I was reminded today as I received an email with ‘IMHO advice’ (In-My-Humble-Opinion) from a local designer of how much of a disconnect there can be between what a designer thinks is correct for a web site and what actually works. He voiced concerns about changes that, unknown to him, have resulted in a doubling of the goldandgems.com conversion rate and thousands of dollars in sales every month. His IMHO advice was that the site looked cheapened, less elegant and would result in less sales.

Like I ask my clients all the time, would you like someone’s opinion, or a verifiable strategy that will make money? The designer in question had something invested in the design to which he was referring, as he had in fact designed the first iteration. As is the case with most designs, they get modified slightly over time and it looks a bit different than originally planned. Yet…

There is a reason for the changes. His original design did not attempt to address the web site’s (and business’) credibility an any other way than beauty. But the truth is, and this is known and provable fact, customers validate a web site very rapidly. And the faster you answer the question “Why buy from me?”, the more likely you are to make a sale.

With that in mind, we suggested and implemented icons using a different designer at the client’s request, and pop ups that answered those questions (you can see them yourself at goldandgems.com).

The result: An instantaneous, measurable and substantial increase in conversion of traffic. If given the option between an IMHO designer and results, I know which I would choose.

One of the pleasures of working in this industry is being able to apply a sense of organization to what can be a very chaotic and overwhelming amount of information. Most of my clients are experts in their fields and have a vast array of information to impart. Usually they are not so good at organizing that information so that their customers can find and understand it.

A good case in point is a web site that we are working on this week in which the old site had a sales page for a product that was at least eight feet long. It consisted of every piece of information about that product and related products that one could imagine. If you were looking for one discreet piece of information about that product, you would feel like you are looking for a needle in a hay stack.

The solution: we took the information from that web page and separated out each individual discreet question or piece of information and developed an FAQ area to organize it all.

Now, instead of a disorganized sales and landing page for the product in question, the client has a very clean landing page and 27 individual FAQ pages. Each page represents additional linking structure for the new site and a unique landing page for a unique key phrase that potential customers can find. Google and Bing will find them soon, and new traffic and customers will be the result.

Most designers seek out the look of a web site and design it before consolidating the feature set, functions and navigation. Unfortunately this leads to ‘instantaneous feature creep’, requiring multiple updates and countless hours of everyone’s energies to get everything to fit together as it should. Dotcomjungle’s strategy is exactly the reverse – we design the functionality, navigation and module placement BEFORE working on any design. This results in a design that emphasizes function over form while providing the designer a platform to maximize their skills in designing a theme incorporating the look and feel of your corporate identity. In the end you receive better function AND better form.

DCJ’s Grey-Screening Process Is Better

Dotcomjungle’s development strategy eliminates ‘instantaneous feature creep’ through a gray-screening process that defines the navigation, feature set, aggregation and presentation modules, as well as their locations on each page, before even considering the design. In this way the grey-screen, which is a completely functioning live web site, can be ‘themed’ exactly as desired. The job of the designer becomes incredibly simple. ALL questions in regards to the design are already answered. Development of the design is faster, better implemented, and more to the point based upon the real functional objectives of the web site.