This Blog post was inspired through a post by David Shen which was originally inspired by a tweet that eventually morphed into a post by Dave McClure in which he states the following:
Probably more than half of the startups, and more than 90% of the investors have no goddamn clue what the hell they are doing re: user experience and online marketing.
Even with all our advancements in tech, we rarely find good engineering and good design coming together in a web service. Everyone knows that the best design is clean and simple. Still, there are so many services applying clutter laden Google AdSense to compensate for the revenues lost on the Freemium business model. The only good design could be found at places like the FWA which are typically sites made by big brands or leading designers… in other words BIG $$$ Advertising Agencies which don’t have the forward thinking technology to make those sites any better than a fancy digital brochure… in other words, with a few exceptions NOT scalable websites.
As a result Design has played a very small role in how advertising is shared and distributed over the web. Huck Huckabee has been championing the use of Social Media to Small Businesses by talking about Honda and their use of Facebook to connect people through ‘Honda Love’. What has always fascinated me about Huck and his Website is how the independent business man has been able to make a killing building terribly designed websites for the last 10 years. That is, up until Social Media came along and made it easy for anyone to build a www.facebook.com/mycompany or www.myspace.com/myband and drive guys like Huck Huckabee into the history pages.
Which can only mean that if Social Media has affected the SME’s freelance web design market that must also mean that with Lord Zuckerman’s 300 Million users the High Priced Design Agencies will have started feeling the hurt by now. Especially since big companies like Honda are making bigger profits and attaining more market reach through essentially free software. Which brings me back to David Shen’s article in which he lists a couple of Big Brand Design Agencies who ‘Invest’ in Startups.
Observe:
Fuse Project Partnerships Programme say they will:
…reduce our standard fees, mark the reduction as an investment, and seek ROI on that investment via royalties and equity.
How can they reduce their fee’s to struggling/Bootstrapping Startups and then turn around and ask for profit share? However, I digress.
The nothingGrinder guys (Gabriel and Aaron) come from a Film/Animation Arts Background which is why we decided to make a Media Rich Platform in the form of a codeless website builder. Our main aim has always been: To create well designed, media rich websites in Flash whilst still conforming to W3C Web Standards. Yes, in Flash. Sort of like Yooba, FlashMoto, CabanovaXL or the most recent flavor of Free Flash website Wix (Over 2 Million Free Websites and Counting). nothingGrinder intends to offer a higher quality of design and usability employing a flexible set of software driven technology to create what we call ‘The Ikea of Website Builders’. We hope that our platform will offer a happy medium of Design and functionality. Attained through a flexible environment for distributing content to any device.
The video below illustrates some staggering statistics on the Social Web. Enjoy!
