Interlude: Get Over Yourself. Get Out There.
One of the most common website issues I see is, well, utter lack of personality. The site owner has bags of personality. Trouble is, she (it’s usually a she) doesn’t let one tiny bit of it creep onto the website. Instead the web content is stuffy, over-formal or just somehow lacking anything that would really draw the passing reader in. There’s another extreme, too. That’s the website where you know everything about the site owner’s struggle with depression/ongoing house renovation/gnawing fear of getting old…and that’s before you buy any of her...
Read MoreWeb Design Secrets of the (Internet) Rich and Famous
What do you need to have in place in order to attract thousands of readers? Today I’m going to look at five blog-heavy websites, most of which are pretty much Internet Famous. All of the site owners run businesses which depend on the blogs, and together they demonstrate the power of five different elements: desire, rapport, content, headline, and brand. Desire: Tim Ferriss, The Four Hour Work Week Most very successful blog-based businesses are offering something that people want very strongly, and Tim Ferriss is a good example of that. My first reaction is a sort of...
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 MoreInterlude: We Are Not The Customers You Are Looking For
(Website to Wonderful will resume next week) It’s hard when your face doesn’t fit. Especially when you’re the eager customer. I got an email recently from a clothes store that I love, with an invitation for customers to take part in a market research exercise at my nearest branch. I got terribly excited, but then I realised they were looking for people a lot younger than me to take part. That was a little bit sad-making. I loved the brand, but I really wasn’t a core customer to them. I even wrote a little note explaining my passion and begging to be let in, but nothing...
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 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.