I recently had an experience that revealed to me that we don’t know how to communicate these days. A co-worker was late for a meeting. Knowing he was coming from another office and might be trying to communicate with me (as I sat in a meeting room), I went back to my desk and fetched my Blackberry.

The Blackberry had no e-mail communication from him, and only a strangely blank voice mail message from an unknown number. I sat and waited.

When my colleague showed up, he said, “I tried to reach you! I called several times.”

Here were two sincere people, trying to transfer information. What went wrong?

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July 2007 marks two years since the re-launch of our website with a brand new design and an elegant new custom content management system built for us by a small, boutique web development company here in Chicago. The CMS, whose four managing editors review content before it goes “live,” is easy to learn and easy to use. And the company is constantly improving it - usually based on our requests but sometimes when the firm anticipates our needs. Fabulous.
Since that time, we have trained more than 120 employees throughout the hospital on the system; it rarely fails that someone comments at the end of the one-hour training session how easy the CMS is to use! Again, terrific.
And off they go, enthusiastic about keeping their section of the site up to date. So far, so good.

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According to the 2007 Web Management Survey, most respondents work in a Marketing or Communications department. And for good reason: the organization’s website is often the visitor’s first direct exposure to the organization. The website offers the visitor a look into the organization: its purpose, what it offers, and how it can benefit the visitor. A reasonable question, then, is whether a website should first market its services to the visitor or merely inform her about available services.

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