Author: Lance Jepson

In 1993, when I first began making websites, I knew nothing about marketing. I was a graphic and layout guy. I was not a sales copy writer. I designed web sites that had a sidebar on the left with links and a header at the top. In many instances I would make two sidebars filled with hyperlinks, one on the right, another on the left, with content in the middle.

One day I received an email from a business owner who had paid me $650 to make a beautiful looking website:

“Dear Lance,
Your website design looks fantastic but a strange happened after I put it up. My sales dropped by 20%. I don’t understand it. My website looks so much better than it use to. Why are people no longer buying my products?”

I was totally mortified. The issue was the number of links on the website. Where blank, dead space had been, we replaced with the following links: Press Release, Awards, Screen Shots, Books, Magazines, About Us, and Privacy Statement.

I put the old website back up and sales, almost instantly, improved.

KISS (Keep It Super Simple)

What this experience taught me about web design is that you need to keep it super simple. Website visitors had so many hyperlinks to choose from that the website had no focus. There was no clear instruction on what we wanted visitors to do. Way back in 1993, we did not even know the single action we wanted visitors to take, other than to buy from us. The web logs showed that very few people even visited the new links we added.

The lesson I learned is that people do not care about your business. Your visitors could care less about your awards or press releases. All that your visitors want to know is what your service costs and is it the solution they are looking for. It really is as animal simple as that.

Many beginners in ecommerce make the critical mistake of hiring a web designer to design their site. The result is a fancy looking website, that can’t convert prospects into customers.

You have 10 seconds to grab your prospects attention. If she feels overwhelmed by 5, 12, or 20 different hyperlinks, she will simply click the back button on her browser and pick the next site listed in Google. If she has so many options presented to her that she can not find what she wants, she will click the back button on her browser and pick the next site listed in Google.

A simple, attention grabbing headline with good sales copy, and a single call to action that you want her to take, beats layout and design when it comes to converting prospects into paying customers.

You must use the precious seconds you have to grab your prospect’s attention and present them with only one option, THE option that you want them to take.

By Lance Jepsen author of Profits That Lie Hidden In Your Web Site

A Little Mistake That Cost An Internet Business Everything (video)

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Filed under: Internet Marketing

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