Common mistake, blame it on the website design

Things does go wrong or in better words, things may not perform according to your expectation. I have worked on 100s of websites and with dozens of web marketing inhouse and client teams. In most of the cases, the non-performance of the website boils down to redesigning of website. Every hard hitting meetings ends up in a new design and then few months of sleep, expecting some good results. Whenever the top management wants to get involved with web marketing, he will start with redesigning the website. A new manager comes in, he goes for a new design.

Why people blame website design?

Only reason is that they feel (I repeat, they feel) there is something wrong with the website design. Another reason is, they have seen the design for some time, got bored and now want a change. Recently, one of our client launched his website, it was an information rich website with some courses. Everybody liked the design and we started marketing for it. Within a couple of weeks, we noticed another design with rich red color flashes. It looked better and we kept working on other parts of web marketing. Another couple of weeks, the whole design was changed and put a new one with gray shades. The reason, “Sales are not happening even when we have some traffic”.

Dismantling website designing

Before going into website designing blame game, let us get some facts right. Website design is just not all about look and feel. It has two parts:

1. Engineering
2. Arts

You need to get your Engineering right before getting the artist work right. We used to spend 3 to 4 days in getting the right engineering done. Engineers generally don’t get Art right, so after engineering we used to make way for our artistic designers. Let not Engineer do the Art work and vice-versa but do debate and discuss. Remember the final work for Engineering issues must go to Engineer and Art issues to graphic designers.

Let’s take an example on how we design website:

(this was the website we had to redesign, the reason, sales not happening as expected. I won’t have redesign the website but I wanted to put a new architecture on the site.)
(Image missing)
Now we started Engineering:
First step was to meet the expectations. These are the probable questions that the people might ask.

1. Quality
   • Will they deliver quality?
   • Is it the best that I can get on web? (One of the biggest challenges in Malls and web)
   • How do I know that the quality is good? (At times your visitors/potential customers even doesn’t know how to judge)
2. Trust
   • Is this company a trust worthy company? (Remember website do represent a company and people are looking for some company identity. But for some of the services it is not important like a hosting service or a search service.)
   • How do I believe what they say on the website?
3. Return on money
   • If I am spending $X and if I am not happy then I will lose $X. Am I ready to risk $X with this company?
   • Ok , I am not very sure about quality and trust but they looks ok, can I risk $X or should I search more?
   • I need to talk to a person before making my decision/is there a facility to talk to the team?

Differentiation to push sales:
(Sorry! Can’t reveal this)

Now we started asking:

1. What are our strengths? weakness? Opportunity? Threats? (SWOT analysis, I do really AMAZING SWOT, people get surprised at the out, they never thought it is applied for websites)
2. How to convince about quality?
   • Link to the demo page/gallery/sample/case studies.
   • Help them learn how to judge the product as many of the clients even don’t know how to judge a product. Even when we go out to buy a fridge, salesmen do help us with decision parameters. You feel more comfortable with someone who is educating you in the right manner.
   • Show them that we have knowledge (EDU, FAQ). This helps the first time customers, even when they don’t buy they do refer our websites to many others as they get help in understanding a lot of things. Also putting knowledge on the website can increase credibility.
   • Product/news/question of the week to reflect that the website is fresh and things are happening. You certainly don’t want to enter a old shop for shopping. Give freshness to the site. It does send positive signals.
3. Trust (One of the most difficult things to achieve)
   • Showing that it is a part of a bigger network with a link to the partner companies.
   • Edu about latest trends. (We call it purple cow, not many are doing it. People will certainly notice it and get hooked to it)
   • Client testimonials as well as live products linking to their website. (Nothing works better than this, live demo of your work, we have focused on getting video testimonials and all possible testimonials from credible people)
   • Return on money in terms of money back also helps them in building trust. (Somewhat)
   • (Am I ready to risk $X with this company?) Money back policy
   • Providing phone numbers, skype IDs etc can work in favor of the company. It is sometimes easy to convert sales on phone.

After all this analysis web marketing team came up with a sample design. The sample design is them passed on to the other web marketing heads for final review. The web marketing department approves it on the basis of:

1. Right Logical layout (usability)
2. Sales/conversion
3. Search engine friendly
4. And other points

Sample website Engineered by web marketing team.

(Image missing)

Artists are Artists for website designs

Once the engineering is done, the artists (designers) enter and make it look really good.
(Image missing)

Now, the magic, SHUT UP

Now if you are expecting that the new design will create magical sales figures, forget it. Designs are never complete. In the above phase only the skeleton is done on based of your log analysis, intuition, market knowledge. Different layer for good inputs:

1. Insights/Your thinking/Your intuition based on your market knowledge. (Starting point)
2. Competitors websites (Verify your insights and check for new points)
3. Go for a run time check for your design. http://www.sensible.com/Downloads/script.doc, check for the usability test chapters at http://www.sensible.com/secondedition/index.html (Get their feedbacks)
4. Experimentation and Testing: Use Google analytics, Google optimizer and various other tools to make it a little easy and faster.
5. Keep checking the logs and user click stream to understand whats going as per your expectation and whats not.

Faggot vs single sticks – Good story for website designs

Do you remember the story? (Visit http://www.idealwebtools.com/blog/simplify-problems/). Redesigning the whole website is like breaking the Faggot but redesigning some section or redoing some text is like breaking a single stick. If you can look at the log file and keep modifying sections by sections then you might end up with a better design. This do change slowly slowly, don’t believe me, just get inspired by Amazon

Tags: amazon, design, engineering, google, logo, SEO, usability, web, website design