Push or Pull
A short time ago the school district I work for decided to go through a web site refresh. It was actually at my recommendation since we were using the classic Google Sites which was about to reach end of life.
There were some things about the new Google Sites that I didn't like, so I got quotes from several companies to provide us hosting and content management. There are a ton of places that cater specifically to school districts and municipalities for this sort of thing, so it wasn't too hard to settle on one.
This is probably the third or fourth web page refresh I have been through with this district. I actually just jumped over to web.archive.org to reminisce about some of the past web pages the school district has had over the years. One of them I inherited, two I designed myself from scratch, and the other two were hosted with a content management system.
Despite all of those differences, the one thing that has always remained the same is the ever increasing amount of content that gets thrown out on the webpage.
Pull Culture
It has always been a pet peeve of mine how cluttered our web site can get. Through the course of a school year I get countless requests to add things to the site.
Sports boosters are having a golf scramble fundraiser, can you put this flyer on the website
Sure, you want me to put it on the Athletics page?
No, it needs to go on the main page
big sigh from me okay, I'll take are of it when I can.
As you can guess after you get a couple dozen requests like that, the nice compact site that you had designed starts to look like a "cluster".
Perhaps people are okay scrolling through lines and lines of text to finally get to what they want, but personally, I don't enjoy it.
That's the way things used to be though right? You want information, you go out and you pull that info in. You visit a site, you actively seek it out. All of the responsibility was on you to find that information yourself.
For us as a school district, that required us to have the information out there for people to pull it in. We needed a repository for people to pull from.
You with me so far?
Push Culture
I wanted things to be different with our new site. I fought really hard with my other administrators to convince them that all of that extra information was not necessary. I was very clear about the fact that just because it was on the old site doesn't mean it will be on the new site. If anything I wanted less information on the new site than the old one.
My main reason was my belief that people don't access information that way anymore. Things have definitely shifted from pull culture to push culture. Sure, there are still some times that you seek out information to pull in, but for the most part, info is pushed to you.
Facebook, Twitter, Text, other social media alerts, that's the way most people get their information these days. Right?
If you were to do a little bit of Internet sleuthing, you could probably figure out where I work. If you were to visit our current web site, there is honestly still a lot more pull content there than I would like, but I had to compromise a little bit.
Our building secretaries handle the majority of the updates now, so it honestly doesn't bug me as much.
I can get from the top to the bottom of our High School page in three scrolls. That's honestly one more scroll than I would like, but again, compromise.
The Point
The point of this post is to bring attention to the fact that information and the way we get it has changed pretty significantly over the years. What worked even five years ago doesn't necessarily work now. People are adapting and businesses have to adapt as well if they want to keep up.
I know Facebook is a four letter word here on Hive, but how many businesses do you know that have a Facebook page? How much does it annoy you when you are trying to find a business and they don't have a Facebook page? Maybe a lot, maybe a little, but I think for the majority of people, it probably bugs them a lot.
Because that is the way they get their information now. They follow a business they like on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and the info they need is pushed to them.
It's marketing genius, it's the world we live in.
The question now is: What's next?
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