Not a day goes by where I don't hear someone quote Jakob Nielsen to me. In fact, he seems to come up more often than Jesus.

In the 60's John Lennon thought the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. In the context of his observation, he was right and therein lies the problem.

Context is generally intangible, something undefined and at the time of comment, not high on the priority list. It is only when a statement, comment or “work” is taken out of context that the importance of establishing its originating circumstance comes to the fore.

Context is important. It provides a key to understanding and a key to communicating. Using a statement in context may save hundreds of words and enable an idea to be distilled into one short grab line. Conversely, a grab line out of context can be easily misunderstood and create numerous problems in reparation and damage control.

So the problem for the usability religion is that there are no hard and fast rules, yet everyone keeps quoting them - relaying sermons from the messiah, Jakob Nielsen. After all, who can disagree with the world’s most renowned usability expert?

A website shouldn't and can’t be everything to everybody. In fact, no communication can be everything to everybody. You have to know who you are talking to.

Over the last 4 years Thinking has focused on a key contextual emotion - affinity. Strangely, this single emotion provides us with more internet success than anything else. Using this focus, we end up with sites that are sticky, have long session times, high customer satisfaction, high site loyalty and most importantly, appear to have spirit. That's right, spirit!

The spirit of a site is bound by its context. My office looks out at a cafe and a pub and has three more cafes, a pub, two wine bars and three restaurants behind it (as they say in real estate - position, position, position). All of these venues essentially do the same thing yet each does it in a different context - flashy, ye olde worlde, cocktail lounge and a few are just joints. This contextual differentiator creates its own distinct character, appeal and client audience.

I would doubt if these venue’s patrons only frequented the one place for all their food and beverages. It would depend on the time of the day, where they were and what they wanted to eat - they would have their favourites but “all in context”. However, when it comes to websites, many website owners expect their patrons to go nowhere else. I'd be surprised if any of the abovementioned establishment owners thought they were everything to everybody, so why do websites. Cafes are not cocktail lounges and pubs don’t do takeaway sandwiches. Understand the context of your website and stick to it.