Haha­haha, just to say I still get vis­i­tors from this blog post! Thanks for all comments.

I am design­ing a new “quote” form, just for you lot and Aaron the alli­ga­tor. It is here:
http://www.lingscars.com/quote_new.php not fin­ished yet, needs a bit more colour!

I will add this blog post to my news page!

Aaron the alligator.

Refresh my header. Wait.

Aaron Reply:
October 7th, 2009 at 9:26 pm

It’s bet­ter. I get the point. Still pretty busy. There is a great arti­cle about the myth of the fold at http://www.cxpartners.co.uk/thoughts/the_myth_of_the_page_fold_evidence_from_user_testing.htm, which it appears you already knew.

Haha­ha­haah, now I have you defend­ing your own site.

Got a men­tion by Seth Godin in a talk he gave in Lon­don. Funny… he didn’t men­tion any design­ers No offence.

http://www.lingscars.com/sethgodin.php

You know the real­money is in mar­ket­ing and in SEO?

- Ling

Aaron Reply:
February 19th, 2009 at 2:08 pm

Defend­ing? Not hardly… Even­tu­ally, I’ll review this site as sucking…

Hey Ling,

My hand­writ­ing sucks so badly that I doubt any­one would be able to read it. That’s why I type…

Aaron the alli­ga­tor… I mean for­give me for being picky — but even the “hand­writ­ten” post it note in your header is a *FONT*. You fake hand­writ­ing????? Why not sim­ply write it?

This is what I mean. Do you see?

The gifs on my active tabs may be slighty off-colour gifs (damn that 256 colour pal­lette) hahaha, but I wrote them with my mouse, not used “Ling­Hand Bold Sans Serif Con­densed” for neat­ness and consistency.

Tomor­row, I meet Seth Godin. How about that for a name drop

Hmmm, we tried mil­lions of col­lours (well, five) and these worked OK. I am not going for super-styledom. I don’t want it to be Mac-perfect. There are plenty of sites that offer per­fect design but are crap at doing busi­ness. I have no qualms about cob­bling stuff myself.

I do also need peo­ple to remem­ber me, so there needs to be a “wow” or at least “aaaaagh” fac­tor, not just uni­ver­sal acceptance.

I like the tabs not being the same height. Do peo­ple care? Do peo­ple want them neat and tidy? Who says tabs have to be the same height? You want all cars in a car park to be the same length and colour? You want them all parked straight? You want them all clean and equally white-balanced? You are mak­ing stuff neat that doesn’t need to be neat. We do not live in a neat world, and some of the most inter­est­ing stuff is not neat. Like China. Liv­ing breathing.

Neat is… like Step­ford Wives, and hon­estly I don’t want to be bored to death. There are zil­lions of neat sites out there all done by some designer or other.

A site (if alive) should be liv­ing, grow­ing, chang­ing, adapt­ing, it is Dar­win­ism. (There is no God, really When was the last time you fid­dled with THIS site? Exam­ple, it has all been ter­ri­bly well and nicely done, but there is some “inert­ness” about it — that top logo is too per­fect. It rep­re­sents cut-and-paste, hand­made, but it is not, it is very pro­fes­sion­ally done. Like a plas­tic flower. Wouldn’t a bit of rough­ness at the edges make it real? Do you want a per­fect world???

You should really use glue and scis­sors, then pho­to­graph and there — you have as real as you can get. Not photoshop.

This is a very impor­tant point and one that is often missed. Humans do not want per­fec­tion, they want… life. Real life.

- Ling

Aaron Reply:
February 18th, 2009 at 12:23 am

I agree with you in some respects, and dis­agree in oth­ers. There is noth­ing wrong with pleas­ant pre­sen­ta­tion. Design­ers are called design­ers because of what they can do that oth­ers can­not. Humans DO want per­fec­tion, but very few of them know what it is. Pass­able is always good enough for most. You can con­vey the same atti­tude with the right presentation.

The fact that you are still here talk­ing about it tells me a cou­ple things. One, you really take your work seri­ously, and two you take mine too seri­ously

By the way, I don’t use Pho­to­shop. I use the GIMP. The point of the header here is sim­ple. Loud, obnox­ious and more or less kitschy. I think it hits all of the above.

OK, Aaron the alli­ga­tor. I do lis­ten. But — it is most impor­tant not to be per­fect. Tomor­row, I am work­ing on some bloody tabbed nav­i­ga­tion. Here is the orig­i­nal effort from 2 days ago (just the first go, not work­ing), which I (hope­fully) will make work tomor­row with con­text sub­menus. No designer though. No one else can see this at the mo:

http://www.lingscars.com/header-tabs.php

If you post with impor­tant stuff, pls ping me with an email sales@lingscars.com

Aaron Reply:
February 12th, 2009 at 7:14 pm

I like the tabs from a nav­i­ga­tion stand­point. I think you should change the col­ors, maybe a light blue for inac­tive and a blue with white text for active. I would also make them a fixed height so that they all match. I think you should cer­tainly go with tabbed nav­i­ga­tion as a replace­ment for what you have, though. It’s eas­ier to follow.

Well, I wish it would “go viral”… I didn’t set out to do that. I sim­ply set out to engage with cus­tomers as humans. Has any­one actu­ally read and digested the text on most car sites in the UK? It is just SO banal and yuk, it’s like it was cpied from a 1973 man­age­ment book.

Here’s a web­site that is just start­ing (in build) from a guy who asked for advice from me today. http://www.tmbleasing.webeden.co.uk/ — just read that grip­ping text!!! This is how most car leas­ing web­sites read… my com­ments to the guy are below:

———-
———-

Ok, well, you will need the web­site on a full domain not that .webe­den domain

I will say some stuff, don’t get offended!

1) It is yet another set of ini­tials, there are dozens of firms called xyz leas­ing. You expect peo­ple to remem­ber your ini­tials. You are not B and Q, or M and S

2) It is about cus­tomers, not cars. 95% of car lease web­sites get this wrong. But, no one lis­tens. For­get the cars, think of the customers.

3) Too wordy too small too bor­ing, not inter­est­ing. If this was Top Gear, would you switch the TV off?

4) Most peo­ple when surf­ing want: sex, skive, fun and a mas­sive prod­uct offer­ing (not always in that order)

5) you seem (like most web­sites) to want to max­imise cov­er­age by doing every­thing: PCP, CH, Com­mer­cial Leas­ing, GAP, HGV truck, main­te­nance, non-maintenance. This is a mis­take, cus­tomers get con­fused. I am con­fused

I do £400k of just con­tract hire/year, non-maintained. That’s it.

6) You are say­ing stuff like: you are spe­cial­ists. Are you? Why say that? I thought you said you were just starting?

7) “We are absolutely com­mit­ted to cus­tomer ser­vice ” — you need to prove this, not say it.

Peo­ple don’t want a “wel­come”, they want to be slapped in the face with a deal, they want to smile, tell their mates and feel happy.

Those are my words of wis­dom at this stage.

You are in dan­ger of hav­ing no dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion from 50 oth­ers I could name, by jum­bling A-Z and adding Leas­ing and being as bor­ing as hell

——–
——–

You see?

Oh, and next week I am filmin an ani­mated header where I will wave, jump down and run along point­ing stuff out. It will win awards. Really. because, noone else does this stuff. Human stuff. Talk soon.

- Ling

Aaron Reply:
February 12th, 2009 at 7:09 pm

Like I said, I know exactly what you’re try­ing to do, and the “over the top” thing is work­ing. As evi­dence that it is, you are rak­ing in the quid even as the econ­omy is tank­ing. Look at it this way. If you change noth­ing, this arti­cle will get you even more traf­fic. I really enjoy that you are involved in the dis­cus­sion. Many peo­ple reviewed don’t have a sense of humor. I make fun of me every day.

hey, hey!

I am Ling! Now, my site is very spe­cial, it is the best site in the UK car indus­try. Every other site just drone on about …cars. I am about peo­ple, not cars. The car replace­ment cycle is very long and I man­aged to move over £35 mil­lion of new cars in 2008, all from my site. If any­one can do bet­ter, please feel free to have a go at sell­ing mas­sive ticket items like new car leases purely from a web­site. And do while being a female immi­grant in an indus­try full of giants with unlim­ited spend.

You do not get points for design, but you do get UK pounds for mov­ing cars, so… for­give me if I tell you that you lot are full of hot air with all your knowl­edge of how to do it bet­ter. Get on with it, then, big boyz

Now, there’s a challenge!

- Ling

Aaron Reply:
February 9th, 2009 at 2:45 pm

Ling, I appre­ci­ate your com­ment. Like I said, I respect you for your busi­ness. I think you should have a designer point you to a few styl­is­tic changes that would make your site bet­ter, friend­lier and more usable. Try http://www.mayhemstudios.com. Calvin is a great guy, and will point you in the right direction.

By the way, am I full of hot air about you being a good busi­ness per­son, or about your site need­ing help?

Nice post…

Ling’s site has made the rounds within in the retail car indus­try as a nice “what not to do” exam­ple for car dealers…

But, its also an iconic, ironic design in that Ling’s cus­tomers must all talk about the site…she has set her­self apart — so far apart — from the com­pe­ti­tion that the site itself has gone viral.

Aaron Reply:
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:43 am

To be hon­est with you, I see what she’s doing. I just wish she’d do a lit­tle actual design with it.

It was me! I was the one that showed it to her. It was actu­ally after see­ing your prior post about “it’s full of stars.” I told her I had just recently seen a site that was WAY worse. Glad you enjoyed.

Aaron Reply:
February 3rd, 2009 at 12:44 am

Well, thank you for the sug­ges­tion. Feel free to send them directly, and you’ll get the credit.