I have seen many websites built by friends of mine who were starting their businesses. I have also worked on several internet companies, and I always differ myself from the way people make decisions for those websites at the start.
Here is my point: I believe that design and appearance of one website should NOT be decided by us. Indeed, whose is that design for? It’s for the visitors, and our consumers! Don’t you think they should be the one to decide the way the website look then?
Most of the time, when people start an internet business, they allocate a big part of the budget in “design”, neglecting a budget for advertising the website itself (PR, SEO,…) . I think this is a huge mistake here, and 90% of people still does that .
Why is that a mistake? Well, Design does not generate traffic. So why would you spend so much money in this when you need traffic more than anything else.
Here are my points:
- A good design is important for a website, I know, but it does not generate traffic and then sales, and therefore should not be a priority at start. The first priority when you start a website is to generate traffic, and prepare your site to be search engine friendly as having your website friendly from the beginning is key factor for success, in the long term. Your design should be only enough for not pushing visitors away.
- After a few months running your website, you should start having a decent traffic coming from different marketing channels. This is at that time only, that design will become important because your traffic will give you the opportunity to test different design, and then keep the most converting one. Test different design? Google website optimizer is great tool for A/B testing and multivariate testing of landing pages. Keeping the most converting design or appearance of your pages will increase the number of sales of your website without spending an extra penny in advertising. That is how things should work.
- So now, have you noticed that we are not deciding the design in that process, but the visitors do? That is why we should not decide the design. I actually think that because we are running the business, we should be the last people to decide for our customers. Being user centric is simply taking our customers opinion in consideration, and therefore taking our thoughts out of the game.
When you start a website, those are the 3 steps to follow:
- Generate Traffic
- Test different designs
- Keep the most converting design.
That’s All! And don’t give priority to design when you start your website!