Simple Design and a Simple Message
Posted On: 2009-03-23
Well a few moments ago I was about to say that this looked like being a beautiful Sunday morning. The sun was shining ... I couldn't see a single cloud from my home-office window ... and there was a gentle breeze blowing through the palm trees. It really did look as though it was going to be a very hard day to get some work done.
But now, just a few minutes later some clouds have blown and covered the sun, that gentle breeze has picked up and now we look like we could get some rain. Oh well I guess I really didn't want to head down to the beach after all.
In those few minutes between the sun shining and the rain threatening I was reading a mainstream web designers board. I do it quite regularly because you can really pick up some good tips on mainstream boards from some very smart designers/webmasters. At the same time you can also see that some of those mainstream designers/webmasters simply do not have a clue.
These are guys who supposedly design websites for a living ... that's their bread and butter ... and yet all they talk about is being out on the cutting edge of design. They're the ones that jump in and answer questions from newbies about what browser versions they should be designing for.
Invariably their answers tell newbies to forget about old browsers ... they shouldn't worry about that quirky IE6 ... design for the latest version and let the surfer update their browsers if the surfers want to see the websites they design ... and more bad advice after more bad advice.
Yes, despite what you might think, that sort of advice is deadly for a newbie. If you're designing websites to sell a product ... if you want to make money from affiliate marketing through websites that you build then you really have to design your websites using code that will render in all the major browsers and that really does include IE6.
Sure, you may be using the very latest version of Chrome, Firefox or even Opera but the people you're trying to sell to ... especially in the adult market place ... are more than likely to be using Internet Explorer and may be back there in the dark ages with IE6. They may not have IE6 at home but a very large number of corporations still have IE6 locked in as their desktop browser. So if you want to sell to people who are surfing from the office then it's up to you to deliver your sales pitch in a form that they can access easily.
At the same time you need to keep your message simple. In mainstream people are prepared to read more but here in adult the tendency is still to skip over everything that comes between them and the link to the free images. So use short sentences, simple language, power words that will attract attention and don't be afraid to use big font sizes and emphasis text that you really do want people to read.
Underline the text, use italics ... do whatever you have to do to get that text to stand out and distract the surfers from all that free porn that they so badly want to see. Yep, you have to realize that if you want to make money here in adult then you need to design sites that are visible to the greatest number of surfers and sites that will sell and you also have to face an important reality.
If you want to design cutting edge sites that are only viewable in the latest browsers and that are absolute works of art with beautifully formed text patterns, color gradients and every other fancy thing you can think of then your goals are incompatible with reaching the widest possible audience and making sales.
Yes that is the reality of making money here in adult. Your sites need to be simple, they need to render correctly in the largest number of browsers and you have to make your sales pitch jump off the page at surfers as they're skimming to find the 'enter' link and the gallery links.
If you simply can't bring yourself to design sites like that then perhaps you're wasting your time trying to make a buck here in adult. You're probably also wasting your time trying to make any money from affiliate sales over in mainstream too and if you're designing beautiful sites for clients who want to generate leads and make sales then you're wasting their money as well.
And I really can't stress that too strongly. You need simple design and a simple message if you want to make money and that really is the bottom line for every designer/webmaster.