80% of websites have adequate traffic to achieve their goals, they just don’t handle it well.

My last post was about the Internet Strategy Checklist my firm uses to “cover all the bases” with clients when brainstorming their Internet Strategies (albeit a useless list if I don’t already know the client’s audience, objectives and opportunities).  The list is arranged with the most important Internet marketing strategy components first, from the perspective of priority and hierarchy of what needs to be done 1st.  The 1st category on the list is Website Optimization.

Don’t Throw Money at a Bad Site

Without a website that can handle traffic, there is no sense of giving it any.  So often companies get caught in the idea that sending more traffic to a site will result in more sales, and they are normally right, but not normally making profiting off of it the way they could be. The 1st thing we do for clients is audit their incoming traffic.  If they are paying for clicks, we figure out the return on investment and estimate how they can better convert these “paid for” visitors once on the site.  This is a minor step in the big scheme of things, but it does “stop the bleeding” so we can get to the point of getting sites on a path towards optimal health.

You Know Where to Find the Yogurt.

A good website is like a grocery store. People coming in have a sense of where items they want might be located and easily follow directions and conventions to getting what they want.  This is no accident.  Retail Strategists lay out stores be easy to navigate and promote.  Sound familiar?

Website Optimization is getting the most out of people visiting an online property.  This might be apply to a landing page, micro-site, website, online catalogue, online slide deck, Interactive tool etc.  If your web presence is not handling visitors well, then paying to sending qualified traffic to it in large part a waste of money.

Good website optimization often starts with the website homepage strategy and how site visitors handle people once they arrive at it.  I wrote a post on this a while back, click here to read it.  The best place to start is to look at your website analytics and see were the top “landing pages” are (what pages people are entering your site) and then optimizing your landing pages (another previous post).

Keep Your Promises

When I look at a site for the 1st time, I look at its “Promises”.  What is the site promising the site visitor?  Then, is the site delivering on its promises.  This starts from the ad or search result that got the user to the site.  Do they arrive on a page that fulfills the promise of the search engine (This shows why SEO without strategy is worthless, as it can just create “broken promises”.  If you have a decent landing page and are getting more than a 20% bounce rate on it, it is likely caused by “broken promises”.  I don’t want this to be an SEO post, but having an integrated SEO strategy is part of Website Optimizing (sending qualified traffic in any way is part of it).

Focus on Website Optimization

Focus on website optimization as your primary web focus.  This starts off by making sure the site is simple and well organized from the user’s perspective.  Then it goes further into “giving people what they want”, when they want it and how they want it.  It also means spending time on statistics and testing out different things (check out

Achieve your Customer’s Goals, Forget Your Own

Your customers have their own goals when they are your site (forget about your site’s goals for a minute).  Once your site is organized from your site audience’s perspective, you need to set up analytic goals and track the “Goal Funnel” to see where visitors are falling off in trying to achieve THEIR goals.  Once see where they are dropping off, you can critically look and very likely see why.  Then you can fix it.

Now lets talk about your company’s and its site’s goals.  These are really just the goals of the site visitor.  If you achieve their goals, you will achieve yours.  (This needs to become your mantra.  Design it from your visitor’s perspective, give them what they want and help them achieve their objectives, you’ll profit from it, have faith).

Try User Testing

It is so easy these days to get user testing (See Get Tested) there is no excuse not to watch people trying to achieve their goals on your site on a regular basis.  This is the catalyst to website optimization because after watching your target audience trying and failing at core basic stuff, you will be compelled to do something about it.

Measure Progress

Your site needs “Core Metrics”. These are what you need to measure.  These metrics need to be from analytics, sales (or leads) figures, feedback data, and anything else that you could measure that would show that website optimization is working.

A Website Core Metrics Example

Website Optimization Summary

Give people what they want, do it from their perspective, make it easy and test test test. You likely have an SEO program.  Now you need a Website Optimization program.  They two have a lot in common.  Neither give immediate results, seem simple but are not, and require a strategy and lots of work.  There are there are website optimizing companies that provide such services, and even pair them with an SEO company.  I suggest getting  website optimization services before sending paid clicks at your site.  So many companies build something and leave it.  In reality, you can often get 100% better performance out of a page or navigational path through optimization.

Lets step back from the site objectives and underlying need for business profit for a minute.  Lets talk about website architecture design and how to structure information in a way that it will get found and consumed by its intended audience.

Internal Perspective vs. Customer Perspective

For a lot of years (and still today), web professionals and website owners have organized websites as they saw their business , that is from their Internal Perspective .  For those same # of years, months, days and hours, visitors to those sites have had trouble finding what they were looking for.  This is because customers were looking for information from their external Customer Perspective .

So, website information architecture is often ignored or undervalued. Why does it matter?  Well, lets step ahead again. When it comes to the way information is organized, which perspective, Internal or Customer, do you think ultimately leads to achieving more site objectives and more profit?  I’ll give you a wild guess.

The problem with organizing information from an Internal perspective, or what a business feels is the  “logical” organization of the business they know so well , is that customers don’t know the business that way. Customers only know their needs, and at the end of the day, they won’t put much effort into learning more than that, they’ll just leave the site.

9 /10 People Search Out Of Frustration, Not Interest.

Nine out of Ten people will not search until they have failed trying to navigate a site and have failed to find what they’re looking for.  Therefore, search can be viewed as an indicator of customer frustration, more so than customer interest.

The top search results for a site are far more likely terms of things that can’t be found, not popular terms. I had to be responsible for leads worth a million dollars each month before I drove to the bottom of that fact!  In the end, after reorganizing the site with the theory I advocate in this post, the search results really were for the most popular items, as the 1 in 10 people who searched as a preference rose to the top.  But this only happened after the majority of users found what they wanted, they way they wanted (site navigation).

The result :  The company expanded the sales force.

Streaming Visitors, The Best Architecture For Websites

A website needs to present content from the user’s perspective, then offer complete clarity how to get to the information they seek. The problem is, most sites have more than one type of audience and each audience likely has more than one perspective. This is a lot to handle on a site, in particular  while designing a website homepage .

So how to you organize a site to handle multiple audiences with multiple perspectives.  Enter Streaming.

Most sites have these 3 Streams.

1. Audience
2. Products & Services
3. Markets

Audience Streaming

If you know that your site has 3 types of visitors, you can “call out” each type of audience and lead them to what they are interested in. It is important to determine your Primary audience.  They may not represent the most visits, but should represent either your greatest revenue stream or opportunity.

Products & Service Streaming

Lead people by the product categories and product types they are interested in . This approach works great for product everyone knows, but if your customers are not REALLY familiar with your product and service offerings, then they are not going to know how to get to what they want, or even what they want.  Product & Service categories are most often a useful way to present information on a site for some customers, so by all means offer it, but don’t organize your entire site around it.

In some cases, when the product is unfamiliar to customers, but the products are key to organizing content, it makes sense to lead the product stream through a wizard to help users figure out what they need.

Markets Streaming

If your company’s audience or products and services span across markets, you need to lead people by the market they consider themselves to be in.  Lets say you were a cleaning contract company.  You could span the corporations, schools, hospitals, small business etc etc.  Each market you service could have specific preferences (i.e. Government wants cleaners with security clearance).  By streaming by market, you get to present your “pitch” to each market individually, so they know everything you have to offer them.

Navigation & Destination Pages

There are only two types of web pages when it is all said and done.  They are;

1. Navigation Pages
2. Destination Pages

Navigation Pages

Navigation pages are used to get people to where they want to go.  Their purpose is offer information needed to make the decision on where to go next, then offer them a clear path in the direction they need to go.  If you have good navigation pages, your search statistics will go down, the need to search will go down.

The thing most people don’t realize is that people on a mission don’t pay attention to anything except what they are after. Therefore, trying to promote something on these pages is useless, in fact it is a waste of time for you and your customers. Promote and offer “Next Steps” with relevance on the Destination pages AFTER people have found what they are looking for.

Destination Pages

Destination Pages are the final page on the user’s “quest” for information.  These pages are focused on providing the information on the product, service, topic or solution that customer has come to your site in search of.  This is where you deliver what the site visitor needs and organize it from their perspective. This way, they understand it and take the action both you and they want to take.

Destination pages need to “hit the spot” everytime. There is a good chance you will have to have more than one destination page for one product or solution.  This could be due to different audiences wanting the same product or different markets wanting the same solution.  What ever the case, Destination Pages need to speak directly to the people reading it.

Once your site visitors are satisfied , you can lead them to a “next step”, “promotion” or some other “call to action” you want them to take, and more importantly, an action you think they will want to take at that point as well. Keep the offers relevant!

Summary

So by now I hope your understand the need of stream and how they affect your site Architecture.  Handling multiple streams throughout a site, and perhaps resolving each into Destination pages that drive leads and builds your business, requires a lot of thought and planning.  Don’t just spend 20 minutes on a white board with a catalogue and your product manager (pssss, get sales and customer service in there).

I hope this help you think about how others are viewing and using your website, and helps you organize you site better.

…and remember, you can do this!

Purpose of a Website Homepage.

If more than 12% of the visitors to your homepage leave right away, you may need to read a bit more. We’ll show you how to make your new homepage, or change your homepage, depending what stage you are at.  This is not technical, this is what your need to do as a business, then hand off to who every is “technically” taking care of your site, if not you.

A homepage isn’t what it used to be.  It used to be the single entry point for a website, a place where you dazzled all visitors with what your business and mission was.  Well, that was the 90′s if ever at all.

A good homepage is a popular entry point, and likely the place most visitors arrive.  In fact, it may be just the way you imagine it, or it could be far more people enter from sources like search engines and other sites to the places on your site where they actually want to go.  It could be that they have bookmarked another page on your site, or even published that bookmark on social sharing servies like Digg.com , StumbleUpon.com or Del.ico.us.

Regardless of how people enter into your site, your homepage is the convention for visitors to orient themselves to your business, and navigate to where they want to go.  This means that your site is one part sitemap, and one part branding message.

Site Transparency

A homepage needs to offer transparency to a site.  A site visitor, regardless of how they enter a site, should be able to arrive at the homepage an know 3 things.

1. Who are you.
2. What do you do.
3. What does it mean for them.

Site Transparency also means visitors should know what is on the inside of a site, by looking at its homepage.  Is your website transparent from the homepage?  Let’s talk about how to get it there.

Other Must Have’s

1. Hours of Operation
2. How to Contact the Business
3. Steams into site (See below).

“Streaming” Visitors

Not all visitors are the same.  Your site likely serves more than one audience.  Your homepage design needs to handle each audience in a clear concise fashion.  Each audience needs to know where to go, and what areas of your site are useful and intended for them.

Consider the Best First

Every page needs a primary audience.  If you are a new business, when you create the homepage, design it for your ideal customer.  If your business is established, the homepage should be designed for your best customer.  Other audiences your serve will have their place, ut you don’t want to risk the experience of the audience that brings in 60% of your business revenue for the audience that brings in 15% either.

Local Businesses

If your business’ clientele is locally based, than your website homepage needs to have certain information on it.  You should have the following on your homepage;

1. The area your serve
2. Address (include street, city, postal code & neighbourhood if applicable).
3. Location Map (cross roads version will suffice)
4. Phone #
5. eMail

For a local business, this information should be available on on EVERY page, not just the homepage. This is why I suggest placing it in the top right of the header. It is easily placed on every page, but is also quite visible do to the way people scan a page (top to the right 1st). There might be a bit of “banner blindness” to this position, but when someone is looking for something on a site, they most ofter return to the top right of the page.

Here is a local business I love . They make organic ice cream, serve fair trade coffee and have a great environment. But the one issue I have with their website is that when I went there to get their phone # so I could book a meeting in their back room, I could not find it. To make it worse, my meeting was with people who have never been and they might need a map on the site to get to this popular meeting place. In the case of the Red Trolley, they are on 32nd street, but not the more popular part of it. In fact, 32nd street is broken up buy a couple of streets and park area, meaning it is hard to get from the more know part of 32nd street to the now “emerging” part of 32nd street they are at.

This business obviously needs a map, and it needs to be prominent with their phone number.

If I were to “tweak” the site, I would use the area in yellow to provide a map with the crossroads defined well, along with the phone # and physical address. I would also try to get “Open Hours” in there too. I might even through up a link to map it with Google Maps and “pop-up” a layer with the map. The other page elements this would displace could easily go to other areas once the top navigation was tweaked with “About Us” and “Faces of the Red Trolley” being combined”, “Giving” could move into “About Us” as well. This would free up the best navigation spots for “Parties & Meetings” which could move to the left with About Us and a “Menu” area, standard in this industry.

Might Have’s

1. Special Promotions – If so, make it clear which of audiences it is for to avoid confusing the others.
2. Newsletter/eMail sign up – See the Quadrant below to see where to put this. hint:You want them to do this.
3. Most common tasks or popular pages.
4. Search – 9 out of 10 people will try to navigate from the homepage.  If you have heavy search usage than you likely have a poor homepage.
5. News – If you really have to, remember this is most likely you wanting visitors to know your news, not vice versa.  Consider of a link to news instead.
6. Trust or Policy Info – Letting them know you ship UPS or have Verisign Security on purchases is great, but not pressing information.

User Experience – Give ‘em What They Want.

Your website, especially your homepage will be more successful the more you organize information from the perspective of your site visitors.  Basically, you give people what they want before you try to present them with what you want them to know or do.  We call this user centric design, and it is important to remember who the site is really for.

Homepage Quadrant Guide – Put it in its Place

Here is a guide to use when you are organizing the content mentioned above and anything else you might have. Each quatrant (area) of the page is representative of a web page.  i.e. If user often go to an online tool, then place that in the top right quadrant.

Using this Quadrant as a tool to organize your Homepage, will ensure you are presenting your business from your customer’s perspective, not yours.  It is also great for any page, but works great with home, product and service page.

Quadrant Breakdown

Top Left – This is the information your site visitors want the most. This is what they want to KNOW. This is not the place to place specials unless you 1st “satisfy” your visitors questions about what you do and what it means to them.

Top Right – This is where to place the things your site visitors want to do. This is not an area to sell. It might be a good area for search, but only if that is what your customer WANTS to do. Offering quick links to the most popular areas of your site would work well here. If you take orders by phone, put it here.

Bottom Left – Here is where you should tell them what you want them to know. Additional services your offer, your specials, charities you support etc.

Bottom Right – This is where you offer thing you want them to do, like sign up for that workshop you offer, or sign up for your newsletter (unless your site is so great that is what they want to do, which is rare).

Summary

What you read is more than a philosophy of page design. It is based on best practices, common sense, experience and long term strategy. If you organize your homepage as suggested, covering the key points mentioned here, your homepage will be what is supposed to be, and what your customers need. I suggest finding out your current “bounce rate”, the % of people immediately leaving your homepage, and compare it after you reorganize your page. If is not cut in half, I would be surprised.

If you have a homepage you would like to have feedback on, please leave a comment and I will take a look it and give my two sense, as will (I hope) other readers.

Crowdsourcing Web Design Changes Everything

It used to be that designing for a site meant selecting a web designer and being limited to the talents, ideas and inspiration of that web designer. Then came crowdsourcing . According to Wikipedia.com , crowdsourcing is taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an “open call”.

This works great for web design! You can also use it for Logos, Stationary, and even T-Shirt designs!

Before you start Crowdsourcing Web Design

1. Decide which design crowdsourcing site to use. The choices right now are 99Designs.com or CrowdSpring.com . Browse through each site, checkout the categories you will be listing in and see where you think you can get the best value for what you are looking to get.
2. Be ready to go public. This is a public process. 99Designs.com allows you to set up a private contest, but it costs more. Ask yourself if your competitors really have nothing better to do than find your contest, and if they don’t, will they actually do anything about it after they see it?
3. Have a clear vision of what you want your design to convey. You should also be clear the objective of what online presence. The key here is for you to be clear on what you what to convey through the design.
4. Make sure you have the time to write a good design brief. The design crowdsourcing site you use will walk you through this, you just need to make sure you take the time to fill it out thoroughly. Remember, designers will only give you what they think you want, so that is what you need to communicate to them. If you have a Marketing Summary already, use it!
5. Research how much you should spend. Take a look at contests similar to the one you will be creating. How much are they offering to the designer. You will notice that the greater the reward, the better the contest entries. This is already the “cheap” way to go, don’t be cheaper!
6. Know there will be additional “middle man” charges of around 20% on top of what your set the contest for. You need to factor this cost in when you set the amount the design contest winner receives.

Create a Design Contest

Now let’s walk through the design crowdsourcing process I used to get the eMarketing Matador web logo and header image you see in the header area of this site. For just over $200, I got 7 very talented designers to submit 27 designs, and compete to win the design contest.

In this case, for the logo/header contest, I used 99Designs.com . At the time, I was more impressed with the logo/header designs I saw on 99Designs.com , and they appeared to be going for about $50 cheaper.

In submitting my contest, I did not select a lot of the options available, which all cost extra. Some of these make sense, such as promoting the contest in the forum area of the site, especially if you are in a hurry and want the attention of the best talent. For me, I give the design period about 5 days, ensuring me time to work with the designers through feedback etc. You can also highlight the contest etc and make it stand out. All these things might work, but how much more than just throwing the additional costs into the contest reward is debatable. I personally would rather see the extra money go to the Designer.

Here is my Design Brief for the eMarketing Matador Web Logo/Header

In the Design Brief , there was 4 key points I wanted to make;

#1 – I gave the address of the site so they could see where the logo/header image would live.

#2 – I “sweetened” the pot by offering to recognize the designer and link to their site. You can see this in the footer of this site.

#3 – I wanted the design or part of it, to have good icon appeal. If you look at the address bar, you will see the icon for this site.

#4 – I pre-paid the prize money. This showed I was serious and that someone was going to win.

Once published, a Design Brief looks like this to prospective designers

You can see that the summary is just that. I used it to give the basic and vital information, as well as provide the incentive related information of what I was going to do above and beyond just the contest.

Below are the different entries I received.

You can see I got a lot of variety to select from. It is amazing what 7 different designers will come up. Each has their own style and interpretation of your design brief. This is where crowdsourcing design excels. With a single designer, you get one set of “vision” and “talent”. A single designer also does not have brainstorming access with other designers trying to achieve the same task. Let one talented designer see anothers work, and the clients feedback to that work, the quality and direction of their own work will end up being more targeted and what you want. This is where you win!

Tips to Getting the Best out of Design Crowdsourcing

1. Give Timely Feedback – I try to check my contests at least twice a day and provide feedback for each design. I rate the ones I don’t like and the ones I do like, I let them know. If I see something with potential, or going in a direction I like, I let the designers in the contest know so they can all go down the right path together. Design feedback is crucial.
2. Get a good start – If you don’t see at least 5 designs submitted after a couple of days, review other contests and see what the bids are there. You might need increase your bid a bit. For this contest, I raised the bid by $20 once and saw better results after.
3. Build a relationships – If you see someone with talent, keep in touch. You may want to go direct to them in the future, cutting out the competition and middle man. Going direct to the designer will easily cut costs by 2/3′s. Worse case, you can let the designers know of your next competition and have them “raise the bar” a bit.

The Winner

In the end, the winner of the contest was UaLz, a university senior taking time out of studying for finals to made some much needed money to pay rent etc. If you’d like to use him, his email address is

To visit the contest I hosted for the eMarketing Matador logo/header image, simply visit 99designs.com here.

Related Article on Landing Pages

I recently wrote a post on Landing Pages, which are perfect for Crowdsourcing. One page, simple goal. Its a good place to start!

Listen to Seth

I’m a big Seth Godin fan. He’s a great Marketing author, blogger and Entrepreneur. He wrote an article “How to live happily with a great designer” that captures the essence of working with a designer, web or not, crowdsourcing or not. I recommend reading it before working on any Web Design Brief to any Web Designer.

Remember: You can do this!