Ab Tests Web Design

A potential client recently came to me with an existing site. It certainly was slick: the homepage featured a Flash animation of telegenic young professionals culled from a stock photo service, psuedo-jazz techno music, and words sweeping in from all sides selling you the company's service. Unfortunately the page had no useful content, no call-to-action and no Google PageRank. It was an expensive design, but I didn't need to look at the tracking stats to know no one came this page.

So you're ready to ditch a non-performing site for one more dynamic, something that will attract customers and interact with them. Here's five tips for building a self-marketing website!

One: Useful Content for your Target Audience Give visitors a reason to come to the site. Text-rich, changing content is essential. In practicality, this means installing a blog and writing posts every few weeks. You'll see measures like "keyword relevancy" increase instantly as excerpted text shows up on the homepage. Add videos and photos if your company or team has that expertise, but remember: when it comes to search, text is king.

Two: Give away something valuable or useful Many smart marketing sites feature some free giveaway right on the homepage: a useful quiz, professional analysis, a PDF how-to guidebook. A builder I worked with went to the trouble of posting dozens of floor plans & pictures to their website and compiling them into a PDF book, which they gave away for free. The catch in all this? You have to give your contact information to get it. Once the free material has been compiled, the site runs itself as a sales lead generator!

Three: Ask yourself the Three User Questions! It's amazing how focused the mind gets when you actually sit down to define goals. Just about every website can benefit from this three-step exercise:

1. Who is the target audience?
2. What would draw them to the site? 
3. What do we want to get from them?

Get a group together to through your website page by page these questions. Brainstorm a list of changes you could make. You'll want to end up with Defined Goals: what quantifiable actions do you want visitors to take? It might well just be the successful completion of a contact form.

Four: Test Test and Test Again Many small businesses now get a lot of their customers from their websites. Your website is an essential piece of your marketing and publicity and you need to be smart about it. Compile together your favorite site-improvement ideas and make up  alternate designs incorporating the changes. Then use a tool such as Google Website Optimizer to put the alternatives through their paces. Which one "converts" better, i.e., which design gets you higher percentages in the Defined Goals you've set? Once you've finished a test, move on to the next brainstorming idea and implement it. Always be testing!

An extensive series of tests of one site I worked on doubled it's conversion rate: imagine your company doubling its internet sales? It is completely worth spending the time and effort to go through this process.

Five: Don't Be Afraid to Get Professional Help If you need to hire a professional to help you through this process you'll almost certainly get your money's worth! A recent projects cost the customer $6000 but I was able to document savings of $100,000 per year in his publicity costs! See my piece What to Look For in SEO Consultants for my insider-advice to how to pick a honest and competent professional web publicity consultant.

Over on my O'Reilly Media blog, I've written "Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?," a look at where I think the third-party social media websites are going. Here's a taste:

The goal of most websites is to extended the interaction with the visitor beyond this one visit: we seek to sell them a product, join our mailing list, buy tickets to our event or subscribe to us in a news reader. Facebook is quickly becoming the most important email list and news reader. If it continues to innovate (and borrow ideas from innovative competitors) it could quickly become a major commercial portal as well. As its adoption rate climbs within the ranks of our target audiences, it becomes an effective way to extend visitor relationship and build more intimate brand identities.

This will change company's interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms--status updates, calendars, videos--but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth. Smart marketers will think less in terms of selling and more in terms of relationship building. Analytics and constantly-rolling A/B tests will give us a near real-time gauge with which to measure the success of these relationships. The recession is bringing a new urgency for measurable results and might actually help shift corporate and non-profit budgets away from high-price opinions and toward this new style of social-network-mediated marketing.

It will be interesting to see how organizations adapt to social media's evolving role.