What Type of website are you?

In our experience the common mistake made is that sites are designed to appeal to all customers, of all ages, all requirements and both sexes, after all we don’t want to leave anyone out do we?

Sadly, in many cases the result is a website that end up appealing to nobody, because it has no “soul”, no way of communicating with its audience, as it’s too busy being all things to all men/ women/ children …………………

Where we need to start is deciding what the primary call2action on the site is - typically websites will fall in to one of four primary categories:

1) “Buy me Now”

The primary purpose of this site is to get people to buy stuff from you. Now that may sound pretty straight forward, but it’s not that easy and most websites make it as hard as possible, either by not allowing you to find what you’re looking for, or making you give your life history before you’re allowed to buy from them or by having a convoluted check out procedure or at the very moment that a customer is about to part with some cash, finding a way to prevent then from doing so.

2) "Talk to me"

In this instance they just want to make friends! They’ve given you lots of useful stuff which makes you think they know what they’re talking about and now they want you to get in touch with them. That’s not much to ask is it?

Sadly, many sites will go out of their way to avoid telling you who you should be contacting, by hiding contact details deep in the site. They’ll also not have a newsletter or make it obvious how to sign-up, which is a shame, when this is such a great way of ensuring that you stay in contact with potential customers.

3) “When will I see you again?"

The whole purpose of these sites is to get you to keep on coming back. That way they can “website real estate” on their site to advertising companies on the back of the amount of unique visitors they have.
In this instance the whole purpose of the site is for customers to sign up to a newsletter (which directs them back to the site) or to bookmark the site and to tell their friends about it.

3) “Don’t talk to me!"

Typified by many software companies, they’ve decided that they’d really rather not talk to anyone, but rather it’s more cost effective if the customer helps themselves out by using the website to find the answer to their question. On these sites there will be a series of mechanisms in place to answer your query; however I defy you to find details on how you can speak to a real live person. Do these companies even have any staff or just highly trained computers? The goal on these sites is to try and make an essentially very customer unfriendly situation seem like a positive customer experience .