Failing Enterprise Blog 2004-10

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The Admin talks about our online community

Wednesday, October 13th, 2004

Since I built the site, I've been waiting for things to get back on track at Enterprise before renting from them again.  I hope to go back to being a regular customer soon, but the feedback I'm hearing says they haven't quite figured it out yet.  I know at least some of their management people are aware of the site (after all, we're now getting 400 visitors per day and we got mentioned in Newsweek earlier this month), but apparently they're still in the, uh, preliminary planning stages of correcting the problems.

Specifically, I returned a rental car today to the Enterprise competitor I regularly rent from a few blocks away (24 rentals so far this year and I'm delighted).  I can't mention their name because I don't want anyone to mistakenly think I'm using this site to promote their business, but they're a nationally-known brand.  After a dozen rentals this year, I became pals with the manager and let him know why I had stopped renting at Enterprise.  I told him about Failing Enterprise and now he's a huge fan.  At one point, a customer of his came in and excitedly told him about Failing Enterprise, and he was delighted to reply "I know!  He's my customer!".

But here's the good part:  He told me today he's now had at least three additional former Enterprise customers, from the same branch I used to rent from, independently get so frustrated there that they went shopping for a new place to rent cars and have now settled at his agency.  My pal loves it, saying he hopes more unhappy Enterprise customers keep coming his way.

In short, Enterprise hasn't exactly become motivated to fix the problems.  It looks like we'll have to grow this web site and its traffic some more before they get the word.

Sunday, October 10th, 2004

I've just completed a moderately large restructuring of the main web site this morning.  After doing some more reading of Jakob Nielsen's work on site design, I've decided to upgrade a few things to improve readability and usability.

Most important was to break up that very long home page in to seven smaller pages and link to them from the home page.  I had been favoring the long home page for two reasons.  First, having all that text about Enterprise made it a particularly rich single-page gold mine for search engine spiders.  I hope that by breaking up the text over eight pages instead of just one I'm not diluting the attractiveness of the site to engines searching for relevant keywords.

Second, I liked the moral high ground that came from being able to claim I had "a one page web site".  While the total site, including some utility pages, was actually more than just one page, the entire premise and justification were, in fact, all on the home page.

We'll see how the search engines treat us with this new design, but in the meantime, I hope the improved readability and faster load times for the home page improve usability.

I also decided to improve readability by sizing all the pages so they're no wider than 800 pixels, which means that everybody running a browser at 800x600 or larger will see the site in the same way, and the smaller width will make it easier for your eyes to follow the text.

Also in this restructuring, I changed the home page significantly and made many file and directory name changes to further improve our friendliness to search engines.

Lastly, I've started this blog.  Very trendy, I know, but I want to improve our sense of community.

Your feedback on the changes or on the site in general are always appreciated.

More on Enterprise car rental at the Failing Enterprise home page.