A Huge Mistake to Make in Your Website Strategy</h1> <article> <h1>A Huge Mistake to Make in Your Website Strategy</h1> <p>TimK — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 10:57:27 -0700</p> <p>Seth Godin bemoans <a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/08/cheap-media-che.html" target="_blank" title="(opens in a new window)">how cheap the ads are during non-prime-time spots</a>. That is, they’re produced cheaply. They stink. On the other hand, an advertiser will pour millions of dollars into a Superbowl ad that runs only once. Because they don’t want to spend a lot of money producing an ad for a spot worth only a couple hundred bucks. But here’s why this logic is severely flawed, even if the ad runs only once in a cheap spot.</p> <p class="callout">Never compare how much an ad costs to produce versus how much it costs to run.</p> <p>Let’s say I spent $100,000 producing a radio ad that I ran for $10 a spot. Would that be a good deal? Our gut reaction is that it would be a waste of money, because we think that a $10 spot must be worthless, or else they’d be charging much more for it. But that’s not necessarily true. Remember that late-nite infomercial spots were dirt cheap when the Ginsu Guys first started running their ads. Were those spots worthless? Hardly!</p> <p>So let’s say I spent $100,000 producing a radio ad that I ran for $10 a spot, in 100 spots—still a measly 1% of the production cost. And let’s say this ad brought me customers worth $1,000,000 in sales over the next 5 years. Would that be a good deal?</p> <p>Never compare how much an ad costs to produce versus how much it costs to run. Rather, compare how much it costs to produce <em>and</em> run versus how much money it makes! The reason Superbowl-ad companies don’t do this is because they usually don’t know how much an ad is actually worth.</p> <h3>What does this have to do with your website?</h3> <p>Many small businesses adopt the flawed Superbowl-ad mentality with their websites, because that’s all they know. And when it costs <a href="http://lucrativewebdesign.com/go/DreamHost" target="_blank" title="(opens in a new window)">$7.95 a month to host a website</a>, they can’t justify spending thousands of dollars on professional web copy and traffic generation. Instead, they say, “We can only afford $7.95 a month for a web site.”</p> <p>But what if that web site could generate $1,000 a month in sales? 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Because I screwed up.</p> <p>She really wanted to see <em>Rocky</em>, because its inspirational story would really make her feel better right now. I really wanted to see <em>Rocky</em>, too. Because the last time I saw it was long before I knew how to write fiction myself, and I couldn’t learn anything from it. In fact, it was so long ago, I don’t even remember how the movie goes.</p> <p>Yesterday, I sent back to Netflix the 3 DVDs I had out. And then I remembered, I forgot to rearrange my Netflix queue to put <em>Rocky</em> at the top. <em>No problem,</em> I thought, <em>I’ll just rearrange my Netflix queue tonight, and they’ll send out the correct DVDs when they get my returns tomorrow.</em></p> <p>Unfortunately, life intervened. I had not been feeling well all day. After dinner, we put the kids to bed. Dead on my feet, I relaxed in a warm tub and then fell promptly to sleep. Next thing I knew, Netflix had already received my returns and were sending out the next DVDs from my queue… which did not include the one my wife really wanted to see.</p> <p>I still thought Netflix might be able to bail me out, however. Because some months ago they added rental plans under which you could rent more than 3 DVDs. If you’re willing to shell out the cash, you can rent up to 8 DVDs at a time now from Netflix. Also, when they introduced these plans, their website presented me with an option to upgrade. If I upgraded, they would send me out my additional DVDs immediately and bill me pro-rated for the upgraded plan.</p> <p class="callout">Never, ever, <em>ever</em> give a prospect who’s ready to buy <em>any</em> reason to procrastinate. Because he’ll take it.</p> <p>At that time, I thought this was all très cool. But I wasn’t interested in getting more than 3 DVDs at a time. But now…</p> <p>I’ve been watching DVDs faster than Netflix can send them to me. Back when they first offered the upgraded plans, the opposite was true. And with my goof, not updating my Netflix queue as I should have, it was the perfect time for me to revisit the question. Was I happy with the 3-DVD plan, or did I want a higher-end plan?</p> <p>So I went to the Netflix website, thinking I could try a 4-DVD plan and see how that goes. That might get me <em>Rocky</em> this weekend, or at least early next week. Or so I thought. But then I saw this on the plan-upgrade page:</p> <blockquote> <p><big>Q:</big> When will my rental program change take effect?<br /> <big>A:</big> All program changes begin with your next month of service…</p></blockquote> <p>So, they <em>won’t</em> send me an extra DVD immediately, and they <em>won’t</em> bill me extra for part of the current billing cycle. With this new information, guess what I did. Even though I wanted to try the 4-DVD plan, even though I’ve been feeling an acute need for it… I decided <em>not</em> to upgrade.</p> <p>Why? Because my next billing cycle begins on the 20’th of the month. That gives me 10 more days to decide whether I really want the upgraded plan.</p> <p>Here’s the takeaway: Never, ever, <em>ever</em> give a prospect who’s ready to buy <em>any</em> reason to procrastinate. Because he’ll take it. Many websites, even for small businesses, do give prospects a reason to procrastinate, in one way or another.</p> <p>In Netflix’s case, it was reduced customer service. If I choose to upgrade, I need to wait for my upgrade to take effect. Or rather—from my perspective—I can only really upgrade one day a month. And there’s no good reason for this reduction in customer service. Because most of the transaction is handled by the computer. They don’t spend time or resources to put my upgrade into effect, because as soon as the upgrade goes into effect, their computer determines that I need another DVD and which DVD it ought to be. That DVD is then distributed through Netflix’s normal channels.</p> <p>Even downgrades should be handled the same way. If I were on a 4-DVD plan and I wanted to downgrade to a 3-DVD plan, the downgrade should go into effect as soon as I send back at least 1 DVD. Simple. Again, the computer handles all the paperwork, and receiving the DVDs happens according to standard procedure.</p> <p>But wouldn’t that mean I could upgrade and downgrade multiple times per month? Yes, it would. But we can’t have customers upgrading and downgrading willy-nilly, can we? Sure we can. Why not? It’s not like we need to pay someone to shuffle around the paperwork for all these hypothetical upgrades and downgrades. It’s all handled by the computer.</p> <p>But the fact is that customers aren’t going to be upgrading and downgrading all the time. But they will <em>notice</em> that they <em>could</em> if they needed to. (The same thing happens with a money-back guarantee, by the way. Most customers won’t take advantage of it, but they feel better because they know they can if they need to.)</p> <p>“But if a customer downgrades before his month is up, does that mean we have to refund him for the unused part of the plan?” Well… Yes, you need to credit his account. So if I’m on the 4-DVD plan and I downgrade to a 3-DVD plan halfway through my billing cycle, you’d credit me $3. Yes, you’d lose a one-time $3 in revenue. And for that, I’d keep renting from you month after month after month, because your competitors don’t offer this level of service.</p> <p>In other words, it’s not all about money. It’s about giving your customer value for his dollar. If I could upgrade and downgrade at will, it wouldn’t be like I’m getting something for nothing. Rather, it would be like I could buy whatever I wanted <em>exactly when</em> I wanted it. Since the computer it handling all the paperwork, it should be cheap for Netflix to provide this service. But it would not be “cheap” to customers who wanted this level of service; it would be valuable to them.</p> <p>Yet even small businesses miss out on cheap opportunities to sell, usually because “that’s the way it’s always been done.” Simply by giving a prospect an opportunity to procrastinate.</p> <p>One example is “Click Here to Order.” Whether you have a sales mini-site or an on-line catalog, you probably have a button or a link you want people to click on, which will start the ordering process. A prospect, after he clicks, he probably sees a series of forms. The first one probably asks him for his name, shipping address, telephone number, and email address. Then after he fills that out and clicks “OK,” he can select a form of payment and verify his order.</p> <p>But look at the “Click Here to Order” link. One thing you should split-test is putting the order form right in the sales letter, because it eliminates a reason to procrastinate. That sales copy you’ve so carefully crafted to carry the prospect from on-the-fence to “I gotta have it <em>now</em>“… Clicking on a link takes him right out of that flow. How many prospects say, “I’ll bookmark this and get around later to the long process of actually prying open my wallet”? Except that they never do.</p> <p>Eliminating this step is essentially what Amazon.com did with their “1-Click” ordering. They took the pain, and therefore the procrastination, out of buying. You see something you want? You’ve already filled out all the forms! There’s no need to “get around to it.”</p> <p>As Homer Simpson said, “But I want it <em>now</em>.” In U.S. culture, it’s what <em>we</em> want, more, bigger, newer, faster. We usually apply this advice to customer service, but it applies to sales as well. Because what you’re selling is your offer. And the more immediate your sales process, the easier you’ll make it for people to order from you, and the less procrastination there will be.</p> <p>In what ways do you give your prospects an opportunity to procrastinate? 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And she asked, <a href="http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2007/06/06/what-do-you-think-of-these-web-site-designs/" target="_blank" title="(opens in a new window)">whether these web-site designs are usable, as well as visually appealing</a>.</p> <p>Well, Ashley. Firstly, let me weigh in on a comment by reader DJ, a comment that can hit home for a small-business owner. He says:</p> <blockquote> <p>For me, it is pretty instructive that none of these sites IMHO are what I would call well trafficked. Therefore the list isn’t <strong>that</strong> representative of the kind of sites that really play a large role in people’s lives.</p></blockquote> <p>This is a comment that can hit home for a small-business owner, because small-business websites usually have very low traffic, at least at first.</p> <p>The rules of design change depending on who your audience is. Or rather, the tactics you use on your site change. But it doesn’t matter whether your site gets 10 visitors a day or 10,000. In fact, even a low-traffic site can play a huge role in someone’s life, if it’s the right site and the right someone. It’s better for your site to be a low-traffic site that uniquely caters to your ideal customer, than for it to be a high-traffic site that completely misses the point. (And yes, some sites have lots of traffic and do miss the point.)</p> <p></p> <p>So, Ashley, looking just at the four sites you snapped, let me start with the <a href="http://expressionengine.com/" target="_blank" title="(opens in a new window)">Expression Engine</a> site. I immediately understood what the site was about, and I was able to click on “Add-on Architecture” to find out more about that, since that was a feature I was interested in learning more about. But I quickly ran into trouble. I saw that they had a module to add an image gallery, and since this is an area that’s frequently a problem in these types of systems, I wanted to learn more about their image gallery add-on. But I couldn’t click on “Image Gallery.” No problem, I thought. I clicked on “View Included Add-ons.” But I couldn’t find the image-gallery add-on. What I did see was a menu that allowed me to click on “Plugins,” “Modules,” or “Extensions.” What the heck is the difference? I gave up.</p> <p>The <a href="http://gckingoftheblues.com/" target="_blank" title="(opens in a new window)">“Guitar Center King of the Blues”</a> site, at first, I didn’t know what to do on it. It’s so busy, it was several minutes before I figured out it was a contest for guitar players. (Note that the site, as it exists now, is not the same as the snapshot image displayed here.) I had to click on the “Rules,” just clicking across the top, at the right, before I figured out that I needed to enter the contest in-person at a Guitar Center store. But I later saw that I could upload my music to enter… something. Clicking on the top banner does nothing: It should link to the site home page. There doesn’t appear to be any way to browse photos on the site, even though they’re featured on the front page. And it was then that I figured out I could register at the site. Now, I happen to be a musician, so I’m potentially within the target market. If I happened to run across this site, I wouldn’t know what to do. Not enough scent throughout the site.</p> <p></p> <p>Next, the <a href="http://store.vorsat.com/" target="_blank" title="(opens in a new window)">Vorstat store</a>. The first thing I noticed is that they only have 13 products. So why the complex navigation options? Yes, the “collection tags” are really cool. And it’s great that you can click on different tags to restrict and expand the set of products displayed. But for only 13 products? I’d rather have a big scrolling list with the image next to a brief description of the product. The biggest problem with this site is that you have to roll over each image in order to see a partial abbreviated description pop-up. Silly. Just show me a list with full (but brief) descriptions.</p> <p>Lastly, the <a href="http://www.knoxville.org/" target="_blank" title="(opens in a new window)">Knoxville</a> site. It’s very cluttered. I pretended I wanted to plan a trip to Knoxville. Once I got past the garishness of the site— How did this site win a graphic-design award? I decided I wanted to discover things to do, places to stay, and places to visit. Nowhere in any of the navigation do they use any of those trigger words. But I found places to stay under “accommodations,” though their search function was too limited, the on-site descriptions didn’t tell me what I needed to know, and I ended up pogoing through them. Similarly with the other items on my list… And I forgot about places to eat, though “dining” was on the navigation menu. So, the information was there, mostly, sort of. But I could have found it much more easily if the site had followed the same process I needed to use to find the information I needed. It probably should have started with a top-level menu for different use-cases. One of these menu options would be, “Plan a trip to Knoxville.”</p> <p>One thing I find repeatedly is that the content on a site is much more important than the graphic design. Because the content is what helps or hinders the visitor from accomplishing what he wants. Unfortunately, many companies—especially small businesses—spend masses of money on a <em>kewl</em> graphic design, when a simple one would be much more effective. And then they throw up whatever content the company founder can write down in a half-hour. Ugh.</p> <p>Good web design encompasses both graphic design <em>and</em> content design. And a good web strategy starts with good web design. And then it drives traffic to the site, and measures how well the site accomplishes its goals. 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We have already notified those of you affected directly via email…</p> <p>The security flaw allowed the attackers to log into our customer web control panel with the access privileges of another user. From our web panel they were able to access individual user password information. The attackers also attempted to gain access to our central database and billing information but were ultimately thwarted in that attempt. No credit card information or customer personal information was obtained.</p> <p>We will soon be making an official post about this situation and the steps being done to safeguard accounts in the future on the DreamHost blog…</p></blockquote> <p></p> <p>As a result of this break-in, several high-profile websites were hacked. And not in an obvious way. Rather, the crackers set up their computer to put hidden links on the website’s page, links that point to their spam sites. This is good for the crackers’ spam sites, because it means search engines will find these sites and people are more likely to find them… in the the short term. In the long term, it can be bad for the hacked sites, because the search engines always figure out which sites are spam, and they figure that if you link to a spam site, your site is also probably a spam site.</p> <p>Of course, this post is one of the things I love about DreamHost. See, the thing is, I was not affected. No one broke into my account. No one hacked my websites. <a href="http://lucrativewebdesign.com/go/DreamHost" target="_blank" title="(opens in a new window)">DreamHost</a> didn’t even have to tell me what happened. But they did. Most hosting companies don’t even have a status site, like DreamHost does, and can’t even publish this sort of information. With those companies, I probably never would have known there was a break-in.</p> <p>What’s more, break-ins like this do happen. They can happen with any company, especially with shared web hosting. They can happen on any web site. Every single host on the Internet is hit many times a day with attempts to crack into them. (This includes your home computer, by the way.) And every single piece of software deployed on the Internet is likely to have at least one security flaw.</p> <p>So how do you protect yourself against the risk of your website being cracked?</p> <p>The advice you usually hear is to use strong passwords, to use a different password with every account, and to change your passwords regularly. I believe one person even echoed that advice in the aftermath of this break-in. And it’s good advice… Except that this would not have stopped the crackers in this case. Nor would it help in most cases. Using strong passwords and changing passwords, that makes it more difficult for someone to <em>guess</em> your password. But it doesn’t help if they can sneak in through the back-door, completely <em>bypassing</em> your password, as the crackers did in this case.</p> <p>This is the most common type of cyber-break-in. And the best way to guard against something like this happening to you is to assume that it <em>will</em> happen. Have a plan to contain, mitigate, and recover from the break-in. This addresses the worst that could happen (that your website could be destroyed) turning it into an annoyance (you need to change all your passwords and restore your website from a backup).</p> <ol> <li>The most important thing you can do is to <strong>keep regular backups</strong>. This includes backing up all your databases as well as your files. And also keep a record of your hosting account configuration, such as email addresses and hosts, so you can restore it— Or transfer it to another hosting provider if something awful happens. We usually think of keeping backups to guard against hardware failure. And indeed, I have lost much more data due to my computer’s hardware breaking than I have from malicious people cracking into my computer. But the same strategy works in both cases. Because you can use the backup to recover your website, regardless of how it was corrupted.</li> <li><strong>Install security updates for your web software, and conduct a security audit on your custom web software.</strong> This makes it more difficult for crackers to break into your website software, because most cracks exploit known security holes. Security updates plug these holes, and security audits help make sure your custom software doesn’t contain any known security holes. This is key. But it only makes sense if you have backups, because it only reduces the already slim chances that your website will have a break-in. Only a backup will mitigate the cataclysmic damage that could occur.</li> <li><strong>Keep different levels of information separate, and share only on a need-to-know basis.</strong> This is why the DreamHost crackers could <em>not</em> access any credit card numbers or other financial information. Because that information is stored on a separate computer, and the web panel can’t access it. This only applies to more complex systems. Amazon does the same thing with their user accounts. If someone breaks into your Amazon account, they can’t get any of your credit card information. The worst they can do is to screw up your Amazon Wish List and order you a bunch of stuff that you didn’t want. They can’t even have the stuff shipped to their mailing address, because Amazon requires you to verify your credit card data before you can do that.</li> </ol> <p>So, will this news cause me to switch from DreamHost? No. Will it cause me to change my website’s policies or web software? 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And that’s your opportunity. Because the more crap is in the world, the easier it is to shine above it all. And there is more crap now than ever, because it is so cheap and easy to get on the web. But the whole story has an interesting implication that Jim missed.</p> <p>In the old days, it was relatively expensive to get into marketing. You had to print and mail a lot of pieces. Even the first infomercials: They were considered cheap for the day, because it was just a guy in front of a camera, and it was aired during excess time the TV stations were giving away for free. Now, it’s way expensive to do an infomercial. But back then, it was cheap. And that was still harder then than it is today to put up a website.</p> <p>As a result, there is a <em>lot</em> of crap on the web. (I’ve even been responsible for some of it, in my day.) Jim writes:</p> <blockquote> <p>The barrier is extremely low to produce a website, write a blog, print brochures, mail letters, disperse flyers, print cards, etc. Everyone and anyone in business can do it. That’s the problem. People without a clue do it…</p> <p>Your opportunity is to <em>not</em> produce crap. So don’t.</p></blockquote> <p>One implication of this is that you should put in the time, expense, and planning to make sure your website is not crap. But I think there’s another way to look at this.</p> <p>Yes, there are a lot of people churning out crap. But that’s not primarily because of the low cost of entry! It’s because they don’t <em>measure results</em>. Every direct-response copywriter has tested campaigns in his career with surprising results. With experience, we learn what tends to work well, and under what conditions. But none of us is a mind-reader. At the end of the day, there’s only way for sure to know whether what we’re producing is crap. And that is, we need to measure how well it works.</p> <p>The thing is, this is also much cheaper and easier than it used to be. Technology cuts both ways. The barrier to entry is lower for everyone. It’s easier for the clueless to churn out crap. But that means it’s now possible for small businesses, even micro-businesses, to do quality marketing formerly only possible with big-company marketing budgets.</p> <p>If you don’t know whether or not an idea is crap, you may face the question, “Should I invest in this website? How do I know that it will pay off?” Thanks to the low barrier to entry, the answer now is, you just try it. Don’t spend a lot of money on it, at first. Just test the concept, in actual use. Then, as much as it turns out <em>not</em> to be crap, you keep doing it. And you invest more in it. And you improve it.</p> <p>But it’s that “it turns out <em>not</em> to be crap” part. That’s the kicker. Because how do you know whether or not it’s crap? 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Imagine you had a magic gumball machine. Except instead of dispensing gumballs, it dispenses customers. You put in some money, turn the crank, and out pops another customer for your business. How much money would you be willing to put in the machine to get another customer?</p> <p>Until you can answer that question, you’ll never know how much your website—or any marketing effort—is worth to you. Thus, you’ll see it only as an expense, not as an investment.</p> <p>Recently I was talking to an old friend, the first time we had talked in a long time. Like me, he owns a small business, in his case a local camera shop. We naturally got to talking about web sites. He told me his business spends $4 a month on its website, because that’s all they can afford.</p> <p>“But what if,” I asked, “you knew that this $4 was buying you $100 in extra profit? Then would it be all you could afford? 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Is the home page irrelevant? To answer that, I dug up a blog post I remembered reading a couple years ago on UIE’s site. Jared Spool and his associates at UIE actually do the scientific research on questions like this.</p> <p>The answer is that your site’s home page is indeed important, but not in the way you may think. And it’s not the most important page on your site, even though it probably gets more traffic than any other page on your site.</p> <p>According to Jared’s research, there are <a href="http://www.uie.com/brainsparks/2005/09/29/is-home-page-design-relevant-anymore/" target="_blank" title="(opens in a new window)">two purposes of a website’s front page</a>:</p> <ol> <li>It gives visitors the content they want, such as with a blog or news site.</li> <li>It helps visitors find the content they’re looking for.</li> </ol> <p>That’s it. Anything else is not part of the purpose of a front page. Ads touting your latest promotion, for example, which I see all the time when we go to log in to do online banking— I’ve never clicked on those ads, and I can’t even remember what even one of them was about. And Jared’s results are the same. Visitors to the site don’t care about these things, and so they pay no attention to them.</p> <p>What they do pay attention to is what they’re looking for. When someone comes to your website’s home page, by using a bookmark, for example, you usually don’t know what he’s looking for. So your home page should be designed to lead him to the content he’s looking for, wherever it is on the site. This is especially true if he followed a link from another site to your front page. Whatever content was promised in the anchor from the link should be right there or featured in a link on your home page.</p> <p>But usually, a visitor will be coming through another way, to some other page deep in your site. If he did a web search, for example. Or if one of his friends sent him a link to a page on your site. Or if he clicked on one of your paid advertisements.</p> <p>In these cases, you have his attention, no catch, but only for about 8 seconds. You have that long to make him want to stay longer and get further into what you have to offer. This is the critical, do-or-die moment. And this page is <a href="http://lucrativewebdesign.com/4things/copywriting/landingpage">the most important page on your site, the landing page</a>. A large site may have many landing pages. And each is important. But most important are the pages you drive traffic to, the links you put in your distributed articles and paid ads, for example.</p> <p>So, no, don’t blow up your home page. 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This is one of the 4 key elements that any website strategy needs. And it’s way simpler than the hype you hear in web-traffic circles. Because you should not maximize your web traffic. In fact, don’t even pay much attention to it.</p> <p>Yes, you do need traffic, or else your website will do you no good. But just getting more and more traffic won’t make your website succeed. Amazon can afford to go after more and more traffic, at any cost. That’s their business model. “Please send us all your traffic so we can make lots of money.” That works for them. It fits into their business plan. You are not Amazon.</p> <p>Here’s <a href="http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/05/how_to_misuse_g.html">what Seth says</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>Why do you have a site? What’s your goal? Is it to sell something? To receive email? To spread an idea? Whatever it is, you can probably measure it. And measure it you should. 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