What You Can Learn From Miss America
In this episode, we'll look at the last four years of the Miss America website at www.missamerica.org with the specific point of teaching the age old lesson of you get what you pay for. And don't think this can't be about you because you're not a pageant. Even though the MAO is a non-profit scholarship organisation, they still have to make the same business and marketing decisions that you make.
In July 1996, my company was hired to do the Miss America website. The previous website company, which incidentally didn't have their own website, had designed a blue text on blue background site that just wasn't working for the MAO. It was the first full year of my business, and I was thrilled to have such a golden resume client. I think I charged them around $4000 for the entire year, which that year included building their entire site with custom 3D rendered graphics, a "mall" with printable and email forms for ordering, a few GIF animations, and a whole week live at the pageant putting up press releases, photos, and results. In mid-1996, you were "up against" AOL 2.5, which couldn't read HTML tables at the time. The site was filled with tables, and we had to rework a few pages without tables for AOL users.
But I had big dreams. I wanted live text chats with Miss America and candidates. I wanted sound up there, and I wanted to see a company that watches around $30 million run through its bank account each year invest seriously in their website. After all, they were starting to compete more and more with other pageants, especially the Trump-owned Miss USA system. What I found over a few months was a company full of people who cared about what they were doing and wanted the best and most out there... except for the CEO, who made the decisions (this particular CEO is no longer there).
So in 1997, the site stayed the same and we just kept adding to it. And I think we changed the font from Times to Century Gothic/Avant Garde just to try to keep ourselves interested. :) 1998 rolled around, and by then, the web had gotten much more funky. Lots more people were online, and people were starting to expect more out of websites... more features, functions, more eye candy. The MAO site was two years old and barely treading water; by then, the amount of added info made so many pages need archives, and it was in terrible need of a reorganisation. But the mandate came down that we're not changing it - if it ain't broke, don't fix it. There was a new CEO, and he was trying to impress everybody by spending less money than ever (this particular CEO is no longer there). Shockwave was out there. RealAudio and RealVideo were out there. Too scary evidently. Heck, I couldn't even get them to OK redesigning the site and at one point I ever offered to do it for FREE because I was so embarrassed at the site, so forget about coolness and multimedia. I was so upset that a company that aims mostly towards teens and young women had this boring mostly text site that was poorly organised, offered little more than the brochures, and was getting worse.
