What Your Website REALLY Says About You And Why It Matters



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Everything you say and do says something about you. This has never been more true than in a text based environment like the Internet. You only have one chance to put across what you want to say. Use it wisely.

Getting a website right does take work and commitment. If you want it to succeed you must spend time to get it right and present the right impression to your potential customers.

During any conversation you can pick up extra clues from tone of voice, the choice of words used, the way it is said, pauses, etc. They provide emotion and meaning over and above the actual words being spoken. The same is true of text and other website content. There are extra clues of emotion and meaning and what you choose to write and how you say it can say a lot about you, your organisation and your priorities. These priorities are often clearly visible to every potential customer that visits your site and can therefore reveal a great deal about you.

It can reveal:

  • your business priorities,

  • how your organisation is structured and run,

  • whether you focus on your customers,

  • how you deal with things,

  • if you are easy to deal with,

  • your attitudes,

  • whether you pay attention to detail

  • if you are trustworthy

  • and more...

So, what is your website really saying about you? Are you sending out a positive and useful 'message' to your potential customers or practically posting a great big sign that says something far less desirable?

How do you know? There are some key things to look for on your website or any other website. Bear in mind also that there could be a combination of one or more of these together:

  • Weak text/sales copy - text that lacks direction and order. If you decide to buy our products, fine. If you dont buy our products, fine. Big sign would read: "We're not really serious about this new web thing"

  • Text heavily focused on you/your products - The message is clear. You are only interested in yourself and therefore your site is too. Big sign would read: "We are great. Customer? Who?"

  • No/wrong website focus - website either not focused on the customers needs or focused on the wrong things. The potential customer doesnt receive a positive and clear message about who you are, how you do business, etc. Big sign would read: "We either dont know or dont care about what our customers want". See also 'Not easy to use'

  • Poor layout - poorly organised webpage/website. No clear sense of order. Lack of clear prioritising and decision making, probably a reflection of the organisation. "We cant identify and meet objectives" See also 'Not easy to use'

  • Not easy to use - difficult to use website and website functions. Often these technical functions have the most sophisticated software known to man to do a particular function like buying a train ticket. Unfortunately they didnt consider how real people actually want to use the website or website functions. Big sign would read: "Oops! We were so busy enjoying doing the great software bit we love, we forgot the user"

  • Too much text - we absolutely love to tell you how great we are/our product is. We'll try and bore you into buying our products with loads of text. Big sign would read: "Just buy our product you fool, we know best"

  • "Brochureware" - existing brochure has been moved online. Token website. Does little for anyone. Looks great doesnt it?... (Not really a question, more a statement). We thought we should get a website because everyone else has one. Big sign would read: "LOOK we've got a website too!"

  • Too much animation/other - extra stuff that doesnt serve any real purpose apart from distraction. We absolutely love flashing things/gadgets/buttons/scrolls/colours/fonts... the more the better. More an experiment than a business. Big sign would read: "Our web designer is great isnt he/she? or i should have been a programmer"

  • Difficult to contact anyone - the online equivalent to an electric fence. Typically employed by big corporations. Theyve gone to great lengths to make sure its very, very difficult to actually email anyone within the organisation. Big sign would read: "We are far too big and rich to speak to 'the little people' who actually buy and use our products. Go away!"

Did you recognise any of these from your virtual travels on the Internet? They are all present to some degree in businesses of all sizes and industries. Does your site have any of them? If so, the message you are sending out to your potential customers is unlikely to help you succeed online. More likely it will have a harmful affect and direct influence on your image and reputation, customer visits and repeat visits, sales and repeat sales, company results, customer goodwill and contact, etc.

Make your site the best it can be. Work at it. Ask for constructive feedback. Make a commitment to getting your website to say the right things about you. It will still be paying you back long after youve done it.

Good luck!



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Increase your pageviews! Or, creating an on-the-fly custom navigation system for new users

Lets face it, when a visitor does arrive it only follows that we should do our best to help them see the value in our website, no?

Welcome new visitor, here is our feed, blah blah... Can't we do better then that?

I see a lot of variations on the Welcome new visitor, here is our feed type of thing when I arrive at blogs and such these days. Sometimes this gets customized if the site determines that I am a "Googler" (visiting from a search engine) and then offers me some piece of text to try and make me become a passionate user of their site.

This strategy never makes me a passionate user.

What does work is when I read the page in question and then navigate around the site and find more great content.

So the trick should be to make great-content discovery the goal.

Welcome Googler, let us help you out

Here we present one solution that works for helping people discover your site. As a side effect it will increase your pageviews in a proper, natural way. (We have a whole pile of other solutions for this, however that manuscript post isn't quite ready yet.)

  1. Check referer string
  2. If search engine, grab query text
  3. Do a full text search on your content to find other articles on your site that are related to their search query
  4. Pass the resulting list to the reader in a user friendly way
  5. Maybe keep that list persistent for the session, unless they close it

What we have done is created a custom, on-the-fly navigation system based on their search query! This little widget should work to keep them poking around your site.

Placement etc.

We've been using this on several sites now (along with some other ideas alluded to above) and it works. Pageviews per user go up. Bounce rate falls (more on that in the future too).

We have had to play with the placement of this box: top of the page? Floated to the right/left of the main page content? Following them down the page (with js)?

As they say, your mileage may vary, but chances are you will get more mileage out of more readers, and that is a good sticky thing.



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