WEB 1.0 BEST PRACTICES: PERSONALITY
You can’t always be good looking and have a great personality at the same time. But personality does go a long way.. All this talk in the last few years in online design circles about Web 2.0, and now Web 3.0, is making me dizzy. Do businesses really need to innovate to the point of obsession? Why unnecessarily spend thousands of hard-earned bucks on a nice website when all it takes is a bit of personality to make it work?
Lets look at a textbook casestudy: Family Auto Mart
Originally brought up on the “Guide to All Things Tacky Fabulous in Orlando” blog via BoingBoing.net this integrated website and late-night television infomercial from a Florida-based car dealer called Family Auto Mart is truly tacky fabulous. The theme song is incredibly catchy and the host is like a 300-lb hummingbird on crystal meth.
Their equally tacky website takes full advantage of the Family Man’s BIG personality, and needs not Flash 9, CSS, iFrames or a CMS. Nay, rollover inverted GIFs and scary .WAV sound effects do the trick in making you fall in love with Family Auto Mart brand. They also have merchandise, a fan club (with photos from an autograph signing), a CD, a biography that reads longer than War and Peace (without a spell-checker), an instructional video (so you can do the “Family Man Dance” at home), and a great motto: “Kiss me in Kissimmee!”.
By all accounts the business is thriving (the recently opened dealership Kissimmee is their third) and the Family Man himself is larger and, assumingly, more prosperous than ever.
Family Auto Mart have snubbed the cool look and data-advantage of modern design in favour of loud personality heavy brash website. Thankfully, it is a cult hit, and I know where I’ll be heading next time I am down honky country in need of a gas guzzler.
Next week in this series I’ll take take a tour of the strobing travel goodness that is Ryanair.
