Thursday, 7 May 2009
Delete Your Website
Executive Summary: If you’re too busy to read this, here’s the Seth Godin quote that inspired this post:
Delete your website and start over with the simplest possible site
If you’re still here, allow me to expand. I think for some people, myself included, just the thought of our websites being ‘deleted’ is quite scary. A website is something we’ve crafted, our personal or corporate representation online, something we’re emotionally attached to, losing this would be tragic.
But I think this emotional attachment is holding us back. If you look at a lot of websites, especially corporate sites, it’s not hard to see how they are a mish-mash of different pieces of content or functionality, added as the company evolved and expanded their product/service range.
Because of this sacred view of the website, compromises are made, links are crammed in and site navigation is complicated. If the people in charge do decide to re-design the website, it’s usually a huge, complex process that takes months and can only be tolerated once every couple of years. With this amount of friction associated with renewing and improving websites, it’s not surprising that many websites are still rolling around the 2% conversion rate.
I think we have to be more radical in our approach, we need to simplify our websites, scale them back. We should be in a position to radically and re-actively change and re-arrange our websites to maximise business.
The logic of this approach can be highlighted quite easily if you are currently using any dedicated landing pages. I’m pretty sure that any of these you’re using are generating a conversion rate higher than 2%, probably a lot higher. If you’ve got one main product or service and your landing page is converting at 10% while your homepage is converting at 2%, why not just replace your homepage with the landing page design? Sure this gets more complicated if you have multiple products and of course there could be client service aspects to your website. But why be constrained to a bloated, Frankenstein of a website out of fear or misguided emotional attachment.
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