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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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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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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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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Most of us are awful at dating. My first experiences usually involved my talking too much in a desperate attempt to hide my terror. In hindsight it may have been better to appear nervous than a yabbering lunatic.

Some people find their usually fluid vocal skills dry up to the point of paralysis, to find themselves eating in silence, only occasionally punctuated by inane small-talk about the weather and how nice their food is.

Many websites commit the same sins; either saying far too much or far too little on their main pages. New visitors account for around 70-80% of most website’s visitors. So their first impression of your company is either ‘silent-enigmatic’ or ‘manic-deranged’.

Here’s what has taken me forty-one years to learn.

‘Silent-enigmatic’ only works on teenagers. A great shame I never knew that when I was one, but in fairness I didn’t have that many opportunities to develop my skills.

‘Manic-deranged’ doesn’t work on anyone. It obviously didn’t put-off my wife, but she’s always been quite good at filtering out the noise.

Treat visitors to your website like you should have treated your dates when you were a teenager, and you’ll be making the right impression from the start.

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AdWords, SEO, press releases, social networking, time-limited discounts – all have the potential to pull in large volumes of targeted traffic to your website.

Once they get there, here are five of my personal favourite ways to distract them.

1 – Interesting external links. Prominent testimonials are all fine and well, but if they’re linked and look a little too interesting (for example a testimonial from one of the weapons inspectors in Iraq) you’ll lose a fair number of visitors who will simply click themselves away.

2 – Interesting images. Personalising your website is a good idea, as people like to see pictures of people. But I have to admit to being distracted by a website with photos that changed with a mouseover. I remained on the website, but my focus went from what they’re selling to what they’re showing me.

3 – Interesting video. Video can undoubtedly be a powerful sales tool, but when you’re embedding your video from YouTube, the rest of YouTube is only a click away.

4 – Interesting comparisons. I’m a fan of the good old-fashioned feature comparison matrix where you demonstrate how your product beats your competition. But the risk is that you’re showing visitors other alternatives to your product. Some of which they might not have heard of, and some of which they might prefer.

5 – Interesting ads. Running ads on your website is risky. If you have regular traffic in the scale of CNN or the BBC, then ads are a monetising opportunity. If most of your visitors come only a few times, you run the risk of losing them to an ad. If the amount you receive per click is more than what you sell, you’re winning.

The content of your website needs to hold your visitors attention. External links, images and video are only there to reinforce.

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The first mistake is neglect – not monitoring how your website performs.

The second mistake is negligence – allowing the damage to continue.

Google Analytics is incredibly simple to set up, and will give you more actionable information than you might have dreamt is possible.

But installing it on your website is like buying the treadmill for your home. It’s a good start, but now you have to use it.

I don’t know what baffles me more – those who don’t try to find the pages on their websites that lose most of their visitors, or those who accept their exit and bounce rates.

Optimising a web page tends to follow the law of diminishing returns. The flip side of this is that your initial actions have the potential to produce great results.

If you knew you could cut your bounce rate by 20% just by changing your headlines and intro paragraph, wouldn’t you do it?

Your bounce rates and exit rates aren’t written in stone.

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You probably know the feeling. You like the product and would like to buy it, but don’t know whether you should trust the company behind the website.

If I order a product online and it never arrives, I can email the company and try to call them. But what if they simply don’t reply?

There’s always some degree of risk.

Buying from Amazon is safe. And buying from the Amazon Marketplace is safer than buying directly from the retailer. Yet I had an unresolved issue with a  marketplace seller.

Buying from eBay is safe – especially when you pay with PayPal. Yet I am right now waiting for eBay’s ruling on whether non-delivery of a service I purchased entitles me to a refund.

Buying from DiscountGoods.com, however, might leave me with no hope of a safety net.

Your website’s primary goal is to engage the visitor; to convince them that you have what they’re looking for.

Your website’s secondary goal is to convince them that buying from you is safe.

Whether you offer a free trial, verifiable testimonials, a money back guarantee, an established history, a credit rating or links to reviews… the more you actively demonstrate that there is no/low risk in buying from you, the greater the chance of the visitor buying.

Bonus tip: the more your visitor needs what you sell, the higher the risk they’re prepared to take.

If your product has the potential to cure their insomnia, the risk barrier will be less of an issue.

If your product merely helps them to enjoy better better dreams, the risk barrier may be higher.

Extra bonus tip: what if you can convince your visitors that the benefits of using your product are greater than they anticipated?

That your product can help them enjoy better dreams, leading to deeper sleep and more energy throughout the day? In that situation, the risk barrier would be less significant.

The greater the reward of purchasing, the greater the acceptable risk.

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