Your homepage is officially dead. Google killed it, in fact they killed the whole idea of a homepage.  How? They knocked down the walls, and stormed the castle they took no prisoners and killed every homepage they could find.  They actually destroyed the whole concept of a homepage.

When the web was born nobody knew what to do with it.  So they patterned things on the web after things they already knew.  They treated the homepage either like a newspaper (think portal pages) or like a store quickly and cleaning sending you down the right rows. So everything that mattered had to be crammed on the homepage or nobody would ever find it.

Now every page of your website was a potential entry point.  Just like a farmers market you can see what you want from a distance and come at it from any angle.  Or you can ignore it all together. Don’t like the tomatoes here? Walk ten feet.  Google became your homepage and guess what?  Your customers can now see you, your competitors and thousands of opinions all at the same time from your homepage.   Now websites from the lunatic fringe of the internet are showing up on the same search results as “big corp inc.”

What does this mean? there are no barriers to entry.  If you have an idea and build a customer friendly website you can be on the same list of “places that matter” as a billion dollar company.  It is no longer about who has the most money to spend on advertising it is about who has just what i am looking for.

Your customers will find you when they are good and ready.  Are you putting yourself in a position to be found?

TV – There you are totally engaged in your favorite show and then suddenly the screen fades to black and you are attacked with a poorly executed advertisement for soap or something you don’t care about.  It is 3 times as loud as it should be to make sure you can’t do anything else.

Radio – You are bored in your car and you happen upon a radio station that is letting you anonymously indulge your guilty pleasure for Kenny Logins.  Instead of going from “Highway Through the Danger Zone” to “Footloose” you end up with a commercial for used cars

Magazines – You can’t even enjoy what you are reading because they have inserted so many ads and stiff pieces of paper that fall into your lap.  They also put part of the story on 20 different pages like some lousy choose your own adventure book.  (I would always read those straight through and then imagine what I would have chosen)

How do you react? Mute, fast forward, change the station, put the magazine down or go get a soda.

What you wanted was great content, what you got was OK content with lots of interruptions

Does advertising work? Well kind of…not as well as a referral from a friend or a relationship.  But it is true if you interrupt me enough you may catch me humming your Jingle – but that doesn’t mean I like your product, or that I am even a potential customer.