Website must-haves can quickly become website dead weight.
In this post we look at another website white-elephant: social media share buttons.
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Technology changes direction faster than a kid trying to choose a flavour in an ice-cream parlour.
The challenge is that we can all get stuck with thinking, “this is what has always happened for our business, and this is what needs to stay.”
In organizational culture, this type of thinking is known as having “white elephants”. A white elephant is something that whose maintenance cost outweighs its usefulness.
One of my greatest joys during my organizational change days was questioning and then removing white elephants that were past their use-by date.
Web design has its own white elephants.
I have already spoken before of the slider white elephant. In this post, I have social media sharing buttons firmly in my cross-hairs.
Ten years ago, every website had to have Social Media Sharing buttons on the side of each page and at the top and bottom of each blog post.
Millions of dollars and hours were spent (and are still being spent) by firms developing and optimizing social share plugins.
Reams and reams of virtual pages have been written (and are still being written), breathlessly telling you the 30+ WordPress Social Media Plugins to use for your site.
There are entire companies whose only product is a social sharing button.
And then the world started to slowly change … and people didn’t notice. |
