Take This Simple Step to Improve Your Website Design

Each month at the Smart Marketing Warriors meeting, one of our members gets treated to a 'Hot Seat'.  This is where we review a member's website then recommend improvements to the website design.

And I'm not your Mother, so it's not called the Hot Seat for nothing.

However, let me set this straight, this isn't about slagging off what someone's doing for 30 minutes, you can go anywhere and get numerous people to do that for free.  No, it's about looking at where the project owner wants to be, what  they want to achieve and what needs to happen to make that come true?

But here's the thing, there are patterns emerging, themes if you will, which crop up repeatedly.   It's not that we're getting bored saying the same thing over to new members as they take the hot seat – but why wait?  When you have this information then you can get going on this right now.

Just for this post, I've picked out the one improvement which is recommended almost every time we review a website, and here it is.

Get the interesting stuff above the fold – the bit which people see when they first land on your web page, or site, and if it fails to entice then you won't' get them scrolling down to find any of the nuggets of contents below the fold.  The 'fold' terminology relates the big newspapers where the leading headlines tell readers why they need to continue reading.

I have my own theory why this recurrs…

1.  The above the fold area is filled with information about the web site owner, logo's and headers, which say little about what's in it for the reader.  The reader doesn't care about you.  They care about what you have that interests them, and that is a very subtle difference which is difficult to achieve without the experienced and non-biased eye.

2.  Newbie web developers (and I know this is what happened to me) are so thrilled at being able to create something, anything, that they fill the space up with incidentals, which are easy to put in, and add colour and words, but nothing else.  A good example is the calendar.  Wordpress cleverly lets you pick and point, and zip, a calender pops into the sidebar.  But unless you are running an events programme which your visitor wants to know about, why would they want to look at a calender?  They don't.

YOU can't do your own hot seat, but you can run a simulation by asking someone who doesn't know what you're doing (and who is not well known for their tendency to flattery) to visit your site and tell you what it's all about, and their understanding of what's on offer.
Or, for less than the cost of a daily cup of tea you can become a Smart Marketing Warriors member and book up your very own hot seat to rack up your website design.  And that way you also get to find out about the other important elements for improvement which you can implement right now.

You can join right now in time for the next meeting right here