One of the constant challenges we have when talking to business owners, is their inability to grasp the importance of not only getting people to their website, but in also keeping people in their website and providing their future customers a seamless opportunity to get in contact with them by having a well thought out and designed website.
Read what Brad Martens has to say about this subject….
‘Browsing through some websites can feel like an obstacle course. This week, I’ve endured all kinds of annoyances, which made me ‘re-direct’ my personal spending. I would have put money in their pocket.
I’ve been exercising and my wife says I need new clothes. Knowing what I want, I visit a few clothing websites to eliminate the pain of being dragged through the shopping centre. I’m in a hurry. The first website wants me to watch an introduction before reaching the homepage. I close it. The second website looks funky but, with poorly designed flash animations, is slow and cumbersome to browse. My patience is worn out.
The third shop sports a quick and easy to browse website. It takes me 15 minutes to whip through the catalogue and select five items I want. I can even order them online if I want but I want to try on the sizes first. The next day, I walk into that shop and spend five minutes buying the items I picked online the previous night.
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I came across this article today about
7 Amazing Lessons from 7 Distinguished Billionaires and thought I’d share.
We all know most of these lessons but we all need to get better at them and remind ourselves of how important they are to remember.
A quick overview of the 7 lessons:
- Look for Opportunities
- Believe in Yourself
- Create an Atmosphere of Success
- Empower Others
- Focus
- Learn From Your Mistakes
- Only Go Forward
You can read the full article on the Dumb Little Man website.
Here is an article written by Ken Davenport – who is a Musical Producer based in New York…who raises some interesting points about a lot of things including web design…
‘For years after its initial release (remember when you had to be invited?), Gmail was in “beta”, or the software equivalent of “previews”. It was years before Google stripped the beta moniker from its logo on Gmail, Calendar and a lot of its other products.
Could a consumer have told the difference over the last 5 years? Not likely. Beta was just Google’s way of protecting itself, yes, but also its way of saying, “We are committed to changes on a daily basis until we make our product better, and then we’ll figure out even more stuff to change until we can better it still.”
Not a bad way to think about any product, don’t you think?
I heard a Web Marketing Guru speak about how to design a website, and he said that websites are never final; great websites are in a state of perpetual beta.
He was right, of course. By studying analytics, conversion rates, etc. we should be making constant changes to our designs to make even the smallest of improvements (increasing an surfer’s time on the site, whether they sign up for email lists, etc.). A small improvement a day adds up to a monstrous improvement in a year. Your website will be a conversion machine!
But why not apply perpetual beta to other things as well?
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“Refuse good advice and watch your plans fail; take good counsel and watch them succeed.” - Proverbs 15:22
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. There is no focus! I often say – if you chase two rabbits, they will both escape.
When I assist businesses (and not-for-profit organizations) these days, I take them through a 4 to 5 hour planning process that asks these questions. From their answers we develop an actionable plan.
Here is the process you can apply:-
Where do you want to be in three years?
Do you want to grow by 10%, 30%, double your size, expand nationally or Internationally, even sell?
I will not accept “I want to stay where I am” – why?
1. They will soon move backwards and go out of business due to inevitable cost increases and loss of customers.
2. They will not action the plan anyway.
3. There will be no momentum, leading to complacency and eventually the organisation will die.
What are the barriers to achieving where you want to be in three years?
When you can list the barriers, then you will be able to start writing actions to address these. Later in this article we will deal with actioning these.
Continue Reading…
One of the constant challenges we have when talking to business owners, is their inability to grasp the importance of not only getting people to their website, but in also keeping people in their website and providing their future customers a seamless opportunity to get in contact with them by having a well thought out and designed website.