Exploration

Love and the Art of the Webwright:

A Theatrical Model
for Web Sites (part 3)

Capitalizing on significant moments is what advertising and commerce are all about offline, so why wouldn't these axioms apply to the online world? In part three of our series, we address the final tools a webwright can use to foster a loyal relationship between Web visitor and Web site.

Upping the Stakes intensifies the tension because the protagonist learns how much more there is to lose by not resolving the conflict. However, fatal flaws may be fatal, but they are also familiar, and therefore difficult to dismiss. Playwrights are challenged by the need of the protagonist to hang on to the familiar even when they are better served by letting go and making necessary changes in their lives.

For a Web site, upping the stakes could come in the form of freebies. Whether it be downloads, contests, or directions on how to build a better mousetrap, when the Web site is offering a taste of the magnificence of what can be, it whets the appetites of visitors, thus upping the stakes. Other ways to up the stakes include showing the consequences of not taking advantage of what is offered or comparing the gains and losses when considering the offerings.

Assumptions, preconceived notions, and predictable attitudes are challenged by offering visitors a completely different way of thinking about how they initially answered the questions of the protagonist. The Web site helps visitors re-analyze what it is they really want by providing and justifying their need to obtain something. In this way, visitors are challenged yet offered something at the same time. Content that addresses a larger frame of reference can better meet this challenge. For example, the visitor who is shopping for prescription fulfillment may be encouraged to evaluate health insurance options.

The Significant Other Services Web site uses a visitors' desperation for competent help in finding an Significant Other, to overcome their fatal flaw so that they can resolve conflict and find love. The desire for a deus ex machina (god of the machine—a device used in Greek drama that was lowered onto the stage to magically resolve all conflicts) has survived time. If a Web site can become the visitorís deus ex machina, it engenders the loyalty and commitment of the visitor and succeeds in its branding efforts.

The Sigmo can inspire, illuminate, and spark the imagination, whether experienced at the theater, on a hot date, or even a Web site. The sigmo is the moment of release that makes all of the hard work leading to that moment worth the effort. Witnesses to the drama—whether they are other audience members or the hot date or other visitors on a Web site—root the experience in reality.

Surveys, profiles, or other tools designed to further engage the visitor create the illusion that the Web site is witness to the visitor's sigmo. These tools can also offer opportunities to share sigmos with other visitors. Web sites that try to manipulate visitors into a sigmo by vicarious association fail because visitors usually know when theyíre being manipulated and they often rebel against that Web site.

Significant Other Services seeks to inspire a sigmo by giving the visitor the hope that she or he can win his or her conflict with the antagonist of loneliness with new ways of overcoming the fatal flaw of not having an SO. Delineated expectations of what will happen when they trust SOS motivate visitors into using the services of SOS. This decision is the sigmo that SOS uses to brand its name. Although precarious, this transition is more easily managed by the webwright who now takes a left turn on artistry to rightly rely more on traditional technologies of marketing and salesmanship.

The Denouement occurs during those vulnerable moments following the sigmo. At this time, the playwright resolves the play. Sometimes playwrights slip in additional dogma while the audience is still vulnerable.

The vulnerable moment after a sigmo is where the webwright can gain visitors' trust and direct them towards Web site community activities, online and offline events, or revenue streams. Ain't love grand? Curtain.

Aristotle, given the chance, would probably have taken up participatory Web site design as a way of validating and furthering his philosophical theses. Shakespeare and his other actors might have come up with rudimentary formats for Web sites that would, like his plays, pass the test of time. Brecht may have used the Net to inspire political advocacy. George Bernard Shaw may have written jokes that became spam. Euripedes may have focused on distance-based-learning programs. Hard to say.

The theatrical model maximizes the interactivity of a Web site by using the elements of drama. In this way, Web sites better assure community building through visitor trust, loyalty, and commitment based on dynamic and continually evolving content that includes a wide range of interactive opportunities. A sense of community better ensures successful revenue streams as that loyalty is extended to the products and services offered, branding the Web site along with those products and services.

Ultimately, as in love, the success of any particular play or theater finds its foundation in the chemistry of effective collaboration. Web sites share this dynamic. However, in the case of the webwright, success can be traced back to a mixture of craft and artistry that invoke the significant moment that, like love, makes life more meaningful.

Z. Sharon Glantz has written and produced educational plays for three Washington State departments, Puget Sound Power & Light, Washington Mutual Savings Bank, two departments of City of Seattle, and other corporations and government agencies. Her play Tarot for Fools received a public reading recently Astrology et al in Wallingford. She is currently experimenting with a variety of projects at Konnexxus, as well as working on her second novel and a workbook on Tarot Journaling, on which she is currently teaching classes at Astrology Et Al.

See also Part 1 and Part 2 of Love and the Art of the Webwright