What happened next was I visited the web site of the company to assess further and maybe sign up. And I received this message:
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We are sorry, as a startup company, we simply do not have the resources to make this site compatible with other browsers at this time.
Thank you for visiting. We hate seeing you go. Please use Internet Explorer 6 or 7 to view this site.
Thank you for visiting. We hate seeing you go. Please use Internet Explorer 6 or 7 to view this site.
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Oh dear. I'm using a Firefox browser at the moment. My educated guess is that 35% of the potential market initially for this service would be using Firefox browsers.
You see, Firefox browsers are used more by tech/sophisticated Internet users. And tech people tend to be the early adopters - that is, we'll try new technology much quicker and easier than most and we tend to be authorative figures on tech stuff for family and friends.
Strong Word of Mouth Referrers
Which then means that it's great to have us using your tech/innovative product because we tend to be very credible third party endorsers. That is, we tell our friends what to use and they believe us and use what we use.
So to announce a big new service and then have it inaccessible to a good 35% of your target market - probably the most important segment of your entire market - might not be the greatest marketing move ever.
Cheers
Brendon
Labels: business marketing
[ comments ]
A start-up company has to do a difficult balancing act and while the decision not to support FF was probably a wrong choice, at least they made the choice.
A few months ago my host changed servers and I had to go to my registrar to change some settings. The registrar is GoDaddy, one of the biggest in the business. The instructions from the host provider seemed clear, but there was no place to make the necessary changes .... very expensive, well designed management screens, but nothings was "there" where it was supposed to be. I called GoDaddy's tech support and the helpful tech tried to walk me through the process. "Just type the new I.P. address in the box."... him. "There is no box" .... me. After quite a bit of give and take on both sides, the tech and I each had an "aha" moment at nearly the same time. he was using MSIE, I was using FireFox. Changed browsers and job done in 10 seconds.
I guarantee that the time the tech spent with me (he had been told that all the pages were compatible with either browser) added up to the time it would have taken the developer to _test_with_both_browsers. No idea how long the problem would have existed in a company without the resources to pay for expensive live tech support.
If you want to make money rather than spend it on support or lose it to frustrated customers, accommodate the browsers people use.
(By the way, does your site work the same for a Mac user as a Windows user?)
This is a great tool to help with this problem:
http://www.browsercam.com/default.aspx
Given the audience of this particular site, it seems absolutely crazy for them to deny firefox users outright. I figure they should at least let me see the site, even if they haven't worked all of the bugs out.
Anyway, after I took the time to load it up in IE6 - I can't see any reason for this not to work in firefox. Its a table-based layout, for crying out loud!!
My impression after seeing this is that the company just doesn't know how to make a website. The design isn't that great, and the markup is horrible. For a business providing such a "cutting edge" tech service, they sure aren't making me feel confident...!
Given Dell's massive sales, if this happens we'll see an almost overnight boost in market share for Firefox.
On the flip side, Microsoft is no longer supporting Windows 98 or ME, and is going to "push" the new version of IE out to all Windows XP computers via Windows Update.
This means the market share of IE6 will drop considerably, while IE7 will become an instant contender.
I dare say that before long, the browser wars will rank up like:
IE7 over FF over IE6
I was listening to Shoemoney's podcast yesterday and he was interviewing the CEO of a new company that is producing video for marketers.
Someone asked him why his website was not yet visible and his excuse was that they wanted to tie all the loose ends of the business together before they put their website online.
It seemed a bit strange to me because there he was promoting his business on the podcast loose ends and all but didn't understand the importance of getting a website up on the Net and attracting the search engine spiders.
Even a poor website is better than no website to get things going. Some may recall a couple months ago when Markus of "Plenty Of Fish" fame got tons of publicity all across the web under the ssubject of his web site being "ugly".
Mebbe it is but he's banking a bundle every month and wouldn't make a cent without his "ugly" site.