Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert – Part 1
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Before you implement your external communications strategy to bring customers in to your site, you need to make sure that your internal communications strategy is in order – that is, your website itself.
Cause the best PR and marketing campaign in the world won’t increase sales if your website sucks!
And how can it suck?
Oh, there are so many ways: obvious problems like…
- broken links
- bad checkout process
- hard-to-find contact information
to the more subtle problems like…
- focusing on your products and your wants instead of your buyers
- writing in a voice that’s going to alienate your identified personas
- not having any useful information on the site to establish yourself as a thought leader
- having bad SEO so no one can find your site
- and so on and so on!
You need to fix these first so that when you do start promoting the site and driving traffic to it, you’re putting your best foot forward and presenting a strong, cohesive website that addresses the needs and wants of your potential buyers.
While this is not a design series, and I can’t teach you how to build a beautiful site (which is an art form in itself) I can help you fix the most common mistakes people make when building a website. The tips I’ll give you are things that anyone, regardless of design and coding experience, can do to improve the effectiveness of their website.
To best leverage the power of the content that you are creating, you need to make sure that it is easy for visitors to find what they need on your site. And you do this through smart design.
Again, concentrate on solving their problems rather than trying to sell your product. Where most people go wrong is that they base their website on their own companies internal organization structure, which makes it really easy for them to find things, but how does that help the target audience? They don’t care about how you organize your company, they care about your problems.
Don’t forget the WIIFM? (what’s in it for me?) that drives their behavior.
To design your site properly (i.e. to get the most conversions) you need to learn as much as possible about the buying process for your product. You need to know how people find your site, and the length of time in a typical buying cycle (i.e. small purchases, short buying cycle, medium purchases, longer buying cycle, large purchases such as cars or homes – much longer buying cycle.) and you need to focus on walking the potential buyer through micro commitments…
Do NOT try to get them to be committed to buying from you to soon!
More to come about exactly how to do that in Part 2…
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so people can spot you Bing forces a change in SEO strategies – iMedia Connection The Yahoo -Microsoft deal will have a huge affect on the paid search advertising world, but it could also set the stage for an SEO war of sorts.Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert – Part 1- johncow.com 08/31/2009 Before you implement your external communications strategy to bring customers in to your site, you need to make sure that your internal communications strategy is in order – that is, your website itself. Cause the best PR and marketing
Good introduction, look forward to the follow-up post…
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Tell me Jason,
how do you manage to constantly come up with whole SERIES of posts on every single topic? amazes me every time.
Igor
Thanks Igor… I guess the best answer is that I am a life long student of this industry who is always trying to improve and the best way i have found for myself to solidify what i have learned is to implement what i have learned, verify it is fact and not theory and then teach/share with others in my own words.
Thanks for sharing such an informatinve and sharing post.
Very true! It amazes me how many websites I come across with broken links. I use Xenu Link Sleuth to check my website links, especially the external links (these are the one’s that I find are the main culprit), a super tool and it’s free.
Regards,
Karl
Bad check out process and hard to find contact information are really things to be considered for any good website performance.
I am following your Free Ebook as a blueprint to building my site and business. I am in the early stages and am using a WP template so things like contact forms and what not are pretty much laid out for me already. I look forward to earning some revenue so that I can purchase a professional design.
John
Great post, often its the simple things that we ovelook and these can have a massive affect on the customer/user experience which is so important.
Look forward to the next post.
Tom
Thanks John! It is resources like this that I go to and get the best advice possible.
Look forward to Part 2!
Your comment on buying cycles committent etc made me do a smidgin more research on gvo titanium thanks Jason! which made me approach the pages in a different way.
I will be following this thread!
[...] Continued from Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert Part 1 [...]
[...] Continued from Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert Part 1 [...]
[...] Continued from Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert Part 1 [...]
[...] Continued from Website Design & Being a Trusted Expert Part 1 [...]
THanks for this series of tips. We are about to launch our educational money website and these tips are timely!
I have my fingers and toes crossed that the way we have designed it will be the winner. It’s completely different to any other money website out there…
Yet another great post Jason. Thanks for all of the hard work that you put into your blog.
Thanks
Jason Berkes
how do you manage to constantly come up with whole SERIES of posts on every single topic? amazes me every time.
Brain
All your post inspires me a lot.. Thanks for sharing such informative post