Why Most Web Sites Fail

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Chapter 3: Designing with Purpose in Mind

Many Web designers start with this chapter. They don’t consider the discussions presented in the previous chapters and prefer to jump in at designing an interface. It’s possible that the designer may have considered content, but in my experience, most designers go straight to the aesthetic. Of course, having read the previous chapters, you now know better than that.

Before you start thinking about the aesthetic of your site, you should think about the purpose of the site and what business goals it should be designed to support. Once you have that in hand, it still isn’t time to scratch out some design ideas. First, you’ll need to think about page structure and site hierarchy. Where will certain pages exist? Will these pages be available to everyone, or will they require a registration, login password, or other special key to access specific content?

Of course, the structure of your site will depend on which goal you need to support. If you are designing microsites to support multiple goals, you will need to support each of the goals as explained in the sections below, plus you need to decide what to do with your main Web site. The information in the section “Design for the multi-purpose site” on page 35 will help you understand your options to support multiple goals.

What will you do with this information? You will design a site chart. This chart will help you to understand the relationship of each page to every other page. You will be able to see how pages are linked, and thus, the paths that you leave open to your visitors. Ideally, you will be leading them down a specific path, one that supports your business goal. During the process of creating the site chart – in fact, I’ll predict that within a minute of beginning the exercise – a flood of questions will arise, questions that you had not previously considered. By simply drawing a chart, you will begin to see things that you had previously not been able to grasp. It is far easier to change your mind and make alterations at this stage than to modify code and file structures that have already been implemented. Therefore, you will save a lot of effort and frustration by creating a chart.

Each goal has a unique strategy, which is why you must identify which goal you are trying to support and why your site should only support one specific goal. The following pages delve into the uniqueness of each of the four major goals.

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Design for lead generation

When you are designing a site for lead generation, the real goal is to convert visitors into sales leads. At a minimum, this conversion requires you to get the visitors’ contact information. Therefore, the site that is optimized for lead generation will:

• Funnel the traffic toward pages that will ask visitors for their information.
• Provide value to the prospect in exchange for their information.
• Employ microsites to target specific audiences.
• Funnel traffic to get contact information

The best lead generation strategies funnel the traffic in such a way that visitors have only two choices: to decide whether or not to share their contact information. Thus, you do not want to present your visitors lots of options. Don’t distract them with your company wiki or blog, for example, unless you plan on asking them for their contact information to gain access to those sections.
Naturally, getting contact information from your visitors is a vital part of supporting a lead generation goal. However, what information should you be gathering? Here are some things to consider:

What is a sales lead in your organization?

The answer to this question helps you decide what sort of information you need to get from your visitors. This is more difficult than it sounds. The more information you ask for, the fewer leads you are going to get. However, when asking fewer questions, the quality of the leads will usually go down. In other words, think about all of your resources. If you want to get as many leads as possible, ask fewer questions. Yet, you will likely be asking your sales people to sift through more lower quality leads than before, so you may need to find a way to scrub the leads before handing them off to your senior sales people.

What will you “give” in order to “get”? (free trial, appraisal, kit, white paper, case study, gift card, etc.)
Once you know what it is that you will be providing to prospects in exchange for their contact information, you need to decide how to deliver that item to the prospect. The answer to this question should help you understand the mechanisms involved in the exchange with your new prospect. You can, in fact, provide many different things to the prospect. Yet, you don’t want to present too many options. If a visitor has come via a specific keyword search, you have a pretty good idea what kind of enticement you should exchange for their contact information (for example, if someone came to your site using the keyword “increase sales leads,” you probably should provide them with a white paper that provides such information). This can always be further optimized. For example, you may learn that people searching on one keyword are looking for a demo, whereas someone searching on a different keyword is looking for information, like a white paper. Keep these things in mind, and you will have a lot more success converting visitors to leads.

How will you and/or the sales team receive the lead?

This question helps you understand what sort of technologies will be needed to support the strategies you wish to employ. For example, is the lead delivered by e-mail to one or two individuals or will it automatically be uploaded to a larger database?

How will you store the lead?

The answer to this question helps answer other questions, such as if a database should be employed.

How will you expect the sales team to follow up with the lead?

This question provides a better understanding of what information you need from the leads generated as well as what technologies should be employed. For example, how will the sales team access the information if they travel frequently? Will someone first screen the leads and pass on the qualified leads to the sales team? If all leads are followed up by phone call, you obviously need a phone number. If you expect to add their information to your e-mail newsletter list, then you need their e-mail address. If you don’t need both, don’t ask for both. Remember, the more information you ask for, the lower your chances are at converting the visitor. But you need to get the minimal amount of information required to qualify the information as a lead, so be thoughtful in your approach.

Provide value in exchange for information

The discussion up to this point has been one of finding singular clarity, understanding the one goal that you want to support. Such focus is a good thing. Yet, at this juncture, you can expand your options.

Converting visitors to sales leads may require multiple enticements. For example, you may want to get visitors to your site with a free product tour. Let them access it without providing their contact information. But don’t give them everything at once. If they are intrigued by what they see, offer a free product demo in return for their information.

A time-honored tradition for getting people to offer up their contact information is to provide some value to the prospect in return for their information. This could be a free trial of the product, a free appraisal, a free product demo, a “kit” of some sort, a white paper, or a case study. Whatever it is, it needs to be something that your visitors will perceive as some value.

By providing some value up front (in the previous example it was the product tour), you are offering some value to the customer. Don’t be afraid to just give something away. Then, step it up a notch. Offer something for a price. Not cash, per se, just their contact information.

Your visitors’ contact information is incredibly valuable. They know this and many are not going to give it up easily. If you are going to have any chance at succeeding with this strategy, you need to build up trust. Some people guard their privacy better than their money, so you have to help them feel comfortable that they are doing the right thing. If, at every step along the way, they are getting something of value, it will be increasingly easier for you to receive what you want.

Understanding this will help you build the proper marketing materials to support this goal. Better yet, turn it around. Don’t look at this from the perspective of what are you willing to give prospects in exchange for their information. Do your best to discover what your target market would view as valuable, and offer that in exchange for their information.

By getting the participant to participate in the process, you are building trust. You are also getting them comfortable with saying "yes" to you. In the sales processes, this is known as getting a succession of yeses. If you can get a prospect saying “yes” to even the smallest of questions, you are building momentum towards a big final “yes” to the question “do you want to buy my product or services?” If you can start that succession of yeses on the Web site, you will be setting your sales team up for success.

For example, if each step of your lead generation strategy provides value, your visitor can assume that the next time you offer something, it too will have value. When you offered a free product tour, your visitor gave up her time to look at it. She risked nothing, and invested only her time. If she came away from it with a sense of value gained, then she will be more willing to sign up for the free product demo. You have laid a foundation of trust with her and now she is comfortable giving up something else – her contact information – in return for something of equal or greater value. This succession of yeses helps your lead generation efforts – not to mention the good will it creates during the sales cycle.

Using microsites to target specific audiences

Web site strategies begin with driving traffic to the site. Regardless of the site structure and all of the other things discussed in this guide, if you don’t have visitors, you will not be supporting your goals. Perhaps the most important tools in this respect are search engines.

Search engine optimization and paid advertising spots on search engine results is where most of your traffic will originate. It doesn’t matter if you are doing banner ads or other marketing efforts, if you ignore your search engine strategies, you are ignoring a substantial pool of traffic.

Search engines are a great way for people to find answers to their questions, but they are also wonderful in another way. By recognizing what it is that your potential visitor is looking for, you can craft a response tailored to his or her question. Of course, you don’t want your entire site to respond only to that one query, thus the best strategy to take advantage of this opportunity is the creation of microsites.

Up to this point, you have been trying to focus on a specific goal for your site and you are creating specific strategies and tactics to support that goal. In the case of microsites, you will have a specific sub-goal. Its main task will fit within the guidelines of lead generation, but it will also have the specific task of supporting a particular audience.

For example, if you are using Google AdWords, you can bid to associate your term with specific search keywords. Since you know what keywords people are using to find your ad, you should have a good idea of what is important to them. You can now talk to your visitors by pointing the link for that Google AdWord to your microsite that supports that keyword. Since you know under which search terms your AdWord appeared, you can speak directly to what interests your prospect. Since you can speak directly to what concerns them, your chances of converting that visitor to a sales lead have gone up exponentially.

Think of it as meeting someone at a party, and they say to you “my company has a problem with ‘x’. I wish we could find some way to solve this problem.” When you respond, you don’t give them your entire company pitch and give them options on learning about the entire product line, or tell them about your cool company wiki, or the CEO’s blog, or how the company was founded, or what jobs are available at the company. Instead, you answer the question and tell the person exactly how you can solve the problem. Then, you ask for their business card and tell them that you’ll get more information to them as soon as you can. This is what your Web site can – and should – do.

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Design for sales

Designing a site for sales is not terribly different than designing a site for lead generation. Much like lead generation, a site that is optimized to support a sales goal will:

• Funnel the traffic toward pages that asks visitors for their information.
• Provide value to the prospect before you ask for their money.
• Employ microsites to target specific audiences.

There is one major difference, however. In a lead generation strategy, you are trying to get someone’s contact information. In a sales strategy, you are trying to get their money. This may seem obvious enough, but it is important to articulate, because many sales-based Web sites get confused and want to turn the process into a lead generation opportunity, leading to confusion and inefficiency. While the site might be generating both leads and sales, it is not optimized for either, and the one really important goal (be it sales or leads) is not fully utilizing the available resources. Remember the dump truck? Well, it’s a pickup truck again.

Funnel traffic to flow towards purchase

There are essentially two ways you can sell things from your Web site: direct from the Web or by receiving phone calls/faxes. Odds are, you will likely want to employ one of these two options, depending on the price of your offerings, your offerings, and your target demographic. It is acceptable to provide both options. In fact, when it comes to sales, you want to give the buyer as many ways to contact you as possible. This part of the strategy requires total flexibility on your part. To limit prospects here means you are limiting your sales.

Regardless of how your customers buy from you, the main strategy for converting prospects into paying customers is the same: funnel the traffic into areas that give visitors easy access to the mechanism that allows them to buy. If that’s a phone number, provide it for them at every turn. If you want them to buy from the Web site, provide a link to the online shopping cart. Placing this information in the header and/or footer of every page is a typical solution, but the specifics on where this information appears depends on the nature of your site’s design and layout.

Provide value before you ask for the money

Once again, we will employ the sales strategy of getting a succession of yeses. Providing value to your prospects early will loosen them up and make them more likely to buy from you when it comes time to do so. As the price and complexity of the item you are offering for sale goes up, your need to provide this sort of value becomes more important.

For example, if you are offering inexpensive impulse-buy products, like music, you need to acquire fewer yeses to convert the visitor to a customer. Even sites like Amazon.com allow you to sample the music and books before you buy them. In other words, even with relatively inexpensive items, you still need to provide some sort of value to the prospect before they decide to buy. But you don’t have to provide them with too many; in fact, if you have too many steps or distractions before the purchase, you may discourage the purchase.

However, if you are selling items that costs hundreds of dollars, you will likely need to build up a lot more trust and provide more value before that sales conversion happens. In this case, odds are, you are really trying to get a sales lead that you hope to convert to a sale later on in the sales cycle. Make sure you think this through and articulate what your goal really is before you put your plan into action. A site, and therefore a business, that is focused on selling, but is really trying to generate leads, will fail miserably.

Using microsites to target specific audiences

As mentioned in the lead generation strategy, regardless of any specific goal, all Web site strategies begin with driving traffic to the site. Forget about the site structure and all of the other things discussed in this guide; if you don’t have visitors, you will not be supporting your goals. Perhaps the most important tool in this respect are search engines.

Search engine optimization and paid advertising spots on search engine results are where most of your traffic originates.Whether you use banner ads or other marketing efforts, ignoring your search engine strategies means ignoring a substantial pool of traffic.

Search engines are a great way for people to find answers to their questions, but they are also wonderful in another way. By recognizing what it is that your potential visitor is looking for, you can craft a response tailored to his or her question. Of course, you don’t want your entire site to respond only to that one query, thus the best strategy to take advantage of this opportunity is the creation of microsites.

Up to this point, you have been focusing on a specific goal for your site. In the case of microsites, you will have a specific sub-goal. Its main task will fit within the guidelines of the overall sales goal, but it will also have the specific task of supporting a particular audience.

For example, if you are using Google AdWords, you can bid to associate your term with specific search keywords. Since you know what keywords people are using to find your ad, you should have a good idea of what is important to them. You can now talk to your visitors by linking that Google AdWord to the microsite that supports that key word. Since you know what search terms your AdWord appeared, you can speak directly to what interests your prospect. Since you can speak directly to what concerns them, your chances of converting that visitor into a paying customer have gone up exponentially.

For example, if you sell scientific instruments, like microscopes and the like, you can buy sponsored ads for keywords for each of your products. Thus, when someone is looking for graduated cylinders, they will be brought directly to your microsite about graduated cylinders and can buy it right away. If you took that same visitor and pointed them to the home page of your site in hopes that they would have found what they were looking for – and possibly buy even more than just graduated cylinders – you would have lost the sale.

Yet, since you were able to satisfy a specific need, you have converted this visitor into a paying customer and a lead. Follow up with this person with targeted direct mail or as part of an e-mail campaign in hopes of selling them additional items. But don’t hope that this person will buy everything on their first visit to your site.

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Design for thought leadership

Let’s face it, there are a million blogs out there. And not everyone reads blogs everyday. However, do a search for something that matters to you, and odds are, there will be a blog or two that shows up near the top of the search results. Blogs are, for some, reading material. For most everyone else, blogs are reference material.

While it would be great to create a dedicated readership, this is not a realistic goal, especially in the short term. What you want to do is create easy access to specific articles so that people will find them as reference points.

Your thought leadership goal will be measured in part by getting your Web site recognized in search results. And if you can get your site recognized in as many different, but relevant, topics, you build credibility among the general population.

A great example of focusing on a thought leadership goal is Guy Kawasaki, founder and Managing Director for Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm providing access to angel and venture capital for seed- and early-stage companies.

Mr. Kawasaki promotes himself and his company as thought leaders on entrepreneurship and small business. He writes articles for magazines and Web sites, speaking at conferences, and serves as the moderator on discussion panels. He also has his own blog (http://blog.guykawasaki.com). All of this speaks to and about small business and entrepreneurship and relates back to Garage Technology Ventures.

If you go to Garage Technology Ventures (http://www.garage.com), you get a little more about the company, what they do, and their relationship to small business. However, there are no overt mentions of Guy Kawasaki. There’s no mention of his blog. There is, in fact, nothing on the company’s Web site that indicates that they are “thought leaders.”

This is because this goal is being accomplished outside of this particular venue. They have optimized their ability to be perceived as thought leaders through the leadership and opinions of Guy Kawasaki. By having someone as smart, energetic, charismatic, and any other adjectives one might associate with Mr. Kawasaki, Garage Technology Ventures assumes those same characteristics and becomes a magnet attracting those who also want to be associated with these values. This is the benefit of thought leadership, and, to a large extent, the brand.

Allow visitors and search engines to easily find and reference content

When designing for thought leadership, the key to success is easy access. You don’t want to put up obstacles for visitors to get around. You don’t want to dissuade them from coming to your site. You don’t want to make them sign up or give up on your site. You want them to know what you know. You want to help them. You want them to read your opinions on specific topics of interest. The same goes for search engines.

Search engines cannot, as a rule, get past pages that require special passwords, logins, or other “protected” pages. If you want to get people to find your Web site during a reference search (and you do), then you want the search engines to be able to have access to all the content on your site.

Using microsites to target specific audiences

Blogs are perhaps the most efficient way to establish a thought leadership position. While you can use other methods, such as white papers and the like, you will have to work fairly hard at getting that content recognized. In the end, you want to use as many different methods as possible.
However, not all companies have the resources to create white papers quickly. If this is the case in your company, blogs are probably the way to go. Blogs usually have built in methods of publicizing the site, which is one reason why blogs are such efficient vehicles for thought leadership strategies.
But, again, you want to make sure that your content speaks to specific individuals. If you have white papers, published articles, and the like, you will likely want to place them in a specific microsite. For example, the main corporate Web site, if it is supporting a thought leadership position, would be an ideal place to house the white papers. However, you may want to set up a unique URL to host blogs for individuals. Each of these unique URLs would be considered a microsite.

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Design for branding

The one goal that permeates all the rest is branding. The overall experience and look-and-feel of your site will be perceived by visitors regardless of the specific goal you are trying to achieve. Your site design, logo, color scheme, site navigation, and many other factors all help create your company’s brand. And all of these things can be present while supporting any of the goals.

Let’s look at Garage Technology Ventures again. Notice that their Web site (http://www.garage.com) and Guy Kawasaki’s blog (http://blog.guykawasaki.com) don’t have much in common. This is a good thing. The brand of Garage Technology Ventures is protected and not over-extended.

Yet, there are at least two specific goals that one could have that would fit under the banner of branding that go beyond the look-and-feel. If your business model focuses on generating revenue via advertising, you are really looking towards a “branding” goal. This is what media sites, like ESPN.com, CNN.com, and portal sites like Yahoo.com do. They generate revenue based on advertising, but bring customers to their site (as opposed to others like them) based on their branding.

The other specific goal that one could have that would be considered branding, is customer support. A customer support (or technical support) component is a unique entity, in that the measuring sticks for success sometimes are opposite those of other goals. Where most goals require the visitor to linger to be successful, the goal of the customer support site is usually to get questions answered as quickly as possible.

Design for advertising

Designing a site for advertising revolves around several things. First, you need to ensure that you have a page layout that supports space for your paying advertisers. At the same time, you want to make sure that you are optimizing your experience for your visitors. Some of the best places for advertising are locations on the page where the eye of a visitor naturally wanders. However, these are likely to be great locations for navigation items as well.

This is a tricky balancing act and shouldn’t be taken lightly. Think about your favorite sports information site. Why do you get your information from there and not from another Web site? Sure, it may be because of the writing and maybe because of a specific reporter or two. But most sites use the same reporting services, like Associate Press, to serve up their news. What is different from site to site, is layout, look and feel. In other words, branding.

When designing a site around an advertising model, you want to optimize for the visitor experience. The more visitors you have, the more revenue you can command from your advertisers. Therefore, plan out what kind of content you are going to be offering, and think about how your visitors are going to be navigating to these areas.

Yet you don’t want to forget about your advertisers. Think about what would be attractive to them, and who they might be. There are lots of advertising models out there, and if you haven’t thought about which one you are going to offer, this is a great time to start, because the different models require different strategies and technologies in the structure of your site.

For example, if you are going to be charging your advertisers on a cost-per-thousand basis (also known as CPM, which means that your advertisers are paying $x for each 1,000 page views of their ad), then you’ll need to know how you are going to serve (publish) the ad and how you are going to track each time it appears on your site. You also need to know how you are going to prove to your customer that you have indeed served their ad the specified number of times.

Other models include, cost-per-click (where the advertiser pays only for the clicks generated from the site), cost-per-acquisition (in where the advertiser only pays for leads that are generated from your site), and term-based, or ads that are served for a specific time frame, with specific start and end dates. The technical implications of each of the models differ significantly (term-based models being fairly simple, cost-per-acquisition being one of the more complicated). So think this through before you get to the execution phase of your site design.

Design for customer support

Customer support and online training sites are somewhat unique, in that support sites want to expedite the visitors’ time on the site, meaning that you want to get visitors in and out with what they need as quickly as possible. Any distractions disrupt your ultimate goal of customer support.

Design for the multi-purpose site

It’s not uncommon to support more than one of the four major goals. However, if you expect your visitors to decide which path to take, you will undermine all of your goals. Therefore, you will want to create microsites. Each microsite supports a specific goal.

Rank what is important

The most important goal will be the goal that the main Web site supports. This is the site on all of your printed collateral and will be the URL that most people try to find when looking for your company. How do you know which is the most important goal? It’s the goal that, if not properly supported, will cause other strategic business and marketing plans to suffer.

It is possible that strategies to bring in traffic for specific goals will overlap. For example, your strategy for bringing in traffic to different microsites might use similar tactics if you are supporting lead generation and thought leader goals. If this is the case, you need to know which is more important and use the strategies for your primary goal. In the end, you will need to measure and analyze the results of your implementation, so don’t be afraid to make a decision and commit. There will be plenty of opportunity to change tactics later.

Make microsites based for each goal

Ultimately, the best strategy for a multi-purpose site is to create microsites for each one of the goals you hope to support. Go back and look at the strategies for each of the different goals, and create a microsite that supports that goal with those strategies in mind.

Do You Want to Learn More ?

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"Well written, thought out and provides a great step by step for the novice marketer or web-master. I think will be a great starting point for many who are venturing into, for them, un-chartered waters; a good marketing insight for those that are more technical than conceptual; and a good refresher for those that need to step things up a notch."

Peter C. McIntosh
Marketing Director
Cowan + Associates, Worthington, OH