Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

good idea Craig. now you have introduced an "emotional" problem (it would be embarrassing to have dirty sheets), which increases the motivation to do something about it. much more motivation than offloading your laundry so you can study or do something else... however now you are also stepping into the world of parents who realize that their child may be "hooking up". so that`s another taboo issue. "will our hero ever be able to solve this dilemma?"

Brian, I would ask 5 different people (students and parents - people you stop on the street, not anyone who knows you personally - that will only give you false compliments), ask these people to read your printout and tell you what they think, then keep revising, keep testing, etc, before you pay the web people to make the edit. Hmmm, I also seem to recall that you said you spent alot of time on your website, which I took to mean you did it all yourself, but now you reveal you have a web designer, so I`m confused again...

Congratulations Criag on getting a topic named after you. Sure made me what to click on it to see what it was about. But people new to SuN wouldn`t know what it meant.

One of THE best market tests I ever had a chance to work with involved an idea for a novel I have. I tried to figure out a way to get truly objective feedback, and just couldn`t come up with anything.

All I could do was send a couple of opening chapters to people I`d met online. But what happened was one of those folks, using their own initiative, forwarded the chapters to three people THEY knew.

So I had no connection whatsoever with those downstream three people. They didn`t know me at all, and hadn`t the slightest interest in my feelings. And that`s when I got some really important, useful commentary. The result was a fundamental change in the overal organization of the plot.

Yes, Steve`s right. Write it one way and you attract students, but stress the parents. Write it another way and you attract parents, but bore the students.

:-) Given the schism between parents and teens, I doubt it can be resolved to a single Web site, or a single target market. So what would happen if you created two separate sites, each targeted to the different audiences, but both offering the same business?

Possibly on a separate page titled "For Parents" where the copy can take a more serious and businesslike tone and stress time for studies.


-------------------------

Steve Mann
Internet Videographer
MannMade Digital Video
My Email

Yah, I was thinking about that. I`m not a fan of splash pages, but perhaps a "central gateway" type of page? "Student? Enter here." "Parents, here"...maybe like that?

Obvious, to me, is that what`s causing all this problem is the desire to keep the humor. So okay...keep the humor and have the split. Otherwise, lighten up on the humor and that opens a way to reconile the site`s two targets.

I`m a big fan of humor. So I`m not at all arguing that a site should be humorless.  But the type and style of humor has a huge effect on audiences. I see no point to Def Comedy Jam, and never watch for more than a moment. Does that mean I don`t get the joke? No. I just don`t relate to the *context* of the jokes.

A narrow focus on "college humor" is also what closes the context to parents of college kids. The example of the hooking up reference seems to bring this point out. As Steve recognized, what parent is going to be thrilled to think about their daughter hooking up and having sex on clean sheets (or dirty ones)?

Yet "hooking up" is contextual humor. College men will certainly identify with it, just as they indentify with the sad-sack sitting in front of the machine as the really good image on the front page.

Ultimately it comes down to the site owner, what they want, and their choices. The issue then becomes working within those choice parameters.