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I was reading about the book "E-Myth: Mastery" on Amazon and came across this review. As I was reading it, I thought about how applicable the reviewer's thoughts were when applied to website effectiveness and web design. So many user experiences contain too much information and bury their "gold". Worse yet, there may be little "gold" at all, but a lot of fluff. This not only hurts your classic marketing: identity (brand, imagery) - purpose (what you do) - unique selling proposition (why you're better and needed), it also hurts your usability and Search Engine Marketing or SEO. First, let's read the review. Then I'll explain the connection.
This book is a natural buy if you, like me, have read E-Myth: Revisited and absolutely loved it. This book is full of invaluable information, however, it suffers from the greatest flaw ever - it is the most annoying and painstaking read ever!!!!!!!
Let me give you an example of what I mean by rewriting my first paragraph in this book's style:
I was reading about the book "E-Myth: Mastery" on Amazon and came across this review. As I was reading it, I thought about how applicable the reviewer's thoughts were when applied to website effectiveness and web design. So many user experiences contain too much information and bury their "gold". Worse yet, there may be little "gold" at all, but a lot of fluff. This not only hurts your classic marketing: identity (brand, imagery) - purpose (what you do) - unique selling proposition (why you're better and needed), it also hurts your usability and Search Engine Marketing or SEO. First, let's read the review. Then I'll explain the connection.
This book is a natural buy if you, like me, have read E-Myth: Revisited and absolutely loved it. This book is full of invaluable information, however, it suffers from the greatest flaw ever - it is the most annoying and painstaking read ever!!!!!!!
Let me give you an example of what I mean by rewriting my first paragraph in this book's style:
This book is a natural buy if you, like me, like all the other entreprenuers out in the world, who like Susan from the first book, who wants to know more information, and join the thirty some thousand other entreprenuers like them, after you have read the first book E-Myth: Revisited, and absolutely loved it, thought that it was inspiring, insightful, and was written in a well thought out, interesting, easy to read way, and want to read more about building a world class company, one which is measurable to the likes of other world class companies, companies who have succeeded, companies who have applied these principles, who have leaders who understand these qualities and have the spirit, perserverence, energy, ability, vision, and committment to success, both personally and professionally.
90% FLUFF and 10% GOLD
Painful reading wasn't it? When you take a step back and look at your site, how much of what you have there is distracting, defocusing or downright annoying? Everybody loves their own baby. Are you ignoring flaws because it is a part of you? Did an ad agency win an award for your site? Did a tech geek show what he did on your site to his friends because it is so "COOL!". Was your site built for another decade and users view your website through a porthole?
I advise my clients as follows:
- Make 30 seconds count. Within 30 seconds, make it clear who you are, what you do and why you're essential. Eliminate any "eye candy" that doesn't enhance/support that communication or distracts from that exchange. If you're effective, you will reset the timer and buy yourself 30 more seconds.
- Create a reason to care about you through your site. Are you providing value? Do you support a cause that starts to build a closer relationship with your customers? Do you start a conversation that they want to join and can continue later or take with them via Twitter or a subscription?
- Don't be coy. Nobody wants to play word games with you. Be up front about what you do and how you will serve them.
- Know your audiences. Almost every online experience must speak to multiple audiences. Have you taken the time to think through what experience each of them are receiving? Walk in the skin of each persona to see how well you are serving each one with the message that they need to receive. Search engines are an audience too. What do they see when they scan your site? When people click on a search engine result, does what the search engine saw and the human sees match up? If not, you're in trouble. Look at this example from a big web design firm in my area - LINK HINT: The most frequently used keywords found by the search engine are largest and this is for their homepage.
- Be contagious. Everyone likes to feel as though they have found something valuable and then share it with others. "Look what I found!" Make it one-step simple to share.
