You’re not the BBC (and that’s OK).
Doing things because big companies do them, won’t necessarily make you successful. You need to find your own path.
Choosing the right references
When planning a piece of digital work, one of the first things you might do is to look around and find some examples of other things on the web that might help to inspire the project you’re working on. Sites which are often cited, include BBC, Apple, the Guardian and Google.
These sites are showcase some of the best digital work around. By referencing them, people are saying “I want something that looks great and is of high quality”. This is totally understandable, but it can end up producing some unintended results.
How it all goes wrong
Let’s say you use something like this page from the Guardian to inspire your new blog. You might be tempted to add a “Most popular” section to your website because that’s the sort of thing these sites frequently do to increase the amount of cross-site linking and that means users spend more time on the site. That’s great for the Guardian because they make money from advertising, so they want you to view as many pages (and therefore ads) as possible.
Your organisation might not care about page views or time spent on the site and what it really needs to do is convert the people who have just read your blog post into a customer or into someone who will donate to your charity.
Doing things just because big successful companies do it won’t necessarily make you successful and you need to find your own path.
Being yourself
Trying to compete with a big tech or media giant is like trying to live like Beyoncé – after about 45 minutes you’ll have spent all your money and you still won’t be Beyoncé. Oh Baby.
Start by defining the goals that your organisation has and focus your efforts on solving them. As for inspiration, pick more modest examples and try to look for ideas from industries outside of your own – if you’re an educational institution planning a piece of digital work, look at what’s happening in the fashion industry or the car industry and see how they’re doing things before getting excited about a trendy new Apple product page.
At Torchbox, we build this into our discovery process, so that our clients are exposed to a wide variety of inspiration before decisions are made about their own site.