The “picture is worth a thousand words” often seems to be taken a little too literally.

Take the main page of the Nuance UK website:

The image is striking, but conveys nothing. And the text overlay does little by the way of clarification.

A click on the Learn More About Nuance button takes me to the following page:

Another person with their head thrown back, but I’m still no clearer, so I click on the Learn More button again:

The images on these pages serve no purpose, aside from adding some colour.

Images employed on your website need to either convey relevant information or entice your visitors to act.

By way of example, Amazon’s own graphics and visuals are almost non-existent. The visitor is instead bombarded by images of the products that they sell, and nothing more.

Research demonstrates that our eyes are initially drawn to the images on a web page. So why not go for something more productive than eye candy?

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Three ways to sell more software (or anything else). They’re all different flavours of the same idea, but with different degrees of complexity.

B-A test: the basic-but-better-than-nothing option.

Take an important page that gets a healthy volume of traffic.

Look at the last 7, 14, 21 or 28 days of data (see the points below) and note the basic page performance indicators. Eg: bounce rates, exit rates, time spent etc.

Create a new version of the page – but make it noticeably different.

Changing “Download our trial!” to “Download our trial!!” won’t blow your visitors or your results away.

Let the new page work for 7, 14, 21 or 28 days and compare before with after. Hence the B-A name.

One version of the page will almost certainly out-perform the other.

Use it and test it further.

Split test: the intermediate-and-feeling-good option.

Take an important page that gets a healthy volume of traffic.

Either create a script that divides traffic to one or more variations, or use a service (see below) that makes life easier.

Compare the various versions.

One version of the page will almost certainly out-perform the other.

Use it and test it further.

Multivariate test: the expert-and-don’t-I-know-it option.

The same as above, but instead of pages you create variations of individual content. Eg: different headlines, texts, buttons, offers etc.

These are displayed in conjunction with each other.

It’s more complicated to understand and easier to misinterpret, but in the right hands can produce better results.

Points that apply to all of the above.

- Only work in full units of 7 days. Every website demonstrates a clear seven day trend, so don’t contaminate the data by looking at mixed samples.

- Only compare like-with-like data as far as possible. A write-up on Hacker News will boost your traffic but pollute your data.

- You might be able to write your own system for the tests, but why reinvent the wheel? Services like Visual Website Optimizer, Optimizely or even Google Website Optimizer are easy to setup, use and understand.

- Anything is better than nothing. We’ve run hundreds of split and multivariate tests for our clients, and if I remember correctly I’ve only ever seen two experiments that didn’t result in an improvement.

Do it today – you can be up and running in less than 20 minutes.

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We already know what makes a person attractive: symmetry and (apparently) a resemblance to our parents. The latter is disturbing beyond words.

But what makes a website attractive?

Probably not symmetry, and certainly nothing to do with our parents.

Colour? Use of space? Eye-catching graphics? Clarity? A picture of a grinning model wearing a headset?

Probably a combination of most of the above.

The real question, however, is whether it matters.

Bafflingly, a large number of companies prioritise the appearance of their website over how well it functions.

Question: When did wowing your visitors become more important than engaging with them?

From a marketing perspective, the answer to what makes a website attractive is how well it performs.

Listen to your data.

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Too many businesses believe that the people who come to their website are unpredictable. That they’re out of control, entirely irrational and impossible to control.

This is nonsense.

The people who come to your website can only read the content that you present to them.

They can only click the links and buttons that you put in front of them.

If you don’t want so many of your visitors to go from the main page to the contact page, then remove it from the top navigation.

If you want more people to click on your main products page, then get rid of some of the other links and distractions. And make the link text more compelling. You can do better than Products can’t you?

You’re in control of what your visitors do when they arrive. Control your traffic.

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Yes, this was the subject of an email I received last week. Yes, the person who wrote it gave me permission to quote him. No, I’m not going to name him.

Before going further, let’s remember the difference between a bounce rate and an exit rate.

An exit rate is the percentage of visits to a page that go no further in your website. For example you’d expect the exit rate of your form’s confirmation page to be high.

A bounce rate is the percentage of single-page visits. For example the number of visits arriving at your home page who go no further in interacting with your website.

Let’s be realistic here. Your main pages are probably going to have a reasonably high bounce rate. People come to your website for all sorts of reasons, and one of the quirks of the search engines is that a number of them will probably looking for something that you don’t provide.

In the case of the person who sent me the panic-struck email, there was nothing wrong with his website.

A quick play with his Google Analytics filters reassured him that a significant percentage of the visits to his main page were looking for something that had no connection with what he was selling.

When we excluded the junk-traffic, we saw that his bounce-rates were actually in the region of 35% – considerably lower than many other websites that we’ve seen.

Of course it didn’t take long for him to realise that there was room for improvement even here. He’s just engaged our conversion optimisation service to see how we can reduce his bounce rates further, and I’m confident that he’ll be happy with the results.

The bottom line is that balance is a good idea. There’s no need to panic when you see your bounce rates, but there’s no need to accept them either.

Conversion rate optimisation really works.

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Your website’s second mistake is having too many links.

One of the worst offenders I have ever come across is The Seattle Times.

At the time of writing this there are 579 links on their main page. 579 links.

I can click on 149 of them without having to scroll down the page. That gives the Seattle Times at best a 1 in 149 chance of knowing what I’m going to click.

I wouldn’t choose to be an advertiser on their website.

When visitors arrive at your website, you’re in full control of what they click.

There are specific pages of your website that you want them to see, right? So why are you linking to so many other pages?

Control your visitors.

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When I was in Beijing a few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting one of the markets that sells a wide range of goods at “too good to be true” prices.

Here’s the script of what generally happens.

I walk past a stall selling questionably-authentic designer handbags.

Seller: [LOUD] Hello Sir, want to buy a designer handbag?

Me: No thank-you.

Seller: [LOUDER] We have all the designer makes, great prices.

Me: No thank-you. I don’t want to buy any handbags.

Most sellers at this point give up and forget you exist. You’re not interested, so why waste time?

Persistent seller: [SHOUT] But come and look. Expensive brands, low prices, I give you the best deal. How much you want to pay?

Me: Stop following me. I don’t want a handbag. Do I look like I buy handbags? Look at what I’m wearing. I will never buy a handbag.

Persistent seller: [SHOUT LOUD] Okay how much you want? Tell me price and I give you best deal in China. [PUSHES CALCULATOR IN MY HAND]

Me: Go away. I don’t want any handbag at all.

[FAST FORWARD 5 MINUTES]

Me: …. I don’t want ANY bloody handbag…. why are you still following me? Please go away.

When the visitor to your website walks away without purchasing, downloading the trial or contacting you, they have most likely decided that they don’t want what you sell.

When you sell a solution to a problem, that decision is usually final.

Continuing to push the product they are no longer interested in is pointless.

It may work for choosing a vacation or ordering office supplies, but it won’t work with a solution to a problem.

So what does this have to do with Google?

Google explain their remarketing functionality as follows:

“Remarketing allows you to show ads to users who’ve previously visited your website as they browse the Web… Remarketing allows you to communicate with people who’ve previously visited key pages on your website, giving you a powerful new way to match the right people with the right message.”

The idea is that I go looking for software to monitor my websites. I come across your website, look at what you offer, then continue searching elsewhere. Remarketing allows you to reach those people again.

In theory it’s an interesting idea, but I don’t believe that it’s a good fit for software developers.

All software solves problems.

So in the above example my problem is that I don’t know when my website slows down to a crawl or crashes, until someone complains.

I go looking for a software solution, I find your product, then decide that it’s not what I’m looking for. So I move on.

Don’t emulate the crazy woman who followed me trying to sell me something I wasn’t remotely interested in.

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On Sunday night I went to a friend’s 40th birthday party in London, and enjoyed watching my friends describing what they do to some of the people they met.

My friend, Simon, always gets the best reaction when he tells people he’s a neurosurgeon. For some reason people always look slightly surprised and slightly amused.

What intrigues me, however, is that very few of us have any idea what a neurosurgeon actually does. We picture a scalpel, a brain, and perhaps a drill, but for obvious reasons we have very little idea about the specifics of what the work actually involves.

If you sell software, you probably tell people you meet that you’re a software developer or a programmer.

If you tell someone who’s interested in what you sell you talk more about what it does.

But there’s a good chance you go into too much detail, much like the main page of your website.

Today’s challenge is a simple one. Describe what you sell in five words or less.

Here’s mine: SoftwarePromotions helps you sell more.

Over to you.

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Your website’s first mistake is a common one. You’re trying to squeeze in too much information.

You may not like the idea, but there’s a reasonable chance that your website is the online equivalent of that guy who cornered you. You asked him what he did, and half an hour later he was still sharing far, far more information than you were interested in.

Microsoft Word is one of the most overwhelming applications I have ever come across. Yet Microsoft’s main page on Word 2010 lists only three features, and three goats:

If Microsoft can describe the most feature-overloaded application of all time in three benefits, so can you.

If you had to describe what you sell in one short sentence, what would it be?

What do we do? We help software companies sell more. And you?

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Next Tuesday I’ll be making a couple of presentations to the Software East network in Cambridge, UK.

Website Armour: a practical guide to protecting your website from customers will look at some of the many ways that software developers lose sales through their websites.

31 ways to ruthlessly exploit Google AdWords is self-explanatory. Google have been taking your money under false pretence for too long. I’ll show you how you can exploit AdWords with no regard to a fair and balanced relationship.

Admission is free if you book before the 23rd; £15 afterwards.

I hope you can join me there.

An evening with Dave Collins

Update: Just to clarify, this is a live “in the flesh” event in Cambridge (the real one); not a webinar.

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