The Web Portal on 34th Street

[I’m sure this is a very old observation, but it’s new to me!]

I recently saw, for the first time, the 1947 film Miracle on 34th Street. The basic story is: a little girl is being brought up with an emphasis on the ‘real’ world, being taught to disbelieve any fantasy, including Santa Claus. She then meets the real Santa Claus and the grown-ups in the story have to deal with this realization. A key part of the story is that Santa takes a job at Macy’s (a still popular US department store of the old school) as the Santa. His job is to shill Macy’s toys, but he decides to make the kids happy. Thus, when a child asks for something Macy’s doesn’t have, or which Macy’s stocks an inferior version of, Santa recommends an alternative store for the parent to pick up the desired gift.

Mr Macy (played by Harry Antrim) rather than being angered by the innovation, responds to the positive feedback and declares that this should be the policy for all stores.

This policy – please the customer first, keep the customer second – is a key decision for web properties. Do you point the user at a page off your site if that is the best page for the user, even if you have an inferior version of the content on your own property?

Comments

[Andy from Workshopshed]

I suggest this depends on your customers. If you have a lot of regular visitors then yes I'd agree that this is definately the better policy. However if most of your visitors never return for other reasons then you might benefit from not taking this policy.

All of the sites I run have lots of external links. Some of the destinations are content that's better but most of it is different in scope, level of detail or is off topic with regards to what the site focuses on.

On one of my sites I've made the effort to identify external links with a small arrow and also on most of them configured them as target="_blank".

See http://www.fleacircus.co.uk/History.htm for example.

[Adam]

Are you kidding? Almost everything I've got you can find superior content for elsewhere, and I try to find it myself to point it out regularly (after all, I can at the very least become a valuable source for finding other people's content).

At the risk of being ironic (by plugging my own content), I do have an essay where I describe why you would expect people to link to outside sources even if it means risking the loss of attention:
http://sophistpundit.blogspot.com/2007/04/competition-by-any-other-name.html

[PetWolverine]

Why are you hosting an inferior version on your own property? Why have the content if you don't think it's the best version of that content? Either improve the quality of your version to the point where you think that's the best place to link, or specialize, i.e. don't keep that content at all and use external links. Whatever you do, do it well.

As far as keeping users, I don't think you'll lose them by giving them good advice. Take Google for example; when it started it was nothing but off-site links, but of course people kept coming back, because it was the best place to find the links they needed.