People Don’t Read Your Website… They Scan it.

Make it Easy to Scan your Information, and They’ll consume it.

Anyone writing copy for web needs to understand how to write web copy. The reason is that copy writing for the web determines how and what of what your write actually gets read.  If you write to have your copy scanned, then you are writing good web copy!

Headlines

A page’s headline needs to interrupt and be relevant. It does not need to be descriptive, explain or introduce anything.  It just needs to stop people and get them to the Sub-Header.

Sub-Headers

A Sub-Header needs to engage a website visitor while expanding on the headline and its relevance to what the subject of the web content.

Image Captions

Following reading the headline and Sub-Header of a page, people will turn briefly to images and then read the image caption. This is why it is so important to write the best image captions possible, as this is what people are reading to determine if going further is going to be a waste of time or not.

Bullets

Write in bullet form;

• As much as possible.
• When appropriate.
• When a paragraph is going to be too large.
• When you want it read.

Paragraphs – short and start bold

Keep your paragraphs short.  I suggest 6 lines or less. It really helps to bold the first part of your paragraph (no more than 1/2 of it), and place the most “to the point” copy there.

Use your Colours

Use your website colours as the colours for your headline and Sub-Headers. You don’t have to use the exact colours, but doing this will help your copy stand out a little.

Calls to Action

Calls to Action (what you want people to click on to fill out a form, become a sale or go further in the sales or lead process) should not be copy unless it is also accompanied with button that repeats or expands on the text link.

Perfect Example

Just look at those image captions! This comes from www.eightbyeight.com , the website of an excellent eCommerce optimization company.  I have met Amy Africa who is a partner at Eight by Eight and knew I would fine the best practices she and I both advocate.

I hope this helps!

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!

What is a Landing Page?

A Landing Page is the 1st page you intend a site visitor to see 1st.  With search engines indexing every page of your site, any page can be a landing page, so each page has to be designed with that in mind. For our purposes, a Landing Page is a page designed as an entry point into a website.  We all know that the Homepage is one of these, but it can’t be everything to everyone.  No, really.   It can’t!

Why Does a Niche Need a Landing Page?

Your Niche product or service needs a Landing Page so you don’t lose business. 80% of business websites receive adequate traffic, but few handle the traffic very well.  This leads most businesses to believe they need more traffic, ironically to just lose more business.  What most businesses need to do is stop focusing on getting prospective customers to their site, and start focusing on getting real customers through the site.  You can focus on increasing traffic after your site is optimized, and biggest factor in optimizing for converting customers online is Landing Page Design.

Toddler Syndrome – To get visitors through your Niche website, you need to keep them FOCUSED.  That means lessening distractions like navigation.  Think of the visitor as a 2 year old.  They want what they want, when they want it, how they want it, and they want it now!  That is an online visitor’s mentality, and this is what Landing Pages are designed to do.

Keep the Promise.

Website success often boils down to keeping promises.  If you tell a customer that there is a sales rack at the back of your store, it better be there right?  Same with online.  Lets break down the typical Internet Marketing “Promise”.

Offline or Online Ad –> Website –> Form or Shopping Cart .

Simple enough right.  Now think of each stage as a promise.  When a customer finds you online via a search engine, the customer is being promised you have what they searched for, especially if it is a paid result.  They expect to see what they are looking for right away, and expect all the information they need will be one the page the result link takes them to (or else they would not have clicked it). Today’s Internet users additionally wants the information they are expecting to be well laid out for them and from their perspective.

This is why you don’t send everyone to the homepage (unless your niche is so narrow, you only sell one product).   Homepage are meant to offer transparency to an entire site, for information and navigation purposes.  Homepages are not meant to handle a site visitor on a mission, with the attention of a… well, toddler.  When it comes to visitors expecting information on SOMETHING, having information on EVERYTHING is going to confuse , delay and frustrate them, all of which means they leave (bounce) right away.

Keep ‘em Focused

A landing page is about one topic, and has one obvious way to navigate, that is towards the “objective” you set.  For a niche product or service, you need to lay out a landing page that provides all the information a customer wants, and in a way they they are willing to consume it. Here is an excellent Landing Page “Wireframe”  This layout has excellent psychology, and keeps the user focused well on what they want.

Tell The Web Designer

Before you engage a web designer to create a Landing Page for your Niche, you need to determine a few things;

• The Landing Page’s business objective (There should really be only one)
• The copy and content for the page.
• The Branding for the Page (if it will help with the sale, use your website header, if it doesn’t, don’t)

The free Landing Page design wireframe shown below is a “how to” of how to approach laying out a Landing Page.  Don’t worry about images and making it look good yet, that happens at a later phase with a designer (see Crowdsourcing Web Design )

Download the wireframe shown above in PowerPoint or OpenOffice Impress .

Once you have a final draft of the above wireframe, take this to your Webdesigner so he can create the web page, add images and complete the look and feel, making it consistent with the rest of your site (if they don’t do this, get a new web designer ).

You have 5 Seconds

Online vistors SCAN.  Write your landing page for scanning, not reading.  Within 5 seconds a Landing Page visitor knows if they are going to stay.  keep it simple and relevant.

Embrace the Space

White space can be used to bring emphasis to areas of a page you want a visitor to have their attention focused on.  Make sure your page does not look crowded, especially around your form or call to action button.

Always Be Relevant

A Landing Page needs to be extremely relevant to the visitor, especially the headline. For example, if you have products for women and men create a separate Landing Page for each sex. You need to be as targeted as possible, even if that means having dozens of landing pages. If you do search engine marketing, you more likely need to create landing pages at the Ad Group level, not the Campaign level.

Sell the Offer

Landing Pages promote offers, not products. You don’t need product details, company information or more about your services. You just need to confirm that they are on the right track, get them excited about it, and give them a clear path to go down.

Lose the Navigation

A Landing page needs to be without Top and Sidebar navigation. You want to keep them focused. You can have footer navigation which tells the user the page is part of a greater site, a must for some and key to search engines, especially when evaluating the quality score that determines your cost per click, should be be doing paid search. You should also have your logo linked back to your site.

Image a Better Life

Images can help or hurt. A fantastic image can lure people away from your objective. Imagine using a celebrity wearing your type of product only to have people leave in pursuit of more information about that celebrity. You images need to promise a better life if they purchase from you, leave it at that.

Also, the image needs a caption These captions are more likely to be read more than any other text on the landing page.

Write for Scanning

Writing Copy online is a bit of an art. Here is a basic formula to follow;

• Headlines are to capture attention.
• Bylines (Secondary Headline) are to expand on the Headline, fitting in what you could not say with a Headline alone).
• Write in point form as much as possible, and keep each point short
• The 1st few words of each point should be focused on selling the offer, and be in bold.
• Use Video when you can, and keep it short

Test with Constraint

I spend far more time testing what I have, then making more new stuff. That is because time spent testing pays off more than time creating new online content.

Test the following (Ordered by importance).

• Headline
• Image Captions
• Call to Action Button or Form
• Graphical elements.

Test one thing at a time, its the only way you will really know what caused improvement or damage. Also, don’t stop a test till you can be sure the results have meaning.

Make a Template

If you are going to have several, even dozens of Landing Pages, don’t pay a Web Designer for each one. Have the first one created as a template, where text and images are easily swapped out. Make this need clear to your web designer.

No Example?

We debated for a while on including some examples of the Landing Page wireframe discussed here and in the end concluded that people would just copy the pages and end up with what they saw, not what they need.

Work with your web designer and this wireframe to get something for your business niche. If you are looking at paying more than $500 for the Landing Page Design, I highly suggest looking at crowdsourcing the web design instead.

I have every confidence if you present a good set of requirements, and ask for the wireframe to be followed above (plus your site’s footer links, and header if appropriate), you will end up with an extremely strong Landing Page, ready for testing to further capitalize on it.

If you’d like to know more on the subject of Landing Pages, check out the excellent Blog Unbounce

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!