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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