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Since your website is an important part of your brand, you’ve got to think about the content of the former as representative of the latter. You’ve just got to. To a potential consumer online, what your brand represents is nothing more than the content of your website. This means that if that content fails or is unconsidered in any significant (or, in fact, even in any seemingly insignificant) ways, your brand is in danger of representing this failure.

Given this framework, some decisions that may seem like good strategic ideas are in fact bad. The reason for this is an assumption on your part about your ability to provide a coherent semblance of total information, while at the same time actually providing either partial or exaggerated information. In a word, you’re trying to trick, omit key information from, or (even worse) lie to your users. And it’s not going to work.

"You guys don’t have to trick me! You’re my friends!"

The ostensible reasons to lie or omit are hugely many, and can range from innocuous to downright nasty: to prevent competition from learning key information, to exaggerate product quality or market saturation, to misrepresent product features; the list goes on. The one thing they all have in common is that they are going to end up costing your brand in the end.

How do you avoid this tragic mistake? By assuming that your users are smarter than you are. If you have it in your mind that you can’t get away with pulling the wool over your users’ eyes, you won’t try it. You won’t even have to appeal to your better nature to do the right thing. You can let fear operate for you.

Which brings up two lines of inquiry:

The Fat Cat’s Complaint

I’ve been looking for an excuse to do a LOLCat here for over a month.

First, let’s call this the fat cat’s complaint: "But I am smarter than my users," or else, in its slightly less narssisistic (and equally deadly) version, "But that’s what I’m paying you for: to be smarter than the users." The drift of this argument is that with the correct kind of control structures in place, a web site can redefine reality in a coherent way.

To address the fat cat’s complaint, allow me to make an appeal to Google. The fat cat might be on to something if a website were a hermetic or one-way technology (i.e. a snail-mailed pamphlet). However, it is clearly not. If you lie, or omit something, and your very smartest visitor notices (which they inevitably will; even the fat cat can’t imagine 100% user coverage), then one of two things are going to happen:

1. They are going to find the information you are trying to conceal using Google.
2. They are going to raise a stink about the omission on the Internet, which will eventually be indexed by Google. GOTO 1

What this all amounts to is that right there, on the top page of your search results, along with the website you worked so hard on, are people griping about you. The simple solution here is transparency: In most cases, the data you’re trying to omit is not so devastating as you imagine, and people will recognize and respect your brand’s commitment to delivering the real goods.

On the other hand, occasionally, you’ll run into a more severe exception. Namely…

Chicanery

"But I need to lie! Otherwise no one will ever buy my products!" The answer to this complaint is, in the first place, the same answer to the Fat Cat’s: you’re fooling yourself if you think you can manipulate your way out of a bad product (pace the Rotten Steak Rule). Your users are sharp. Just assume it.

In the second place, if your product is broken, you don’t need a web designer, you need a product designer.

Overture to Product Quality

Both of these complaints are instances of brands and companies imagining that they have more control than they really do over the reception of their products. Product quality is the first brand ambassador, and if a company doesn’t have that, they’ve got much bigger problems than a website can fix.