A Very Odd Website

Posted At : January 9, 2009 9:39 AM | Posted By : Admin
Related Categories: General

My colleague, Ken, skyped me a URL this morning, then said, "I'll give you $20 if you can figure out what the site's about." The URL is: www.unifyer.com. His money, I fear, is safe.

The site (check it out if you have a moment) uses Flash gratuitously to convey -- well, that's the problem; I have no idea what it's trying to convey. I went to their FAQ, hoping to find a "What the hell is this site about?", but no luck.

Now, Ken happens to know what Unifyer is. I'm glad, because I don't think I could have figure it out without a guide. Is it software for...

[ ]A: Multi-level-marketing organizations?
[ ]B: Churches?
[ ]C: Chain letter email management?
[ ]D: Parent-Teacher organizations?
[ ]E: Synchronizing blog networks?

The answer is "B" -- it's software for helping churches manage their affairs.

Or maybe Ken's just having fun with me, because even after knowing the answer, I don't get it.

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Even worse then sites that give no apparent clue as to what they are about are sites - and I mean well known eCommerce sites - that make it damn near impossible to find a link to login. I want to manage my account, could you please make it easy for me?

# Posted By todd sharp | 1/9/09 10:49 AM

I stopped at your first paragraph and went to the site to see if I could meet the challenge. I went through every piece of content they had to offer, and not until I hit the blog did I even have an idea as to what Unifyer was. Even then, I wasn't sure, but I got a sense that they offered some kind of email/message board/blogging software - but nothing concrete.

When I came back to your post and saw that it was for churches, I was surprised.

# Posted By Steve Brownlee | 1/9/09 10:58 AM

Yeah, it's definitely for churches. I went to the blog myself and the first entry was about a church using their software. I went over to that site and found a link to a login ( http://montrosechurch.unifyer.com/ ) and I can only guess it's community based stuff.

I'm with Hal, very confusing site. I can only hope they're paying attention to their referrers and see the confusion here and fix it. :)

# Posted By Todd Rafferty | 1/9/09 11:11 AM

I sorta-kinda figured out that it was a church management application of some sort but only after glancing at the videos. The site is beautiful I'll grant, but I think flawed on many levels. I'll dispense with my normal rant about lack of accessibility, etc. and just note that the site makes no attempt to communicate to the user what it's for. It assumes the user would know exactly what Unifyer is before coming to the site. Perhaps so, but any site that refuses to tell right off the bat that the user has come to the right place is probably not going to keep that user's attention.

Oh and the Lorem Ipsum text in the "culture" section, priceless :)

# Posted By Christian Ready | 1/9/09 11:22 AM

It's a social networking application for (primarily) non profit organizations. I know of one college that deployed it as their alumni networking app.

# Posted By Steve | 1/9/09 11:31 AM

I hope it's not strictly for churches, the flame logo and firery design seem to be more representative of "the other side" if you know what I mean.

# Posted By JAlpino | 1/9/09 1:15 PM

The sign up page asks if your industry is: church, education, corporate, other ...or errrm... greek!
I also like the link in the support section to "get flash"; which requires flash to see the link :)

# Posted By John Whish | 1/9/09 2:28 PM

I had the exact same experience the first few times I went to Twitter. I kept hearing about it, everybody seemed excited, but after visiting the site I was still foggy about that the heck it IS. I now know, but that's because I've since read OTHER people's descriptions of the service. The site is very ambiguous (or at least it used to be, they might have improved it since then).

# Posted By Jake Munson | 1/9/09 4:17 PM

This was a hard one to figure out until I go t to their blog. It's a shame to see my fellow Christians with absolutely no clue of how to effectively market a service like this. They do need professional help is getting their business message out to their desired audience.

As for the logo - the flame in that style is very much a Christian symbol. It refers to the book of Acts 2:3 "And there appeared unto them cloven tongues like as of fire, and it sat upon each of them."

# Posted By Wil Genovese | 1/9/09 4:27 PM

Not to mention, the fact that the name itself "unifyer" is not too descriptive. Yes, I understand it has to do with unifying something, but what??? And in what manner?

# Posted By Lola LB | 1/10/09 9:35 AM

If you think it was hard to figure out from the Flash animations, try looking at the page with NoScript turned on.
(If you don't have NoScript installed for Firefox, you need to get it.)

# Posted By Andrew B | 1/12/09 3:51 PM

I liked the red tomato soup in the background!

# Posted By Göran | 1/14/09 9:51 AM

It appears to have done a great job of unifying a group of web developers into figuring out what in the world they do :).

# Posted By Scott | 1/15/09 11:23 AM

Hal, oh Hal. Did it ever occur to you to view the source?
[meta name="Description" content="Unifyer is an online community and communication tool for churches, schools, associations and non-profit organizations."]

See? *Anyone* can figure out what this site is. Anyone who reads metadata instead of viewing the actual site.

So if you're a search engine, you have a very good idea of what this site is. If you're a human who's never viewed the source of a web page, you're out of luck.

# Posted By Jordan | 1/22/09 5:25 PM

Ha ha! Now, why didn't *I* think of that?

# Posted By Hal | 1/22/09 5:32 PM

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