The Big Red Fez: Zooming, Evolution, and the Future of Your Company

If you're trying to do any online commerce, this book would be worth buying even if the purchase price was $200. The easy-access that has allowed anyone with a computer to have a website of their own has created a huge mass of poorly-designed websites. Unfortunately, the same quality has crept into commercial sites, too....and some of the worst offenders are actual names you'd recognize! In his wonderfully refreshing and down-to-earth style, Seth Godin speaks candidly about what web visitors are looking for when they visit your site....and why they'll leave in less than three seconds if they don't see it. It's not a how-to book on HTML, Java or Flash. It has nothing to do with the mechanics of designing a site. It's about what the web visitor SEES and DOESN'T SEE. This thin little volume will change everything about how you look at web design. Buy it!

Author of several brisk, witty, and informative business books, Seth Godin has a unique gift for locking in on a core concept and then explaining why and how it can guide and inform thinking about an important business issue. In this volume, he focuses on "how to make any Web site better." His dual metaphors explain the meaning and significance of the title. Preferring a marketer's version of a Web site to that of an engineer, he suggests that "One of the best ways to remind yourself about what's really going on [when someone visits a Web site] is to think of a monkey in a big red fez...The best way to motivate the monkey [to take a desired action], of course, is to use a banana. Whenever a monkey walks into a new situation, all it wants to know is, 'Where's the banana?' If the banana isn't easy to see, easy to get and obvious, the monkey is going to lose interest. But if you can make it clear to the monkey what's in it for him, odds are he'll do what you want." Obviously, the monkey is the Web site visitor and the banana is the incentive mechanism. Godin uses a number of different real-world Web sites to illustrate what is and is not effective; he also explains why. (Presumably many of those responsible for the ineffective Web sites have read this book and made the necessary revisions since it first appeared about 18 months ago.) One of the book's most interesting points concerns the quite different mentalities of the engineer and the marketer. The former assumes that smart people have plenty of time, know precisely what they want from their online surfing, and can make a considered decision if provided with sufficient data. In stunning contrast, the marketer assumes that people are busy, ill informed, impatient, not very thoughtful and eager to click on to something RIGHT NOW. The marketer also believes that if you don't give the visitor the right object (or objective) to click on to immediately, the visitor will hit the "Back" button and leave.I presume to add another difference: I think that most visually complicated Web sites resemble the front page of the U.S.A. Today newspaper (especially the Friday/Saturday/Sunday edition) whereas the most effective Web sites resemble the most effective billboards along a highway. Percentages vary but research studies suggest that online surfers spend about 90% of their time visiting the same ten Web sites Also, that after a unsatisfying experience, the percentage is even higher; that is, approximately 95% of online surfers never return to that Web site.One substantial benefit this book provides which I did not anticipate when I began to read it is that the same principles which Godin recommends to increase a Web site's effectiveness are also relevant to the design of marketing and sales collateral materials such as direct mail solicitations and printed brochures. Because of the immense clutter through which messages of various kinds struggle to reach their destination, and because this clutter is certain

Seth Godin can give you more valuable information on the do's and don'ts of Web site design in this small book - with a 1 picture/1 textpage approach that at first glance makes it similar to a kids' book - than any of the boring 500-page encyclopedias by wannabe web "experts" I've read recently.This is a must-read for anyone that USES the Web, let alone for those whose work is making it. As an interactive marketer, you bet I'll be giving this book to my clients each time they want to put their entire company's history in the homepage. Way to go, Seth!

The trouble with marketing books and internet based ones in paricular is they give you so many "musts", that by the time you reach the end, you've forgotten the first points that were made and you forget the basic stuff!Admittedly, Seth Godin is one of my business heroes, but this has to be worth sending $2.70 of anyone's money to charity!One learns best by seeing, not reading. Every point he makes is illustrated with a real-world example taken straight off the Web. Godin pulls no punches and slates some very well-known big names - but, it has to be said, all is reasoned and fair comment. There are accolades too, showing in clear practical steps how to make any commericial Web site better. Don't mess about - just buy it. $2.70? No brainer!