Nobody cares about your website.

I think this [edited to add: meaning Air New Zealand's marketing team thinking that previous customers would care to receive a mail saying they updated their website] is a consequence of certain people involved in the creative process wanting to know that what they do matters. However, since many of them are fundamentally old-school marketers, their metric for matters is Successful Product Launch and to do a Successful Product Launch you have to make a lot of noise. Indeed, absence of noise means a failure.

Six weeks later it isn't their problem anymore.

This is not how I would suggest thinking about web design for most people here. Web design supports business goals. Redesigns support business goals. You measure business goals, when they go up as a result of a redesign, you bust out the freaking party hats. When your talented design firm goes off and produces a heartbreaking work of staggering genius that succeeds in reducing conversion by 23%, you thank them for their time, exchange a firm handshake, and do the next project better.

Now, as a fact of life, you are probably going to learn that "pretty" and "converts well" have very little to do with each other, and that a lot of iterative improvement beats the everloving stuffing out of big-bang redesigns. (Don't take my word for it. Collect data and run the numbers. I'm right, but your designers won't believe me until they see the numbers. They probably won't believe me after they see the numbers, either. That is when you fire them.)

I know a lot of designers chafe under the notion that the best possible use of their time is probably creating 96 different versions of the signup button in slightly different shades of red to test against each other. Yeah, life sucks that way -- I didn't get into CS to do SQL optimization for CRUD reports, either. I suggest taking up a hobby. When you're on the clock, do productive work.

Nobody cares about Volume 14 Number 26 of your weekly ego-list. You are not kragen.

Is the 1:1 ratio of body text to repetitive footer supposed to be ironic?

Oh, I mean no offense to you. It's always better to post links than to hesitate. Let the community decide. But always try to bring good stuff to the community.

Any good community has opinions on both sides.

I can't figure out if you didn't read the article or just totally missed the point.

He isn't talking about coming to a site like HN and posting a "hey, take a look at my new webapp" thread, where people want to give you feedback and try out your new site. Instead, he gives two specific examples where some web designer or online department's pride got in the way of him accomplishing the task he came to the site to do in the first place.

The point of the post is about customer messaging. When you're talking to your customers, you should focus on the things that matter to them, not to you. The redesign of your newsletter very rarely falls into that category, and cheering loudly about it just looks clueless.

My girlfriend is on tour right now and the last time I went to visit her she was excited that she got a new plant. Now I personally didn't see what the big deal was but I was there with a friend of hers and they went on for about an hour on how plants "brighten up a room" and such.

Point of the story: Some people do care about things like new design and the authors of the e-mail, the one's this blog author accuses of being marketing hacks who don't speak from the heart, are probably in fact speaking from the heart. Because some people care deeply about aesthetics.

In other words the author of the blog post mistakes "I don't care" for "no one cares" and that's why he is, imho, wrong.