EightBlack.

This site is simple. Effective. And it works.

I found them originally via PPC (pay per click). As soon as I landed on the page, I knew exactly what they did (and it was exactly what I wanted).

More importantly, I knew what to do.

And buying was easy.

Would your site pass the same criteria?

Sometimes simple is all you need.

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.

I seem to be knee deep in start up’s lately. And proudly, all Aussie. Well, actually - that’s patriotic nonsense. In fact, I would argue that it’s much harder for a start-up to get traction downunder than it is offshore. Our funding sources are too limited. As is the talent pool.

If you put down on your tax return “Venture Capitalist” in the box occupation, 2 guys in a government vehicle would come around, put you in an immigration detention centre and a very unpleasant women with a rubber glove would proceed to crawl up your arse with a very large toilet brush.

Or something like that.

Before you start wailing, I know there are always exceptions to the rule.

I reckon Hippo has legs. Thats why we’re delighted they’re our newest client. I think Chris and Johnny are on to something. And I definitely think Mark and Rob are going to give the search industry a run for it’s money.

We’re also having a crack at something ourselves. Too early to tell but I’m listening to Marc Andreessen and reading this post by Rich Skrenta and Uncov.

God, I pissed myself laughing when I read this on Uncov. Open the page. And then look to the right hand corner. Exactly.

I remember being at Guy Kawasaki’s Garage.com conference in New York back in Web 1.0 (or whatever you want to refer to it as). I remember being interviewed 3 times by PeoplePC and contemplating moving from the midwest to San Francisco with a 4 month year old son. God, I’m glad I didn’t.

Remarkably, PeoplePC is still alive.

The crazy thing is that even amongst all the hysteria back then, people’s logic sort of went south. I know mine did. I got carried away with the internet dream without understanding the most important thing.

Who are you going to sell it to? (the”it” being the product, the service, the application).

I remember Chris Mander telling me a little while ago he was leaving Theme Park to go off into the wild blue yonder of start-up land. Ok, I thought it. Must be a good idea idea because Theme Park was a pretty well regarded digital outfit. And he already had the coolest offices in Richmond.

His idea lauched a little while ago. His email sat in my inbox under one of those classifications “must get around to reading”.

I’m glad I did.

I think Docoloco has got legs. Its clever. And if it gets traction, it will do well.

Local search has got a lot of room left in it and Docoloco is approaching local search in an innovative way - by letting the user base populate the database. Is it scalable? I think so. There’s also the potential for a social networking element in addition to a transactional portal to spring up and I’m sure Chris and his partner in crime Johnny have got a vision for the future about where they want to take their application once critical mass has been reached.

Its easy to see the Theme Park influence in the design of Docoloco - its sleek, elegant and above all is simple to use.

The video tour is here. Bravo is all I can say.

First there was Hitwise. Founded 9 years ago. Recently sold to Experian for US$240 million.

Then came Seek. First big break when Packer first bought in. Market cap now approximately A$2.1 billion

And now, MyLiveSearch. Yet to launch. Google sniffing. Apparently, its founder, Rob Gabriel is jumping on a plane next month to Silicon Valley to hawk his new technology. He wont have to go far. If the Google Aus folks are even slightly interested in what MyLiveSearch has to offer, Rob will asked to stop by 1600 Ampitheater Parkway for a chat.

3 out of 3 aint bad.

Last month, during the System Seminar, I sat through a presentation by Dave Taylor. One of the slides jumped out and hit me - which is strange in itself, given that I reckon I am impervious to powerpoint as a result of the tens of thousands of slides I have endured.

The title: “Your homepage is dead”.

Then today, Seth Godin’s post is about the same thing. He titled his rant “Blow Up Your Home Page“.

It’s true when you think about it. If you run an ecommerce site and you’re driving traffic via Adwords, then your homepage is useless (because of the obvious strategy of driving that traffic to a designated landing page which you no doubt will be split testing). If you are doing anything less, then consider yourself a generous, anonymous donor to Google’s bank account.

I’d hate to think in this day and age, that people are doing business with companies and individuals based on the look and feel of one page. Basic analytics will tell (no prove) to you that this simply isnt true.

The only point of the home page in my mind, is to get the visitor to click forward. To engage. To want to take another step. In fact, its maybe even more basic than that. Its sole purpose maybe to simply reassure people that they have indeed arrived at the right place.

For example, if you want to book a flight on Webjet and you type into your browser www.webjet.com.au, the first thing you are going to see is a big, ugly splash page with an enormous red and white mouse, and the Webjet logo with an unmistakable “enter” button underneath it. No doubt about it. This is what you wanted. In most cases, you are there to search for flights - and if you are a returning visitor, then you know what to do. If you’re new to the site, it’s obvious that it isnt the Lindsay Lohan fan club.

We’re talking to a potential new client at the moment. Here’s what I think runs through someones head before they decide to do business with us. In this case, the person was a referral. His initial contact was via phone (ie he instigated the call and left a message). I’d like to think this was what he might write down if he was asked about us:

• We returned his call within 24 hours
• We showed up on time for the first meeting
• We didnt overpromise
• We followed up with an email and phone call
• We took his subsequent phone calls
• We delivered the promised proposal
• It was less than 10 slides (our company policy no matter how big or small the project)
• We kept asking questions and got to know his business
• We demonstrated knowledge in the space we were consulting in (ie Adwords)

Now of course he visited our website. But he didnt spend hours pouring over the look and feel of it. In this case, he’d already met us and knew that we were “real”. Hopefully, our corporate site provided enough content for him to tick off another box in his evaluation checklist of us.

Homepages are amazingly qualitative by nature. It’s sort of like asking someone “Do you think my kids, wife, partner, house is/are attractive?”.

In our case, our business is primarily in the field of consulting. That by its very nature is elastic. You dont engage any consulting company based on their design of one page. And if you do, you need your head read. That, or you’re a government department. Anyway, my priority with our corporate website is to get people to engage in a conversation via the blog. The very thing you’re reading now.

It’s important that our site demonstrate to its audience technical competence. Which it should. Not perfect, but technically correct.

It should be a part of your identity. Your character. When our design firm first came up with the concept of our new home page, most of our team didnt like the design. It didn’t confirm to what they thought a website should be. No matter, I have a simple saying - “the people with the gold get to make the rules”. Which is true in a benevolent dictatorship like ours.

But the thing that disappointed me most about their intial reaction was the fact that their comments were based on emotion, not evidence. Good online marketers are devoid of all emotion. They trust analytics, data, and fall in love with abandonment rates. As they should. And they constantly test.

Yes, the technical aspects of our site, (any site for that matter) should be correct. Like the quality of the code, the SEO compliance, etc etc. And of course people should be able to tell what you or your business is about quickly. But the content (and the need for constantly updated and fresh content) is far more valid. As is insisting an analytics package (like Google Analytics or Omniture) are installed. Knowing where your visitors go once they arrive is far more important. Knowing why they leave is critical.

Facts like 2967 visits, 5349 page views, 1.8 pages per visit, an average time on site of 2 minutes, a 70% bounce rate and 70% of visits to the site were new - these hard numbers are what keeps me awake. Because these are the real, undisputable facts from our blog for the last 30 day period.

Yes, our corporate homepage is important. To prove to people we exist. But it’s time is limited. Blogs are the future.

In this Web 2.0 day of social networking, the conversation on the blog, the opt-in rate to the blog, the people who send me emails and truly “enage” with me are the only numbers I’ll listen to.

I’d be interested to see if you agree.

The chapter is titled “The Marketing Crisis That Money Wont Solve”

Think about this statement. Gets your attention right?

It’s the opening page of Seth Godin’s book, Permission Marketing - and he talks about the “attention crisis” that we face as consumers.

TV everywhere, mobile phones that we can’t escape, SMS or text mania bombarding us, email inboxes overflowing every day.

And the internet.

Godin goes on to say that its physically impossible to keep up with the myriad marketing messages that flood our lives daily.

Many marketers think that their website is simply an extension of their physical marketing.

They approach it as they approach their corporate brochure ware.

At The Eight Black Group, our passion is building great websites. Websites that work. Not websites that win awards for creativity.

In order for you to understand what constitutes good website construction, I think you need to have a solid understanding of search. And that search powers commerce. Period.

Most people will get to your site via a search engine.

You also need to understand the importance of “landing pages” and opt-in email.

Two critical elements of any decent web strategy.

We stand for 3 things when it comes to the online space.

1. Content

2. Continuing Education of that of ourselves and our clients and

3. Relentless testing

The best marketers in the world are ruthless split testers.

The best online marketers in the world are the same.

Forget branding. The average consumer couldn’t care a rats fat freckle about you or your brand.

Success on the internet is all about speed and relevance. And just wait until we get decent broadband speeds. The issue about speed and relevance will only compound.

Remember, good website design is about understanding that the website visitor is not reading a brochure.

She’s time poor, multi-tasking, looking for something (researching), or ready to buy.

Simplicity, Relevance and understanding “scan” versus “read” is what will bring you success with your website.

Design your site with “scan-ability” and not “read-ability” in mind.