brand marketing blog

Arghhhh! Why is it that most people think that effective website design is about 'eye-candy'. How sadly wrong they are. The era of superficial 'visual only' website design died with Web1.0 thankfully. Today (Web2.0) sites have a much more functional and interactive role to play in the overall marketing mix.

Here are some of my pet irritations with clients that don't understand how effective websites work...

MINIMALIST HOMEPAGE LAYOUT
Actually your homepage layout needs to have adequate content to keep visitors active on the page but not so much as to confuse them (navigation logic is the key to managing this). Sites that are too minimalist are quickly glanced over with no 'stickiness'. You should be tracking 'time on page' through Google Analytics to build 'stickiness'.

LOW WORD COUNT ON CONTENT PAGES
It's a common misconception that less text is better. Google loves content, not just for the sake of words, but it uses word count (how much copy is on the page) to determine relevance of content and keyword density (both important factors in achieving a good search result). I'm not suggesting you have thousands of words on every page, but if you are targeting a page for SEO and search engine performance then you need to have adequate copy. I like to work on around 250 words as a starting point, but this is not a fixed rule.

You definitely need to think about the visitor experience and how much information they would expect. It's not that hard to make long copy easy to read with the use of bullet points, headlines and other formatting styles. Pages with 100 words are just so hard to optimise and get a decent Google ranking.

"I DON'T LIKE THE COLOUR/LAYOUT/NAVIGATION"
You are not necessarily the target market for your website. If your site has been designed by a professional who understands page layout and site usability, uses eye-tracking analysis and applies landing page optimisation then you should allow them to make the call on what is right or wrong for your site. Too many great (effective) sites are wrecked by personal preference that is not based on target market research or site testing. Actually there are a lot of unattractive sites that are extremely effective.

If you want your website to perform well in Google search results, attract visitors, complete the conversion pathway objectives and deliver results, then you should trust your web designer. If you don't trust them rather find one you do.