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Web
Site Design – Focus, Focus,
Focus
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When creating a web site design, it is easy
to fall into the trap of trying to be all things to all people. In
reality, the key to a good web site design is focus, focus, focus.
We Don’t Need No Stink’n
Distractions
It happens ever few weeks or so. I am
sitting in front of the computer contemplating the meaning of life,
i.e., why my numbers aren’t being picked in the California
lottery. A frustrated person calls and wants to know why their site
isn’t converting. Shaking myself from my revelry, I valiantly
pull up their site and here is what I find.
A mess.
The front page is a mass of blinking this
and floating that. In really nasty situations, there will be something
like a banner telling me the weather conditions in some city.
As if I cared.
I don’t even look at the weather
in San Diego. Okay, we don’t really have any, but that
isn’t the point.
The point is a site must have focus to
covert traffic into revenue. This is known as the rule of one. Every
page of a site should focus on one subject, product, thing, picture or
whatever is relevant to your site.
If you have a page devoted to disco shirts
with huge lapels, then everything on the page should focus on disco
shirts with huge lapels. Typically, such a page would consists of brief
text describing the disco shirts, thumbnails of the shirts and prices.
The page should
not include disco cds for sale. The cds should get their own page.
Don’t believe me? Then let us
kneel at the alter of Google. The Google Adsense program is designed to
let you put
Google advertisements on your site. To put the ads up, you simply copy
and paste a script provided by Google. Once the site is republished,
each page with script will show Google ads. If you look at each page,
you will note the script produces different ads for different pages.
Further, the ads on each page correspond to the subject matter on the
page.
Why does Google do this? Because ads that
are relevant to the focus of the page will be clicked more than ads
that are not. Put another way, the Adsense program is designed to focus
on a
single subject matter. The rule of one rears its head again.
Are you seeing a trend here?
If your site isn’t converting
well, analyze the pages to see if you are focusing on one topic. If you
have a weather banner on your site, there better be a very, very good
reason.
Halstatt Pires is a search engine
optimization specialist with http://www.marketingtitan.com
- an Internet marketing and advertising company providing internet
marketing services in San Diego, California.
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