Website development and design - 4 common myths

In the magical world of website development and design, there are many myths. Here are 4 that we come across repeatedly. Understanding them might help you avoid wasted time and money.

Myth 1. The best person to create my website is a graphic designer

If you were building a hotel, would you get the interior designer to choose the location, draw up the plans, construct the building, put in the wiring and plumbing, install the telephone and Internet system? Of course you wouldn’t!

If you were constructing a website, would you get the graphic designer to draw up the site plan, do your market (keyword) research, advise on content, choose and install plug-ins, optimise your pages and blog, organise subscription and booking facilities? Possibly.

This is one of the first mistakes many small businesses make when they decide to develop - or redevelop - their website.

Don’t get me wrong. Today’s graphic designers are usually capable of building a website. But as a designer, they are highly and uniquely qualified to do what they do best - design. This makes them extremely valuable to some aspects of your business, including your website.

But designers aren’t necessarily web developers, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find one who has all the skills you need to create an effective website. Good designers will themselves tell you that you need a team to build a website - online marketer, graphic designer, web developer and copy writer.

Having a good-looking site is nice, but if no one finds it, if it’s not user-friendly, if people can’t subscribe or interact with you once there, if you’re not optimising your content and maximising your resources - you’ve wasted good money.

Myth 2. When someone comes to my website, I need to grab their attention

Tourism Victoria reported some results published by TRA (Tourism Research Australia) in May 2008, regarding the way international visitors use the Internet when planning and booking a holiday.

Alongside the expected result that a huge number are researching their holiday online, the survey established that:

“Only 12% of international tourists in 2007 … used the Internet to help decide whether or not to visit Australia. Fifty-five per cent used the Internet for general information after deciding to visit Australia.”

Visitors to your website are already converted to the idea of visiting your destination and want more information about the destination itself and/or the experiences/services you provide.

Your website isn’t a billboard attempting to attract attention by distracting viewers from other things. It doesn’t need to shout, flash or entertain with moving images. It needs to inform - easily and quickly.

Looking at it another way, if someone walks into a retail store, the assistant doesn’t invite them into the store, they ask, ‘how can I help you?’

Make it easy for your site visitors to find the information they’re already looking for. If you make it hard for them to fight their way through the moving images and flashing colours, or if your site takes too long to load because of the complexity of your home page, your site visitors are more likely to bounce off and try the next link on the search list.

As David Meerman Scott says in The New Rules of Marketing & PR:

“Guess what? When I arrive at a site, you don’t need to grab my attention; you already have it!”

Myth 3. To create an effective website, all I have to do is put my brochure online

Transferring a brochure online to make a website is often the first step in online marketing, but a website is a bit like a sailing boat. It won’t go anywhere unless you remember to give it sails.

Or to put it another way: would you print thousands of copies of your brochure and then leave them sitting in the warehouse?

A website needs sails. It needs to be distributed, placed under the noses of interested visitors - and it can do so much more than a brochure. It can be a sales office too.

We have a simple model to explain what you need to do when you develop a website:

Presence: build the site
Traffic: help your prospective visitors to find your website with keyword analysis and search marketing
Conversation: enable them to contact you, comment on your blog posts, subscribe to your newsletter
Conversion: give them a reason to book now and make it easy
Follow-up: keep in contact through your email database with news and special offers

Building a site without search marketing and content marketing will give you a site without traffic. And a flashy site without keyword research, authoritative content and clear navigation prevents your traffic from sticking around.

A site with plenty of visitors who stick around, but no subscription facilities, blog or clear contact information is a site without conversation.

Neglect your testimonials, accreditations and an easy book-and-pay facility, and you’re losing out on bookings.

And disregarding the benefits of an active email database reduces your chance of converting interested but undecided prospects, increasing repeat visitation, and encouraging word-of-mouth marketing.

Ignore all of these things, and you may as well print beautifully designed brochures and leave them in the warehouse.

Myth 4. The more people who visit my website, the better

If 20 people enter Arcadia Bookstore and 1 person buys a book, then another 10 people enter Zenith Books and 9 people buy books - who wins? Arcadia got more visitors, but Zenith sold more books.

How often do you hear website owners talk about their site traffic? I’m getting x number of visitors per day. My site traffic has increased to x thousand per week. How great is that?

This is certainly one measure of how well your website is doing. People are finding you - one way or another. Great if your objective is to take money from ads placed on your site.

Far more important for a small business though, is the number of site visitors who stick around and browse - and even more important is the number who contact you, enquire or - best of all - book or buy there and then.

The term we used to describe these people is ‘qualified traffic’. They’re the ones you want coming to your website. If you get 100 visitors coming to your site tomorrow, and 95 of them bounce straight off because they realise within a few seconds that you’re not what they’re after - then you’re only getting 5 qualified visitors. The 100 figure is meaningless.

Well, not entirely meaningless. What it’s telling you is that you’re attracting the wrong visitors for the wrong reasons.

This is where careful keyword research is essential. This will tell you what words and phrases are being keyed in by the people who are most likely to convert when they visit your site.

This can be monitored regularly using Google Analytics, so you can look at the terms keyed in by the visitors who stick around for a long time on your site. Those will give you some big clues about how to tailor your content to attract more of the same.

If you have come across a myth that has tripped you up, tell us about it by filling in the form below: