Great Cause, Huge Budget, Lousy Website: The Peter G. Peterson Foundation

Gary North

Sept. 5, 2008

Peter G. Peterson is a very rich man. He is the senior officer of the Blackstone Group, the private investment house. He was formerly Chairman of the Council on Foreign Relations.

He is also a babe in the woods when it comes to marketing.

He has put his money where his mouth is. Where has his mouth been for two decades? Warning about the threat of government bankruptcy due to Medicare and Social Security.

His is a good cause. But unless he learns about marketing, it is a lost cause.

I begin with his Website: www.pgpf.org.

I use the largest print setting on my screen: 800x600 pixels. Older people usually do. Older, educated people are his target audience. At age 82, he is not after kids.

His site not only does not fit an 800x600 screen, it does not fit it when the viewer clicks Ctrl-minus, which shrinks the image. Look at what I see on my screen.

I cannot see the masthead. I cannot see the left-hand side of the screen. I have to use the left-right scroll bar to access the right-hand side, which you never want to appear on your site. It reduces readership. People hate to scroll back and forth.

Here is what I see with the screen set at 1024x768.

The site has no masthead. This is incredible. There is no eye-grabbing declaration of a promise or a warning. We do not read something like this in large bold type:

The United States Government is bankrupt!

The United States Government's unfunded debt exceeds $52 trillion and grows by $1.5 trillion a year. Your family will be taxed unmercifully to pay off this gigantic debt, but the government will default anyway. This site offers proof . . . and a citizens' plan of action.

You must catch the visitor's attention within five seconds. Nothing on this site catches attention. It is a cluttered mess.

Buried under an image (actually, several images -- they rotate in and out) that conveys no specific information is a meaningless, non-specific, ho-hum slogan, which could apply to lots of things and therefore says nothing:

Our Vision

To keep America strong and the American Dream alive by promoting responsibility and accountability today to create more opportunity tomorrow.

That, plus $2, gets you a ride on the New York City subway.

The site has no permanent departments where people can pursue topics.

It does not invite return visits. "Been there. Seen that."

There is no clear structure to the site. It is cluttered.

There is no interaction with Peterson's critics. There are no links to articles showing how the critics' arguments are incorrect. Here is an example of a critic who says "we can grow our way out of this," which was Warren Buffett's unsupported argument in his on-screen comments on the Foundation's movie, I.O.U.S.A..

http://www.optimist123.com/optimist/2007/08/an-800-billion-.html

Peterson says we need a national debate on this issue, yet his site does not debate. This screams: "We cannot defend our position!"

In contract, look at my site. It fits a screen set at 800x600. It has free departments where I discuss the bankruptcy issue.

//www.garynorth.com/public/department79.cfm

//www.garynorth.com/public/department30.cfm

My site is an off-the-shelf product: Membergate. Peterson could have had his site up and running in a day or two . . . cheap! Yet my site is far more user-friendly and action-oriented than Peterson's.

He is a great investor. He is a tireless John the Baptist, crying in the fiscal wilderness. But he did not hire someone skilled in Web marketing. It shows.

Use Peterson's site as a model for what not to do when you create your site.