We all like praise from our parents, but should you be looking at them to critique your website?

Better still, ask a friend.

Better still, ask a client or customer.

Better still, ask a potential client or customer who didn’t buy what you sell.

Best of all, look in your Analytics account. You’ll find plenty of answers, and unfortunately plenty more questions.

Tip: Whether your website is wonderful or not isn’t the point. How much you’re going to improve it is far more important.

Second tip: Improving your website probably has little or nothing to do with how it looks. Nice logos and striking designs don’t make good websites.

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If you’ve ever heard me speak about website design, there’s a good chance you’ll have heard me mention Amazon. Among other things, their website is a great example of simplicity. At least superficially.

I’ve always been impressed that despite an astonishingly large number of items for sale, their main navigation contains only 12 items:

As someone who works extensively with website optimisation and design, I’m always intrigued by what they put into their nav; the wording, the grouping and the order.

Yet take a look at the Amazon US nav:

What happened to the simplicity?

Why did 12 items become 17? Why did 29 words become 43? Why has the height almost doubled?

The answer to all the above questions will be the same: data.

The wording, placement and grouping will all be driven by what works, and as they’re continuously monitored, will change with time.

Measuring what works in your website nav is easy. Working out why each item works or doesn’t, however.  is more complicated.

Is the fifth item on your nav not clicked because of position, wording or popularity?

The only way to find out is to experiment and track.

Forget multivariate testing or even split testing. Start simple.

Try creating a new website nav with minor alterations: stick to changing wording and order only. It’ll only take you a few minutes.

Give it at least a week to generate some good data and compare the new with the old layout. Which links are getting more clicks, which are getting less.

Warning: this sort of experiment is highly addictive, but can be extremely beneficial to your website’s performance and sales.

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I’ve been promoting software online for more than eleven years, so am entitled to reminisce a little.

I remember with fondness the good old days of Search Engine Optimisation. When I could optimise a client’s web page and see the results within a few days. When I would optimise different pages for different engines. When “invisible text” was as devious as it got. When using software to submit to thousands of websites was good for link popularity.

Today that’s changed. Today SEO has become more difficult and potentially more dangerous than in the good old days.

I recently came across a website that was ranking quite poorly in Google. The company admitted to having “tinkered with SEO” around the middle of last year.

Opening up a twelve month date range in their Analytics account confirmed that this was indeed the case:

The DIY SEO Catch-22 is simple.

To learn SEO you need to practice and develop your skills, yet doing so is dangerous.

Medical students don’t stitch wounds on their first day at University. They practice with bananas. The catch, however, is that bananas don’t cry out in pain, bleed or get infected. At some point the nervous medical student has to practice their skills on a live patient.

If SEO is to be handled by someone within your company, the first thing they learn shouldn’t be how to optimise a page or even how to choose keywords.

The first thing they learn should be the fundamentals. Assessment, hygiene and caution.

Too many businesses are complacent about the traffic they receive from Google, and are happy to experiment with little regard for the potential consequences.

If you’re happy to watch your Google traffic drop from 5,000 to 400, then by all means allow the intern with a copy of SEO for Dummies to optimise your website.

If you don’t want to experience the effect a Google drought can have on your business, make sure your SEO student learns the potential consequences of their actions before adjusting a single word.

Extensive damage can be caused in minutes. Recovery can take years.

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You only get one chance to make a first impression. Get it wrong and you’ll never be able to completely shake it off.

At best you’ll be the person who walked on stage with toilet paper stuck to his shoe who actually gave a good presentation. But year’s later you’ll still be remembered as the toilet paper guy.

If my first contact with you is an email with a glaringly obvious typo in the subject, you’ve just lost credibility.

We all send emails with typos, and I’ll probably whince sympathetically when I notice it. But I will notice it, and it will be remembered,

If the first thing I notice on the main page of your website is a missing image that points to your local hard drive or a spelling mistake in the headline, the after-taste will last forever.

We all make typos, but the first email needs to be perfect. The first impression created by your website needs to be positive. The first thing we need to see as you walk onto the stage is confidence.

We can’t control our nerves, but using a spell-checker and a second, third and forth set of eyes is quick and easy.

There’s no excuse for slopiness.

PS: Yes there are mistakes in this post. The question is how many are intentional?

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Finding the right company to design or radically overhaul a website is incredibly difficult. It shouldn’t be, but it somehow is.

In theory you just need to find someone who can produce what you want for a reasonable price. But all too often you’ll find companies who don’t reply to emails, don’t read the brief you send them, can’t follow simple instructions and can’t/won’t/don’t provide exactly what you’ve asked for.

To add salt to the wound, most (if not all) web design companies try to create web sites that just look good.

Looking good isn’t enough.

A well designed website needs three things.

It needs to look good, to contain good content, and to be correctly optimised –  both for the search engines and visitors.

All three factors are equally important.

Let’s start at the beginning. If your website doesn’t rank well in the search engines, you’re never going to pull-in anyone who’s looking for what you sell.

If your website confuses your visitors so that they have no idea what to do next, it doesn’t matter how much targeted traffic you get from Google each day, most of it will amount to nothing.

If the appearance of your website is so horrible that people want to leave the moment they arrive, then it doesn’t matter how well optimised the content may be, your visitors will follow their instincts.

And if the content of your website doesn’t impress your visitors, then everything else is pointless.

Take a quick look at your website. Try to look at it neutrally, or better still get someone who isn’t familiar with your site or business to do it for you.

Three questions to ask: Does it look good? Is it optimised? Is the content good?

If you know a web designer who ticks all the above boxes, hang on to them for dear life. They’re one in a billion.

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Neil Davidson recently wrote an interesting post on Interruption Marketing: Rumors of its Death have been Greatly Exaggerated:

“It’s hard to interrupt us, but it can be done. Not by being loud, but by being different. Be witty, tell a story, and tell it to us when we want to be interrupted, and you can leap out from the clutter.”

Google shows pinpoint-targeted ads that are relevant at the precise moment of search.

TV and radio ads interrupt what we’re watching and listening to.

But what about the While You’re Here adverts?

Neil mentioned an ad on a gas pump, but is that an interruption?

When I’m filling my car with fuel, I’m interested in anything to occupy my mind for a moment. After all, there’s only so much satisfaction I can gain from watching the cost on the pump-display spiral ever-higher.

While You’re Here advertising is a means of offering a welcome distraction from boredom. Ads on trains, subways, in the back of taxis, in elevators, urinals… anywhere where your customers may find themselves with little or no opportunities to pass the time.

A few years ago I was standing at a urinal in a motorway service station in the UK, and to my surprise there was an ad (inches from my face) for SEO services. I would have taken a photo with my phone, but misunderstandings can easily arise.

The only people seeing those ads would be men with about 30 seconds to spare. Is that really taking advantage of the medium?

While You’re Here advertising has great opportunities, but the rules need to change a little.

What if hotels allowed elevator advertising specifically during a conference that they were hosting?

What if there was a website with details of their scheduled events where anyone could purchase the advertising?

What if gas pump advertising offered a credit card that would save 5 pence off every litre of fuel?

What if hotel elevators advertised a local taxi firm with discounted rates for guests in the hotel?

While You’re Here advertising offers a welcome, targeted and useful diversion from boredom. If used correctly.

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Despite the obvious popularity of facebook, their future rests on two factors, both of which lie partly out of their control.

The first is their ability to make money from a great idea. The web may have changed the delivery method and reach of interesting ideas, but the fundamental law of business still applies. Profit is required.

The second is their position as King. Facebook isn’t new, but has been flavour of the month for years now. Yet history teaches us that crowds are fickle and tastes change. I still remember when AltaVista was yesteryear’s Google, when MySpace was the new way and when portable music meant carrying a huge plastic ghetto blaster or boombox.

My main reservation with facebook advertising isn’t so much that it interrupts, but more that it’s invisible.

We’re so used to seeing advertising through our browser that it no longer registers. Quantity has rendered it useless.

Google AdWords works because people go to Google looking for a solution to their problem, and the ads show them what they’re looking for.

When people log in to their facebook accounts, however, they’re not looking for a solution to a problem. They want to see what their friends are up to or to share pictures and snippets of their lives.

I am, however, a data and control addict, and the targeting capabilities of facebook  are incredibly appealing, so I’ve setup a small experiment to see how well Facebook advertising can work.

I’m targeting software developers in the UK and US (try doing that in AdWords) and have committed enough of a budget to get a feel for how it works.

The campaign has been running for 10 hours, and so far has generated over 7,000 impressions and no clicks whatsoever.

It’s early days yet, and I’m going to give it at least a week before even attempting to draw any conclusions. But so far… well let’s wait and see.

Update: 11,000 impressions and one click – a 0.009% CTR.  But this isn’t AdWords and might actually work.
Later: 40,000 impressions and 4 clicks. I’m most interested in what these people  are going to do though…

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Seth Godin’s new book, Poke the Box, is annoying me.

The main criticism I hear of his ideas is that although they’re  brilliant, they’re not practical. Interesting but not actionable.

This is true. I’ve had the pleasure of seeing Seth speak twice, speaking with him and grinning like an idiot with him once, and have read most of his books. And not one of them has included a step-by-step guide, illustrated instructions or even a check list. Not one.

Seth Godin distributes ideas. He doesn’t give me the finished product, but gives me seeds. It’s down to me to find the time to nurture them, to give them time, and help them grow into something interesting.

So far Poke the Box has interrupted two nights of my sleep. With a teething nine-month old, that’s all I needed right now. Thank-you Seth.

Poke the Box is ruining my nights. It’s making me challenge some of the core principles of my business. You don’t want to read it.

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Mistakes on your website result in lost sales and lost customers.

Your website is making at least four out of five of these mistakes right now.

(1) Not understanding the problem.

Everyone who comes to your website has a problem that needs fixing.

Showing them that you understand their problem convinces them to stay longer.

Showing them that you can solve their problem turns them into a customer.

(2) Too much information.

When you walk into a large store there will often be some sort of map or chart showing where to go for different product types or ranges.

You won’t see a list of every single product on sale.

(3) Attention dilution.

A well designed website page steers the visitor towards the pages you want them to see.

Links are choices. The more you provide, the more you overwhelm.

(4) Hurdles that hurt.

There are so many obstacles that you can place between your customer and receiving their money.

Mandatory registration for a trial, internationally-unfriendly forms, enforced plugins, asking for too much data, phone-only sales process, voucher codes that don’t work and more.

All purchases require a minimal amount of time investment.

Go beyond minimal and it becomes a nuisance. Beyond a nuisance becomes painful.

How much pain will your customers tolerate before walking away?

(5) Thinking they care.

Your visitors don’t care about your company goals, your vision, the thought-process behind your website, your hamsters, your company’s environmental concerns, or your life story.

Or rather they don’t care about any of these things when they arrive at your website.

They care about their problem. See point 1.

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I recently bought a new version of an application that securely remembers my passwords and logins.

The problem is that it keeps crashing my browser.

I brought it to the company’s attention on January 27th. They claim to have fixed the issue five times, but this hasn’t been the case.

Their latest piece of advice came on February 21st – almost four weeks later:

I can see six main problems with this reply.

1) As a paying customer, I would expect their support to bother using capital letters in their reply.

2) They push the product as Chrome compatible, so I don’t like the ‘solution’ of using a different browser.

3) Why are they using technical terminology (reenterable calls) that I have no understanding of? Is this supposed to impress me or fob me off?

4) They ignore the fact that it is only their software that crashes my browser. Making me repeat myself is beyond frustrating.

5) The language is dreadful. This is supposed to reassure me?

6) I don’t want to read about it on the internet.

If my memory serves me correctly, I have been using their software for at least 8-9 years. That’s about to change.

Support is an opportunity to impress and retain customers. Bad support turns happy users into angry bloggers.

When software developers look at support requests as opportunities to impress, users respond accordingly.

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