What Are You Trying to Do?
Posted On: 2013-03-15
Right now I'm desperately trying to stay sane after a week that has left me seriously thinking about putting up a poster behind my desk with the words "In the age of information ignorance is a choice" emblazoned on it in big letters.
But what are you trying to do ... with the websites and galleries you build to promote your sponsors?
Of course the obvious answer to that question is that you're trying to make money but is that what you're really doing with those websites and galleries that you're churning out?
Early this week my partner sat down with a new client to discuss the website that new client had previously allowed three other local website designers to work on over the last two years. Steve explained to the client that there were basically three reasons to build a website ... to sell a product ... to inform ... or to entertain ... and unfortunately this client had ended up with a website that didn't do any of those three things very effectively.
What the client wanted was a website that would sell a product and if you were to rank those three reasons in order of effectiveness in relation to his website selling the product was definitely at the bottom of the list. In fact it was hard to see how the website ... as it was during the discussion ... could ever sell anything to anyone.
Instead of being a website that was designed to sell a product our new client had a website that was more informational because, apart from having text that was designed to inform rather than sell, there was not one single page on the site ... and the site had over 70 pages ... that had any sort of call to action on the page.
There were over 70 pages of very poorly written text ... or pages that had no text other than links to other pages ... with not one single suggestion that anyone viewing the website should actually buy the product that the website owner was hoping to sell!
This was a website that had been touched by three different designers ... designers who tout themselves as being among the leading web designers in Australia ... and all three of them obviously had no idea what they were trying to achieve.
Does that sound rather amazing to you? Well you're not alone. Days after he spoke to the client Steve is still stunned by the fact that a website that was designed to sell didn't have one single call to action on any of its pages and he's still bringing it up in conversations.
So let me ask you again ... do you know what you're trying to do with the websites and galleries you're building? Are you trying to sell a product? Are you trying to entertain? Are you trying to inform people of something?
Think seriously about what you're trying to do and then go and have a look at what you're actually doing. Is what you're trying to achieve actually reflected in the websites and galleries you're producing?
I guess you're not really trying to be too informational ... at least I hope you're not trying to do that because what we sell is a basically a fantasy so there has to be a lot of entertainment value in what we're doing. But are you going too far towards entertaining your surfers and slipping away from the marketing focus?
Let me explain what I mean by taking you to one part of the industry that I once worked in. Take a look at the girls who sell sex on the streets ... they're out there selling a fantasy that involves their body and to attract you they're going wear very short skirts ... show lots of thigh ... plenty of cleavage ... and they're going to smile at you and maybe even talk a little dirty with you ... even though they may think that you're the ugliest guy they have ever seen.
They know that they're selling a fantasy so they'll show you lots of skin and be friendly but until you pay your money that's all they're going to show you. Until you pay for their services they're not going to show you their equivalent of our money shot. You're not even going to get to their first base if they don't see the color of your money.
So now perhaps you need to think again about what you're trying to do. Are you really trying to sell a product or are you doing something else?