Creating additional user benefits for your print product by creating a new experience on the web
When you build a website for your print product, it’s extremely important to make sure that your website adds something to the user experience other than doing what they can already do through your print product.
In some cases, like with Guideposts, they allow users to share their own stories, a toolbar that people can install in their browser, games, amongst lots of other neat tools. What they’re doing is taking their content and recreating it as many ways as possible so that they’re adding a benefit to their content by making it more interactive.
The Internet is not a book, magazine or newspaper. Nor is it TV, a live event or a brick-and-mortar store. The web is a unique medium. A well executed website offers the opportunity to do things that other media and physical venues cannot do,
the execution of which is particular to the Web.
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Let’s look at a few more examples:
- Users buy books at Amazon because it offers a selection and an interactive capacity not available in any physical bookstore.
- eBay lets users interact in a way that wasn’t possible from traditional classified advertising or auctioneering.
- ConsumerReports.org makes 48 months of magazine content available in a searchable format, which is very differently from the same content delivered by the monthly magazine.
- Forbes.com offers 1,500+ new business stories to its users every day with searches and alert services to guide them to the content they want.
- eDiets helps users choose which information program is best for them and then communicates daily, automatically, with timely, personalized information and inspiration.
- AmericanGreetings.com can deliver a gift card across town or around the world in a matter of seconds.
The key to successful website publishing lies in exploiting the user benefits that the Web has to offer at the expense of traditional media and retailers. Successful website publishers use content to create unique user benefits.
