I preach it. Clients ignore it (well, sometimes)

I am posting this so I can refer people to this post when they call me… and I get around 7-10 calls daily for sites from people who want every bell and whistle they can think of on the site. From the start. Without any budget or forethought.

So this was a refreshing read about website simplicity and landing pages. Well worth the read. In the article they call out these six methods for web design that can drive away clutter and improve user experience.

1. Only what you need.
   The biggest aspect of simple web design is only showing what’s needed to make the sale, and nothing more.
2. Reduce clicks. The less clicks it takes for a customer to buy a product, the higher returns.
3. The “Grandma” rule. If your grandma (or any elderly person) can figure out how to buy a product for your site, odds are it’s put together pretty well.
4. Reduce the number of columns. Each time you add a column to a page, the content is pushed into a smaller and smaller space.
5. Give less options. There is an added stress put on web shoppers to make decisions.
6. Keep it clean. A clean design keeps visitors happy.

Examples are given that any smart retailer or merchant could follow for success.

During 2007, my firm received hundreds of inquiries for services. The vast majority, perhaps 80% were in the “just make me a website like this one” camp. Many were carrying a previous designers’ handiwork with them in complete wonderment of how such a large investment could fail to produce results. As an design-by-testing developer, this pattern was highly discouraging.

The confusion among businesses about what is required to develop a web business is widespread.

“We just want to find someone to put up a site like our competitors’ ” was a very common request that, to me, is a horrible way to approach the problem. I think it is often a panic reaction to the competitor’s first-mover advantage or to a drop in ones site performance. It is too easy to assume that a snazzy site is also meeting the needs of the customers and reaching full potential. Intuition has its place, but you could be very, very wrong. Even experts get this wrong much of the time. I have evaluated the analytics data from some hot-shot designs and found exit rates over 80% and time-on-site under one minute for most visitors.

Unless you intimately know the market, which most web designers do not, designing “from the hip” is an irresponsible way to spend clients’ money. Every web developer worth their salt should be doing rudimentary testing of a business’ feasibility before heading down a given design path if one could even begin to achieve high conversion rates.

You can, to some extent, predict customers’ movements if you observe through testing and extrapolate the results into the larger design. Observation requires a laboratory, even if it takes the form of analytics on a screen. Lightweight page development with good experimental design can serve that role. While the sample sizes are often too small to achieve “true” statistical validity, even pseudo experiments with repeatable results can help you get into the right quadrant.

Why is it that small to medium businesses have not embraced the value of experimentation in web design and marketing? What has caused companies to embrace the myth of the superstar web designer or the fire and forget web marketing program?

Testing the idea’s potential before spending huge amounts of effort on web development or SEO is critically important, yet rarely done. I received at least 20 requests in 2007 for people wanting to do gift basket websites and at least 20 wanting to sell personalized products (as resellers of the same corporate gifts catalog!) None of these entrepreneurs had even considered the landscape in which they wanted to be painted was full of others doing exactly the same thing and the over-crowded search results pages served as direct evidence.

I am giving much thought to how we might do a better job packaging this story for future clients. I encouarge your ideas in the comments.

Related: conversion rates for some online retailers.

First hope…. roses, poetry, a heartfelt request.
Rejection.
Then, it’s seen with another registrar! Lost!
Alas! it turns up on the doorstep in the rain for a tearful embrace.
Mine forever.

A lesson when using Godaddy backorders. Don’t transfer your credits too soon. This happens to me almost every time.

Managed rights photo shops, such as Getty Images are bound to protect the rights of photographers, illustrators, and videographers in order to preserve the value of their work. Especially in light of an ever increasing level of choice and quality from the very low cost stock photography sites such as istockphoto.com, they are seeking to offer the professional media producer a reliable way to make sure they’re paid each time their work is used in print, online, and elsewhere.

These folks employ a variety of tools, including picscout, to crawl the net looking for unauthorized uses of their work in websites and blogs. Through image recognition and invisible watermark technologies, the crawler seeks out and reports on locations where their photography exists, and then compares the locations to the licenses on file. If a disparity is found, it is reviewed and then action is taken on the website or blog owner. Expensive action sometimes, without a trace of a C&D. I’m certain that at this human-point of the activity there is discretion applied about how to handle it.

For those of us managing dozens or even hundreds of sites, it is very, very easy for an unauthorized image or illustration to make its way into a website. While most have absolutely no intention of defrauding the artist or the stock photography shop, some may find a bill in the mail for hundreds or even thousands of dollars showing spider-finds of photographs on websites. For the hundreds of thousands of sites built upon web templates or the packs of 250,000 images for $99.95 on ebay, you could be tagged at any moment.

As also pointed out on the Signed Media blog, it’s the era of the era of user-created-content.� I have a client using a CMS system to provide websites to over 250 individual users. Other clients edit their sites regularly and post images. These newbie users, despite our best attempts, do not think twice about grabbing an image from another website or from Google Images. Too often, these are images from a managed rights photography shop. We remove the image as soon as we can, scold the site owner, but it’s a formidable task. We have taken “reasonable steps’ as requested by the DMCA procedures to inform users of the policy. I try to tell them it is the site OWNER who will receive the letter/fees, but that doesn’t always help. They see a kitten, they post the kitten, kitten photographer be damned. (more…)

Kim Komando, hostess of the three hour call in radio show covered by 425 radio stations and sender of 5 million email newsletters weekly has recently pushed the Yahoo! Merchant Solutions “starter” program in her publications. As many of you know, I got my start in Yahoo! Store (waaay back in 1997) and have been working hard for Yahoo! store clients since then. The system is a very robust and power packed cart for the entry level merchant.

But,� I encourage new merchants to remembe that just because the platform is easy doesn’t mean selling online is going to be simple.

Basic merchandising and sales 101 apply…..

(more…)

It would seem ludicrous to even consider such a service as this which somehow skipped through my two layers of spam filtering today, but amazingly I talk to people at least once per week who have “gave them a shot” because it “surely can’t hurt anything.” In fact, it can hurt a LOT of things. It can hurt your rank, your perception of online marketing, and simply it can get you banned. Here’s a deconstruction of the spam itself.

A: 2 of your keyword phrases optimized…and submitted to the top three search engines
How do you optimize a keyword phrase? And how do you submit a phrase to a search engine?

B: We’ll give you 4 months of comprehensive SE Ranking Reports
Here, go get reports for free whenever you want them from Mike’s Marketing Tool. Make sure you click on one of Mike’s sponsors.

C: 92% of people don’t look past page 2 and 95% of your competition doesn’t optimize at all.
What, exactly does this have to do with your services? POIF (Painfully Obvious and Irrelevant Facts)�

D: Access a Global Marketplace & Build an International Business
I think that was the thing that Al Gore Invented? THE INTERNET! It has nothing to do with you. POIF .

E: More Traffic -> More Visitors -> More Sales
POIF , but I think they better look elsewhere to get it.

F: Save Thousands of $$$
Over what exactly? Over your arbitrary pricing for an undefined fictional service?

G: This Program Normally $2500!
“This Program” — what the one where you submit phrases to the search engines or the one where you teach people how to send out emails 7 days late?

H: Sign up before July 4th and get one month of hosting Free!
Hosting Value: $10. Oh, and the email arrived July 11th. If you can’t even do a basic email campaign properly, I’m doubting you can do SEO well.