IRREFUTABLE MATHEMATICALLY SOUND ILLOGIC

Creating or re-designing your website means you will have to justify the costs to the CFO (or your boss). And  you’re going to have to talk about things like “responsive design,  speed,  mobile and tablet content presentation.

BE PREPARED

Be prepared when they give you a responsive…

“What the “H” are you talking about?”

They may still think tablets are made of stone.  They will ask questions. Many. Then many more. Each question will have money attached. Money you want.

WHAT THEY’RE NOT LOOKING FOR

The answers they’re looking for are not visitors, views, page hits, comments, links, feeds or community building, it will look so cool or it will be the epitome of awesomeness. 

WHAT THEY ARE LOOKING FOR

They want NUMBERS! How will this improve leads, increase sales, reduce costs or improve the business?

You have to show them the math before they will show you the money.

HERE’S THE GREAT THING ABOUT CFO’S

CFO’s are typically easy to read neuro-linguistically. Though they esteem themselves as calm, cool, poker-faced scions of logic, they usually give off subtle signals – if you know what to look for. Slight visceral indications of how you’re presentation is faring.

MAKE SURE THE MATH DOESN’T ADD UP

You need to be “creative,” in a “make it up math for the better of all humanity” type of way to sell your project. Especially one that is new technology. Analytical types like CFO’s don’t appreciate or understand creative types – except they think they waste a lot of money and time.  They don’t get them. Never will. SO you have to baffle them with a badinage of irrefutable, mathematically sound illogic.

EXAMPLE (THIS WILL WORK ON ANY ANALYTICAL PERSONALITY)

Recently I helped a friend create and present a straightforward and fairly simple presentation for her CFO.  It went as pretty much as expected at the start.

 “We built that website in 1993. What’s the rush to change it?” It still works doesn’t it? What’s a blog again?

My friend championed her project as “the future of the web,”the intrinsic value, the quick  payback, the powerful capabilities and possibilities of the new responsive design website.

Of course, being a CFO, he expected to see the numbers. The math. So, we presented the responsive design website  ROI (quite effectively I might add, if I do say so myself) with this instructional video.

RESPONSIVE DESIGN ROI MATH: 28/7=13

DISTRACTIVE DESIGN

This baffling badinage of balderdash stunned the CFO.

It’s a well known psychological technique called “distraction,” that we built into the presentation. The CFO was speechless, confused. and more importantly … VULNERABLE to some real logic. We took advantage of it and quickly presented the case for the website redesign.

WHY RESPONSIVE DESIGN?

We Need Better Design

Our customers are going mobile. Heavily. Smartphones and tablets. Our mobile traffic has increased from 0% 2 years ago to 47% today. And that 47% leaves almost immediately because or website display Hoover’s (sucks).

Our buyers favor mobile applications that are crisp, clean, and quickly responsive. The small screen size and real estate and  short visitor-attention span on the smartphone and tablets demand better design decisions – to help them find what they need to find – quickly. They want to get in, solve their problem and get out.

Our website has to make it easy for them to do business with us.

EXAMPLES:

 Hubspot (www.hubspot.com)

Harvard University (www.harvard.edu)

We Need Better Navigation

Content consumers dislike deeply nested features on mobile devices and tablets because they’re hard to use– and it’s spreading to websites. They don’t like to go deep-diving through extended sub-page navigation. Too hard. They prefer the EASY experience.

Scroll down, scroll up or scroll sideways. Big visuals. Less words. More meaning.  Really. A lot less words. Ditch the corporate gobbledygook.

We need to put our best content up front. Not buried. Easy to see. Easy to find.

EXAMPLES:

This is Responsive (http://bradfrost.github.io/this-is-responsive/index.html)

Empowered: Sykes Blog (Http://blog.sykes.com)

We Need Better Content Display

In 2010, the average number of unique screen resolutions was 97. That number is almost 250 different types of screens now. This complex variety of screen resolutions today means it’s more difficult to ensure the content presentation functionality of websites across devices. It could look good, bad, ugly … or worse.

Responsive design adjusts to whatever device our customer might use, be it a tablet, smartphone, or desktop.

Some technology analysts recommend building separate mobile and tablet sites to address this issue.  We don’t.  We think the best way to go is a Responsive Design website. Why?  Responsive design eliminates the need for a separate mobile presence. This makes the our proposed website significantly easier to maintain – and much more efficient.

A responsive website generally loads faster—this is critical for SEO – and critical for our customers to find us and our products.  Because  responsive design has to account for both desktop computers and small screened limited-memory devices, the best responsive websites tend to be minimal builds with fewer interactive components. Responsive design websites are like the Road Runners of the internet. Our  current website is like the Eeyore Donkey from Winnie the Pooh fame.  And Eeyore is right all the time.

EXAMPLES:

Compass Clinical  Consulting (www.compass-clinical.com)

The Boston Globe (www.bostonglobe.com)

BESIDES THAT? 

Google has officially said responsive Web design is its recommended configuration, and since the majority of our traffic – 80% – comes from  Google,  it seems like a good idea to listen to their recommendations on how to handle mobile traffic.

We were getting ready to wrap-up the presentation with the INFOGRAPHIC below.  The nuts and bolts. What I consider a lot of the good stuff. But the CFO stopped us.

“Could you replay the Abbott & Costello video again? I’m going to use that on the CEO. I need a raise. 

…  You have your budget for the redesign.”

It reminded me of an old Mark Twain.

“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.”