Website Marketing Tips

Give your own site an objective review!

We all have a tendency to fall in love with our own work, especially if it took many long hours to create, working well into the night. But after becoming intimately familiar with every colour, every link, every image on the site, we can easily lose sight of its impact on someone who is seeing it for the first time. Directions we thought were obvious don't make sense to them. Links we thought were "right there in front of you!", they can't find.

If you can truly take on an objective mindset, you can try looking over your site on your own, but a better way is to sit a friend down in front of your computer, bring up your site and ask him to do something a potential customer might want to do - find your contact info, place an order, compare products in your catalogue etc. (Random browsing without a specific goal will not highlight the problems!) Then sit back and observe. Don't give any further instructions. Take many notes.

I'll warn you now however, this is a humbling experience! Don't do it if you are feeling defensive! And I'd recommend that you do not ask a spouse to do this task! (Or your next task may be a Google search for divorce lawyer.) Unless you are a genius web designer, you will find out that functions you thought were as obvious as jet contrails in a clear sky will be, for them, like following a black thread at midnight. Colours you thought went wonderfully together will make them bilious. That the light text on dark background effect you liked so much left them squinting, unable to read the text.