Website to Wonderful, 5: Are you losing your customer at the checkout?
My son’s worst shopping moment with me took place last Christmas. We were out shopping in the January sales, and I went into WH Smith (a newsagent) to buy a few things. They had some brand new self-service checkouts. I ignored them (hate them with a passion) and queued up to pay a real live person. Then one of the sales staff wandered up and pointed out the self-serve checkouts. I said I didn’t want to use them. He said they were really easy to use if I would just try. We had a little stand-off. A little voice in my ear started going ‘Nooo please Mum nooo, don’t make a...
Read MoreWebsite to Wonderful, 4: Creating easy paths for prospects
Fasten up, this is a long post on the subject of emotional landscaping. First: how exactly do you turn a prospective customer into a paying one? And down below, my take on how it works for all you good people selling coaching and counselling as opposed to widgets. You can find previous posts in the series here: Website to Wonderful, 1: Makeover Edition (Introduction) Website to Wonderful, 2: How not to make your visitors’ eyeballs bleed Website to Wonderful, 3: Designing your site with real users in mind If you like it, tweet it, bookmark it, share it with your friends. If the...
Read MoreWebsite to Wonderful, 3: Designing your site with real users in mind
Yes, it’s time to talk about what user experience types grandly refer to as ‘user journeys’. The word ‘journey’ does sound somewhat major, but don’t get caught out: some of those journeys are the pixellated exquivalent of popping to the corner shop for a pint of milk, rather than crossing the Andes by hovercraft. As site owners, we mostly try to steer people towards the Grand Journeys that we want to promote and we utterly neglect the small everyday journeys that are also important. A good website will handle all of the journeys, more or less...
Read MoreWebsite to Wonderful 2: Usability, or How not to make your visitors’ eyeballs bleed
If you read Part 1 of the series, then you now should have a neat set of goals and wishes to think about. But before we go any further, let’s take a look at your site and see if there are any things which are actively preventing your site visitors from taking a promising relationship any further. This is pretty much Usability in a nutshell. To illustrate, I want to talk about my dog Alfie. Usability lessons from pet sites Alfie is a teenage dog now, about 8 months old. He is my first dog and so the past few months have been a flurry of training and problem-solving. And shopping: finding a...
Read MoreWebsite to Wonderful: Makeover Edition
It’s November! I love November. Three years ago, I did Naniwrimo in November (National Novel Writing Month). This year, I thought I’d direct all my November energy into making stuff for the website. And so I give you: Website to Wonderful. A website makeover guide for the rest of us. This is going to be a series of blog posts intended to help you make over your website presence. They will run twice a week through November, or until we’re done! Who is it for? Well, it’s for you if you have a business or other organisational site which you think needs a little...
Read MoreHow to attract, engage and keep your online students
Maximising motivation in digital workshops and online courses Online courses are being offered more and more, both as an alternative way of taking part in a traditional class, and as a way of providing totally new types of course. If you are designing an online workshop, you will usually want to create something that provides the participant with genuine value and satisfaction. This means producing courses that encourage the participants to sign up, then take part fully, and keep going right to the end. People who drop out or disengage are likely to be much less happy with their...
Read MoreManifesto
Some of us find it quite simple to put our real organisations and authentic selves online.
Others - well, let's just say that some of us can't bear to look at our own websites.
My mission is to help you transform your online presence so that other people understand and appreciate what you really have to offer. So that you can achieve what you want - whether that's better engagement, more readers, or more sales.