Debra’s article this month is about two things: the efficacy of NLP and effective design for web pages, including this newsletter, the SCS home page, and other SCS pages. I didn’t participate in the discussion about the design for the SCS website, so I don’t have any sense of the personality of the person with whom Debra discussed our current website design and his recommendations for change. While I disagree with some of his assumptions about SCS, what he says about Internet marketing is correct.
The company, Meclabs Institute and Meclabs Education, is focused on marketing. I think their Web designs are good, and perhaps ideal for their business purpose, which is (after all) sales. When you read their Web pages, it becomes increasingly obvious that their principal focus is on selling their services to readers. Debra spent more time working in sales than I, and that might account for our different perspectives of the recommendations we received. I spent most of my working life in education, and while I taught business communication and related subjects that included persuasive components, my main focus was on teaching and learning.
Do I want people to “buy our stuff”? Of course, but even more than that, I want people—including those who only read our Web pages—to learn strategies that will help them navigate this thing we call “life.” I think SCS products and services will also help with that, but my desire is for even those whose only encounter with us is through the SCS website to benefit. My sense is that those who read Debra’s and my posts with regularity really do benefit. The caveat is that our regular readers are primarily those who know us from other contexts, so they have a built-in loyalty. I very much agree that we need to make the SCS website more attractive to first-time visitors, especially those who find us by chance (Google knows who we are). I agree that we would do well to persuade those who find us by accident to become regular readers, regardless of whether they decide to buy something from us.
The criticism of the SCS website I agree with most strongly is that our home page in particular is too “busy.” We have “stuff” on the left, “stuff” on the right, and “stuff” in the middle. Simplifying the home page will probably be our first priority. I’m not sure how we will change it, but you (if you’re a regular visitor) can expect change. Change has, of course, become a major fact of modern life. We are more aware of it now because the rate of change has itself changed, from linear (one step at a time: 1,2,3,4) to exponential (increasing rate: 1,2,4,8). If you’re old enough, you can remember when radio was the principal broadcast medium. President Franklin Roosevelt communicated with the American public with a series of Fireside Chats. Then came TV, which quickly went from black-and-white and only three channels, to color and a multitude of channels delivered in a variety of ways.
Debra and I have both been reading books by Barbara Marx Hubbard, a futurist who believes that humans now have the opportunity to accelerate the process of evolution. While I’m not sure about the degree to which that conscious control of human evolution is true, I am certain that change is inevitable. A well-known aphorism is Change or Die. Those of you who watched “Star Trek: The Next Generation” are familiar with the Borg, part human and part-machine, who would tell their victims, “Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.”
My sense is that we don’t have a choice in whether we will change, either as individuals or as a species, but we do have choices about how we will change if we act soon and wisely. I will close with an old NLP language pattern: When now would be a good time to change….