Good Web Design – For Beauty Or For Business?

Ultimateworkathomedads.com commented on an article, so I checked out his site. Looks like he has a bunch of good advice. This article is near and dear to my heart. Go read it.

I recently had someone ask me to make some changes to a site that were completely irrelevant to their business. They had no time to write the sale copy for it, and wouldn’t let me write it, but they did want me to spend my time making some ambiguous graphic changes to it. They wanted it to “pop” more and make it greener.

I wanted to talk about setting up a mailing list to gather prospects. They said they didn’t know what to write in the response emails. I said they need to have me do some SEO so people would find the site. They wanted to go over the wording, even though they had no time to write anything better.

I had another recent client tell me that they didn’t want any SEO at all. This site was not aimed at surfers as much as it was a back up to sales people in the field who could give out the URL and support their claims. Different business model than I’m used to, but absolutely correct for their business.

It’s best to focus on why you have a site, then only work towards those goals. Don’t get distracted by shiny objects, even if they are embedded objects. You need to gather email addresses, make a sales pitch, get people to call, or whatever you want to accomplish. Focus, focus, focus.

Let’s make it work, people. – Tim Gunn

Website Design – Beauty or Business?

What is the purpose of YOUR website?

* Are you attracting art lovers to see how great your site looks OR are you creating a business?
* Do you use lots of images and flash or do you focus on guiding the visitor to leave his or her name and email address so that you can build your business?
* Are you so creative in the look of the site that people forget why they found you and what they are doing on your site?

Is your site lost in Google’s shuffle or does the coding of your site enhance the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) automatically?

Are you asking the viewer to do several things while visiting your site and then they get confused (A confused mind always says NO) or do you have ONE purpose for your site?

Read the entire article at:
http://ultimateworkathomedads.com/gold/archives/1126