Business Bricks

Colin Rainsforth says:
Matt. As ever I read your thought-provoking musing today with much relish. The fact that you stick to ideas and points of view rather than prescriptive do’s and don’t make this one of the best business blogs around - keep up the good work.

On the subject of web design and SEO however, you’re right about the binary nature of the choice - but wrong about the attributes of each.

As an example, for my first SEO customer I increased the number of pages in their site to offer more information to the human reader as well as search engines. This attracted 100 fold more traffic within a few months and, through good design, the site now converts around 12%-15% of this traffic to sales generating £250,000 in revenue every month - about a third of the company’s turnover.

To achieve this I simply do things properly and exercise my skills, knowledge and experience to the benefit of my customers rather than swallowing the hype and getting overly analytical about PageRank et al. which seems to have more to do with marketing Google than actually getting results. Let’s face it if you waste your time on this sort of thing then Pay Per Click is going to start looking very attractive.

So much advice continues to pour through to business managers and owners about how to improve their web sites - much of which is really advice for the amateur but ends up forming the basis of poorly written design briefs.

The choice is simple:

Decision 0 - Employ a professional
[a] Tell them what you want to achieve in your business
[b] Listen to what they have to say
[c] Agree a sensible strategy which suits your business plan
[d] Achieve or exceed your goals

Decision 1 - Do it yourself
[a] Learn HTML, CSS Javascript etc. etc.
[b] Get bogged down maintaining your site instead of running your business
[c] Cut your site down to size so it’s less of a headache
[d] Hope you achieve your goals

And believe me I see this all too often. By coincidence a competitor of the example client mentioned above also approached me with regard to improving their site at around the same time but chose to do it himself. The result has been exactly as I describe above and his company is moving increasingly toward failing entirely as he spends more time trying to be a web designer than doing anything else.
by Colin Rainsforth on 12 Jan

Nikola Mitev says:
Hi Matt, I believe I wrote the email in question, but don’t see the decision you are talking about as binary. It looks like one and it certainly is if all that matters is page count. However you refer to the number of pages in a site in the context of making it clearer and promoting conversions. I do not think that making the website bigger necessarily makes it less clear. I still agree that the homepage should be short, clear and straightforward, but don’t see where’s the problem with having more information available for the few people who will have the inclination to read it – especially if this added information increases traffic.

Everything in its extreme is damaging. For some sites this means they should not be cut in half, and for others that they should not be doubled. Prescribing one or the other without looking at the site is most likely a mistake.

Colin, congratulations for your stunning success with your first SEO customer, you must have done an amazing job. I intend to optimize my site myself and here is why:
– I don’t need much knowledge of CSS or JavaScript to optimize my website
– The most important and time consuming part of SEO is rewriting or creating new text. A good web designer should ask me to write it myself anyway. The business owner knows best what he wants to tell his potential customers and he should be responsible for most or all of the text on his website. A web designer, in contrast, may know very well the rules of search engines, but this is very likely to lead to excessive optimization, or as Matt calls it, Macdonaldisation.

The last time I was redesigning my site I did look for professional help, but I found precious few designers who would work with me in mind, and not their portfolio… and unfortunately I could not afford them. I hope you are one of these few, and wish you the best of success with your work.
by Nikola Mitev on 14 Jan

Liz Marsh says:
When I got a professional to design my website I was shocked and petrified when he told me to let him know what content I wanted. For me the content is paramount and I know enough to know that I am not a professional copywriter! It never occurred to me that he wouldn’t have a copywriter of some description on board to help with that especially in view of the large sums of money involved in website design!
by Liz Marsh on 20 Jan

Brenda Buckingham says:
In three years I have paid extortionate amounts to two web designers and an optimization company. I still have not had a single customer buy on the site. I now do my own web site and will be overjoyed when I sell something because it will help me recoup the money I have wasted on professionals.
by Brenda Buckingham on 21 Apr