Bill Myers - Feburary 16, 2008

An example of how to quickly ruin a good thing by putting the wrong person in charge

After 4 years of continued growth and success, the subscription site owner was suddenly losing customers.

There'd been more subscription cancellations in the past 30 days, than in the previous four years.

The site owner asked me to look into it for him, so I visited the site and immediately saw the problem.

Turns out the site owner had hired a friend as 'web manager'. And the friend decided to change the very successful design of the web site.

The friend had no experience in web design, graphics tools, nor the experience to know what looked good or bad on the web.

That didn't stop him, though.

He replaced all the professional graphics on the site with over-sized jaggy edged images which looked like they had been created by someone in grade-school.

He changed all the muted corporate colors on the site to a combination of florescent greens and yellows.

And then he added a repeating wallpapered background image to every page on the site - making the pages almost impossible to read.

The friend (who had little experience on the web) was quite pleased with himself. In his mind, he had created the ultimate 'look what I can do design'.

Unfortunately, most of the subscribers of the site were 'senior citizens', and they found the new design too gaudy, too busy, and too annoying to use.

They felt betrayed that someone was allowed to 'mess' with their trusted meeting place.

So they voted with their pocket-books, cancelled their subscriptions and went elsewhere on the web.

Don't let this happen to you.

Make sure those who manage the look of your site and your products are in tune with your audience. Else your audience is likely to go somewhere else.