WebPaperwork.com

I have just discovered Jeff Croft’s excellent site.

Two recent articles that really captured my imagination are:

Bring Me Problems, Not Solutions

and

What does it mean to be a professional web designer?

In Defence Of Difficult Clients is an excellent new article at A List Apart. Check it out.

Do you own or operate a website? If you do, I’m sure you would like to know how to make it more successful. I’m sure you would like it to make more sales, generate more leads, produce more revenue, attract more subscribers, or whatever.

In this article I am going to reveal a very simple formula that can help you make your website more successful.

The Sure-Fire, Guaranteed Website Success Formula

Let’s cut to the chase.

If you want to make your site more successful, this is all you have to do…

1. Attract more of the right people to visit your site; and/or
2. Convince a higher percentage of these visitors to take whatever ‘desired action’ you want them to take. (i.e. improve your site’s conversion rate).

If you do both (or even just one) of these things your site will be more successful. Guaranteed. It really is that simple.

Putting The Website Success Formula Into Action

As you can see, the website success formula does not provide you with detailed ‘how to’ instructions and it certainly doesn’t offer any instant fixes.

Instead, it gives you the ‘big picture’. It provides a quick and simple reminder of the most crucially important factors that determine the success of any site.

So, is this formula of any practical use?

Absolutely. The formula starts to become useful when you adopt it as a framework for decision making.

Suppose you are considering making some changes to your site. This could be changing the background colour, or making the text size larger, or adding a new page, or modifying the checkout process, or improving the site’s accessibility. You may even be considering adding some snazzy AJAX effects, or a new Web2.0-inspired visual design.

In truth, there is an infinite amount of things you could change on your site. The challenge is deciding which things you should do?

This is where the formula comes in.

You should only make a change to your site if it will help you to either generate more traffic or improve your conversion rate.

Focus your efforts on tasks that will either get you more traffic or improve your conversion rate and your site is sure to become more successful.

So Many Questions …

The website success formula is short and simple but it generates many questions.

The most immediate questions are:

1. Who are the ‘right people’ (i.e. who is the target audience)
2. What is the ‘desired action’ you want them to take?

The answers to these questions are entirely unique to each site.

Hopefully you already know the answers. If not, you should urgently invest some time thinking hard about this matter. If you don’t know who your site is aimed at or what you want those people to do it is going to be impossible for your site to be a success.

After this, the next set of questions is:

1. How do I get (more) people to visit the site
2. How do I improve my conversion rate.

Both these topics are massive. There so many different books and blogs out there offering guidance that it can be very hard to know what to believe.

I will cover these topics in future posts on this blog, offering my own advice and suggestions with a few trade secrets thrown in for good measure. My goal is to help you to achieve more success with your own website. Subscribe to my RSS feed to receive all the latest posts.

In the meantime, I’ll finish of today’s post with an excellent link about attracting visitors to you site: How to Attract Links and Increase Web Traffic – The Ultimate Guide.

ProBlogger.Net – Group Writing Project

This post has been submitted to the http://www.problogger.net/ Group Writing Project.

Do your clients have unclear or unrealistic expectations when they first approach you about a new web design/development project?

Esther Schindler’s excellent article Becoming Clueful: What You Should Know Before You Redo Your Web Site – Five tips on what businesses should expect from their web designers and developers covers many common client misconceptions.

Esther’s Tips:

• Understand what you want
• It costs more and takes longer than you think
• A Web site has several pieces. Don’t cut corners.
• Balance glitz and guts
• If you build it, they won’t necessarily come
• Avoid bit decay: the site needs maintenance
• Treat the Web team as professionals

You will see that there are actually 7 tips, not five as suggested by the title.

Roger Johannson added three tips of his own to Esther’s seven to come up with 10 things businesses should know before building a website

Roger’s Tips:

• Most people in the Web industry are clueless.
• You only get what you pay for.
• Don’t start your project with buying a CMS.

Roger was also inspired by Andy Budd’s 3 Things You Wish Clients Knew About the Web

My Tips:

Building on the above lists, some things that I find myself having to repeatedly explain are:

1. “It will take you far longer than you expect to write the content for your new site”.

A good way to avoid this problem is to hire in a copywriter to do this work, removing the burden from the client altogether. If you can get the client to agree to the additional expense, I highly recommend it.

2. “Photos taken by a professional photographer will be better than photos you take yourself, no matter how expensive and feature-packed your brand-new digital camera is”.

Photography is not a critical matter for some projects and it is often acceptable for a new site to use photos taken by the client.

However, for other sites photography is of paramount importance. In particular, it is essential to get top-quality product shots for e-commerce projects. Where necessary, always hire a professional.

3. “If you plan to launch your site at Event X or Trade Show Y, please give your web developer a reasonable amount of notice”.

Web development projects always take longer than your clients expect. It is unreasonable for a client to assume that a you can build an entirely new, all-singing, all-dancing site – from scratch – in just under a week, espscially if they are too busy to provide the required input. The solution? Always encourage clients to contact you as soon as possible.

What do you find yourself explainng to clients again and again?