EightBlack.

It never ceases to amaze me.

People will live in a house that clearly needs a paint, the spouting could do with a clean, there’s rubbish and crap piled up against the side, the garage is a mess, the kitchen tap leaks and whenever you use the downstairs toilet, the thing wont flush properly. Or at least it does in our house.

(It might have something to do with the fact that our 4 year old uses an entire roll of toilet paper whenever she sits down and does anything. But don’t get me started).

Anyway.

So, why then in the love of all that’s holy do people fret and fart around with aiming for perfection when they either build their first website or re-do the one they have.

Look, all I care about is traffic. And so should you. Park you ego at the door. Along with your freakin’ concern about the pantone colour of your logo.

Let me give you an example.

A week ago we launched this site. It’s nothing more than a fly-trap. A holding page whose sole purpose is to tell you we exist, to try and get you to engage with us by opt-ing in and sort of asking for forgiveness for the fact that the real site is still a little while away.

In the 7 days since we uploaded the site, we’ve received 10 physical enquiries and we’ve had one physical sales call (face to face) and multiple phone conversations.

We did nothing from an SEO perspective. Obviously, because of our “analytics” bent, we installed Google Analytics. On one page!

Now I’d rather have a single holding page than nothing at all. I don’t care if there’s a typo. Someone with a lot of time on their hands will probably email in and let us know. We’ll fix it later.

I see this all the time. People who are overly obsessed with the look and feel rather than whether or not they are on the money with their offer, product or service.

Our intent with the real TaguchiMail site is to dynamically optimise the content so that the people who actually end up visiting and using the site will be the ones who determine what the look and feel is. Same goes with email that we send. We’ll keep you up to date with which emails that we send work best - from an open rate, click thru rate and actual conversion rate.

And don’t tell this is too hard. Any web designer worth their meagre salary can design you 2 concepts for a home page. Your IT dudes will let you know “how difficult” it is to serve the 2 in rotation.

So next time you get into a bru-hah about what you need to do with your own website or your company’s online presence, just remember 2 things. Traffic and conversion. Read Avinahs’ book before you engage any designer. And insist on Google Analytics as part of any build.

We’ve got a client who basically said when their site was 80% ready, he’d launch the thing. His staff thought he was kidding. It was a big, heavy transactional site built in Microsoft.net. But he wasn’t joking. When it was at 80%, he kicked the training wheels off the thing and went live. Now his staff probably had to work like egyptian slaves to catch up - but the thing is because it was built in .net, 10 years later the thing still isn’t right.

But it has made a boot load of money since then and the site transacts a million bucks a day. Every day.

Everytime I run into someone waving their arms about their website look and feel or they’re hyperventilating over the design of their very first site (because they just know they’ll be flooded with traffic in the first hour), I always hark back to the story above.

Sorry about the sermon. Rant over.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 10:08 pm and is filed under Analytics, Websites That Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.