Most businesses miss this, and in part, what I believe, contributed to the Dot.com implosion. Companies saw the web only as a new marketing opportunity to sell more widgets.

While companies were pushing out their brochure-ware, the people – not customers or consumers, but the people saw the opportunity to connect, talk, create, complain and do more than read brochures, mission statements or digital versions of printed catalogs.

While businesses shoveled money into a “new marketing media”, individuals and small groups were turning their personal computers into web servers, building websites and creating groups.

While these small projects attracted real people and open-source projects spawned creativity, the pompous corporate websites with their bloated strategies were ripe for exposure – the people did it.

Now it’s 2007 – many businesses learned the lessons. Some, tragically, did not. I truly hope that businesses finally learn that creativity is vital to success on the web.

There still seems to be a separation between creativity and business.

Creativity belongs to “artists” – it’s personal work outside of business. Too many companies view art as the antitheses of work, it’s emotional while business is ruled by reason.

Yes, work is the antonym to play, just as reason is to emotion but can’t we agree that both are needed to make sense of life?

If creativity weren’t so important then those individuals and small groups I mentioned that found the webs’ “achilles heal” wouldn’t have been motivated to begin.

No, business shouldn’t abandon reason but they shouldn’t be run under the tyranny of reason either. They should balance reason and emotion, chaos and logic.

They need to connect with the people – not their consumers.

Ok, your expensive “corporate hello” may be great – if it were still 1998.

If budget is your reason for having a generation 1 website, ok, but don’t just redesign the same thing for your generation 2 or 3 site.

Take advantage of the unique capabilities of modern web technologies – the ability to get feedback, personalize, interact, facilitate transactions and to learn as well as lecture.

You must understand that web users today in this networked and interactive market expect you to be at least as sophisticated as they are.

If they can get your service or product quicker from another company online – they will. And if those companies are meeting their immediate desires (and they are) why should they waste their time reading your mission statement?

They won’t.

Individually and collectively the difficulty begins when we cross the line of believability – when that image we have for these businesses and individuals are not the image they have of themselves, has no correspondence with the image held by others.

When self-perception is questioned, when the perception of others is lost, belief can’t continue – trust is lost.

Look at a group photograph where you are placed among others. See where your eyes linger. To whom do you continue to return? You’re looking at yourself.

Why do we always do this? Some people may think silly things – “is that really me?” or “I look horrible” – it’s natural, but why?

Why do we look at the “image” of ourselves and ask these questions?

The answer is in the question – we are checking our image. We’re trying to match the stranger in the photograph to the idea we have of ourselves – but they never quite match.

The photograph is a static moment in time and can’t encase the feelings we had at the moment of capture, the bond with other photo members, the great dinner before or the evening of laughter ahead.

This comes back to trust, to evolution, to building a relationship with your website visitors. You can’t just present your brochure and hope to connect. Your website can’t capture the right “image” of you with an out-of-date or egograph.

A brochure is a given – a standard procedure, a marketing cliché. This is why so many websites are failures – they are no more than the online version of what you printed out and then direct to a digital version of the same thing.

A standard brochure website does nothing to enhance customer confidence or company reliability – it only makes you look static, boring – a waste of time.

Sure, I’ll build you a website if all you really want is an online brochure, but I know that only you will be happy with the product – your visitors won’t be. Even when I drive all this nice qualified traffic to your site and you decision makers are high-fivin’ each other, I also know these visitors will be driven away.

People want you to care about them – not yourselves. We don’t want to read the biography of your managers, we want to know what you think of us! Customers DON’T care about you, they care about themselves – not your mission statement or bloated logo.

It boils down to one thing really, they want respect. How do you do this with a website? This blog in it’s entirety is devoted to this topic (with some side rants and other topics), it would be impossible to devote just an article about it. Try the tag cloud below or just browse around. Feel free to comment or make suggestions – learning is a two-way adventure.