I don’t have a magic formula for making websites. I just have a few things I try to make clients understand in the “How To Make the Internet Not Hate You” process. And while I would love to make The Cluetrain Manifesto, for example, required reading for everyone I’ll ever come into contact with, I would also like world peace and a pony for Christmas. Of those three things, the pony is the most likely.

There are a handful of people out there who seem to really understand how the web, and websites, work. While I don’t always agree with everything Jeffrey Zeldman says, I always take away something useful when I read him. Recently it was this:

Web design is the creation of digital environments that facilitate and encourage human activity; reflect or adapt to individual voices and content; and change gracefully over time while always retaining their identity.

That’s as good a definition of web design as I’ve ever seen. It’s also about a million miles from how most clients see it. People who want web sites made (or, increasingly, re-made) tend to almost universally see their site as a sales or marketing channel. They see nothing beyond that, and critically, they see only themselves. They don’t even really see the “customer” they’re trying to attract.

So my approach is to try to show companies how their goal - flagrant self-promotion and sales, sales, sales - is interwoven with some of the other key elements that go into building a website that does not suck:

Explaining things like conversation and transparency is really difficult, especially in a 30 minute beauty pageant corporate pitch. “Flow chart on a Power Point slide” is probably the method that kind of audience likes best, but I prefer a nice hand out they can take away so they can remember how you’re going to revolutionize their website.

There are about a million concepts and practices that are being shorthanded in a wheel like this one, but if you can get buy-in for this, it can help guide the whole process. Clients (at least smart ones) can see that if they don’t arrange content the way customers see it, they’re not focusing on their customers or promoting their company and products as well as they could.

The wheel actually works starting at any point and moving in any direction, but generally it works best to start with “Promote yourself, your company and your products well” because that is where your audience’s most immediate self-interest lies. How can they promote best? Moving in one direction, by focusing on their customers to arrange content intuitively, and speaking to visitors in a human voice instead of marketspeak. Moving in the other direction, by arranging content in a way that is accessible to visitors, and by making themselves accessible - often a much harder sell, but an easier one (I believe) when you can see how it helps the whole wheel hang together.

The sad truth is that sometimes you just won’t get buy-in from the client for a big-picture web project like this. At that point you can either take the high and mighty approach and walk away, or churn out yet another HTML corporate brochure. There isn’t no value to the brochure approach, it’s just that everything on the site except the contact page is normally of value only to the client. And, of course, to you, in the form of the cheque you cash on delivery.

My hope for 2008 is that we’ll see more big-picture web launches and fewer cheque cashing ones. I’m not really sure what’s required to push this kind of small revolution forward, but whenever I have the chance to present this idea, at least I’ve got a Power Point slide to back me up…