8 Things you Need on your Business Website
With website trends changing faster than Taylor Swift’s boyfriends, it can be very hard not to get swept up in the hype of the latest web trend. Since the beginning of the web, there are a few key principles that are still vital to any good website. Here are 8 things I need to see on your business website to give you my money. Let’s break it down. Anybody else remember Netscape? Just me? Ok.
Welcome-to-Netscape
Source: http://home.mcom.com/home/welcome.html
1. Tell me, what do you do?
No buzzwords, no fancy words, no jargon and no corporate speak. As soon as I get on your website, you have about 3 seconds to tell me exactly what you do in a simple, straightforward statement. Avoid words that have become meaningless like leverage and monetization. Don’t be overly philosophical either. I don’t have time for that. If you sell awesome chairs, just say: “We sell awesome chairs.” It helps if you can quickly tell me why they’re awesome. “We sell awesome chairs that were made by elves.” A short video (less than a minute) would be helpful here too. Of course, the more complicated your products or services are, the harder it is to explain what they are concisely, but try. Something like this:
Washio is a California based wash and fold laundry service that picks up your dirty laundry, cleans it, and delivers it to you. The Washio website tells you exactly what they do in 8 words.
2. Tell me, why should I care?
I talk about this quite often with founders and executives who think their company is the greatest thing since < insert awesome thing that isn’t a huge cliché like sliced bread here>. I will try to be gentle.NO BODY CARES ABOUT YOU.NO BODY CARES ABOUT HOW COOL AND SHINY YOUR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES ARE.NO BODY CARES HOW MUCH TIME, MONEY, BLOOD, SWEAT, TEARS AND BROKEN RELATIONSHIPS WENT INTO CREATING YOUR COMPANY. People only care about how your products and services are going to solve their problems. And not just any problem, but the problem they are thinking about and searching for a solution for when they stumble upon your website. Your product may be a great solution to finding great winter tires. But if it’s July and I’m not really thinking about winter tires, I won’t care.
useronboard-supermario-2
Source: User Onboarding
3. Tell me, why should I give you my money?
Let’s assume that I understood what you do, and how your product solves my problem. You still have to tell me why I should buy from you and not the other guy that’s cheaper or more popular. Why should I give you my hard-earned money? It could be: our product is faster, better, stronger, unique or the answer may not have anything to do with your product at all. It could be: we’re in your local area or we won’t keep you on hold for an hour or we give a portion of our profit to a good cause. Something like this:
TOMS Shoes is a company that sells shoes and eyewear. "With every product you purchase, TOMS will help a person in need. One for One.®" That promise was a main factor of TOMS success, because customers felt good about buying TOMS shoes since they knew that it was also going to help someone in need.
4. Tell me, who are you?
Tell me who is on the management team, and if it’s a smaller company, tell me who will I be dealing with. It’s not only reassuring that I will be dealing with real live humans but it will give me a feel of who is behind the brand. It is also a great space to share key experience and achievements of the managerial team to build credibility. Something like this: http://www.freshbooks.com/our-team.php
FreshBooks - Meet Our Employees
Freshbooks offers a cloud accounting solution designed exclusively for small business owners. Their team page gives a great intro about each team member along with a nice picture. It personalizes the company and shows the team's experience.
5. Tell me, why should I trust you?
Even if your product sounds great, and it’s exactly what I’m looking for, I still need to know why I should trust you, especially when I’m paying you or giving you my personal information. How do I know I’m not wasting my time and money on you, especially if I have a pressing problem to solve? At the very least, it’s reassuring to see that you’ve been doing this for a while, or you have certain standards that no one else has. And I would feel more comfortable giving you my money if I see familiar logos of companies that use your product (B2B), testimonials from real customers (and don’t bother faking this because I will know) and the number of customers you have because “1,000 small businesses can’t be wrong”, for example. The last one only works if you have a significant number of customers. Something like this: https://trello.com/
Trello is a project management web app. Let's say you were searching for "project management app" and clicked on theTrello website. Even though you may never heard of Trello, seeing companies like Microsoft and Google listed as their customers will make you trust them more. If you’re just starting out, it may be a good idea to give away some free trials and get customers to give you feedback and recommendations that you can share. Unless of course your product sucks, in which case, forget about the website and fix it or kill it.
6. Tell me, why shouldn’t I worry?
Try it for free, money-back guarantee, we will set it up for you; these types of assurances convince me that I am not taking a huge risk by giving you my money. Something like this (again):
freshbooks
The Freshbooks signup page has 6 statements (see image above) that ease my fear about signing up with them and making a commitment.
7. Tell me, how do I get started?
Ok, so you’ve convince me to try your product, so how do I get started? This part is where some websites go overboard and give you too many choices of actions to take, while other sites give you no actions at all. The idea is to have one clear and concise Call-to-Action that shows your customer how to get started. DON’T:
http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2014/25894/close-the-gap-between-sales-and-marketing
Marketing Profs
MarketingProfs offers real-world education for modern marketers through training, best practices, research and other content. I subscribe to this email newsletter, but once I get on to the actual site, I find the various calls-to-action (CTA’s) distracting.
8. Tell me, what happens next?
Once I sign up, I need to see some sort of confirmation that everything went through and what the next step is. “Thanks for signing up! Look out for your confirmation email” for example. This is also a good opportunity to let me know what I can do with this product or how I can get started. Something like this:
yammer 1
Yammer is an enterprise social network established to enable employees to collaborate in real time. You need your work email to sign up since this is an enterprise product. Once you sign up, you get a simple thank you page telling you to check your email to complete the process. Once you confirm your email, you are directed right to the signup page. This is pretty basic but it clearly explains to the customer what to do next.
Confirmation page
Confirmation email
yammer 3
Confirmation link in the email takes you right to the sign up page.
Don’t get caught up with the latest web trends. Stick with what works for your business and tell your story:
Tell me, what do you do?
Tell me, why should I care?
Tell me, why should I give you my money?
Tell me, who are you?
Tell me, why should I trust you?
Tell me, why shouldn’t I worry?
Tell me, how do I get started?
Tell me, what happens next?
On Creativity and Fear, The Conjoined Twins of Creation
I just listened to “The Source of Creativity” episode on NPR’s TED Radio Hour which covered ideas about where creativity comes from, why we all have it and how we find it.It takes courage to be vulnerable and say “This is me and I made this.” Especially if you created something that you put a lot of yourself into.I challenged myself this past year to do just that. Create something – from idea conception to final result and push it out into the world. No external obstacles, no managers or committees to answer to, no one instruct on what I should do and how I should do it. This is me and I made this.I listened to many business and entrepreneurship podcasts from other people who created something – a product or a business, including Seth Godin’s Startup School, Mixergy, Startup and I learned a lot from all of the stories of trials and tribulations of people who put themselves out there like that. The main thing I learned is just f#$%^@g do it. Get out of your own head, remove the idea that you have to strive to a level of perfection that doesn’t exist and just do it. Stop talking about doing it and just try it.Watch my favorite motivational 1 min video.And of course there were all the negative thoughts that come along with being vulnerable like that. What should I create? What if it sucks? What if people call me a fraud? What if it just gets ignored completely? What if I’m wrong?But as Ken Robinson says “If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.”I decided to treat this project as an experiment; an experiment in creation. And if it flops, at least I would have learned through the process.I started narrowing down my options. I didn’t want to create a physical product because I know nothing about that and it seemed to be a very expensive experiment to conduct. Instead, I opted to create a knowledge product, based on things I know – no need to recreate the wheel for my beta experiment. I decided on creating an online course about Marketing since I’ve been a marketing professional for almost a decade. But Marketing is a pretty broad term so I needed to narrow it down even further. I was seeing a lot of websites that looked pretty but really didn’t have any substance or optimized for getting customers. And I heard from talented designers and developers that were telling me that they knew how to design a site or develop the site, but they didn’t know much about the strategy side of creating a website. So, I thought I could help with that and I created an online course on website strategy called: “How to Create a Website That Doesn’t Suck.”The challenge was to ship it – to put it out into the world before I talk myself out of it, even if it wasn’t perfect because as the maxim attributed to Sheryl Sandburg goes “Done is better than perfect.”I didn’t want to give in to the fear, I wanted to learn and I wanted to try.This is why I was really struck by Elizabeth Gilbert’s view on how creativity and fear are intertwined.“I think what stops people from doing [creative work] is always exactly the same thing, which is fear. What I've discovered over the years is not that you have to be fearless because I don't believe in fearlessness and I don't advise it.I think the only truly fearless people that I've ever met were full blown psychopaths or really reckless 3 year olds and I don't think we want to aspire to be either of those things.I think instead what you have to do is recognize that fear and creativity are conjoined twins. And what I see people doing in their lives is they're so afraid of their fear, that they end up trying to kill it and when they kill it they also kill their creativity because creativity is going into the uncertain and the uncertain is always scary.So what I've had to figure out how to do over the years is to create a mental construct in which I make a lot of space to coexist with fear.To just say to it: "Hey fear listen, creativity and I, your conjoined twin sister, are about to go on a road trip. I understand you'll be joining us, because you always do, but you don’t get to decide anything about this journey that we’re going on. But you can come and I know that you’ll be in the back seat in panic, but mommy's driving and we're going anyway. And you just take it along with you and that seems to work for me.The rest of the time for me it’s just been about showing up every day for the work. And I find that what actually happens is that you begin the work just from a place of diligence and discipline and then if you’re lucky through that process you’ll have moments where inspiration will come in and meet you.”Gilbert’s approach to fear and creativity really struck a chord with me. Don’t try to be fearless, instead, accept the fear as an integral part of the creative process and don’t give into it.And the results of my experiment? I’m putting the final touches on my course to be released before the end of the year, as I promised myself.
I was also honored to present my talk at WordCamp this year, a global conference for WordPress designers, developers and users and I received great feedback from the attendees. It was a great opportunity to test-run my course and learn from all the wonderful creative people who attended. I am very happy to be part of the WordCamp community.
What is fear stopping you from creating?