What do you sell? Does your website scream the message?
Today I was told about a 70-year-old CEO who didn't like the new design of his home page. The feature areas didn't have enough "meat" for him. He much prefered a 4th level page of the site comprised of 8 paragraphs of technical content speaking about his product. Text...
How presumptious to think that early visitors care what you have to say until you prove yourself. If you want to sell on the Internet, you need to push your vanity aside and provide for the audience.
Qualify before you speak!
There are many metaphors that say the same thing -- Let them look around before you tackle visitors with information. Don't presume to know what they want until you qualify.
Visitors to a website are like shoppers at WalMart coming in from the rain. They may be buyers or they may be seeking shelter in your magazine aisle. Either way, in their mind, it's easier to head right back out the door than deal with an over-zealous sales pitch 10 seconds in.
Your website is the same. Realize what you are doing if you fill your home page with too much content. You are pitching them a white paper while they are shaking off the rain.
Stores have Aisles
If clients come in for soup you've insulted them by showing hair nets, motor oil, fruit juice, mascara, and push pins all at the same time.
WHERE'S THE SOUP!!!
Too late, they left!
Fix your home page before your next customer comes in. Organize your content and save the sales pitch until they've qualified.
1 comment:
Great post, ken. One thing I'm doing with the design of my site to combat this while still providing enough content for the search engines is to present strong CTAs and easy to read bullet points / headings above the fold, and using a journalistic style of informational writing below. After scanning the homepage, users have a clear path of where to go, so it doesn't matter that they're skipping over all the juicy content meant to feed the spiders.
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