I had an interesting opportunity this week to get some constructive feedback.
To paraphrase his website, Ian Lurie is an internet marketer with 14 years’ experience. He is the president of Seattle-based Portent Interactive. He blogs at Conversation Marketing, wrote a book by the same name (which I reviewed on my personal blog), and recently co-authored Web Marketing For Dummies. He’s also on Twitter.
He recently launched a new consultancy service called 10Things, aimed at small businesses. It includes an appraisal of your site, 10 recommendations to improve it and an hour’s discussion with Ian himself. This costs $500 which isn’t pocket-change, but if you’re unwilling to invest that much in expert advice perhaps you should cut your losses and quit.
He announced this new service with a blog post and competition to win one of three 10Things sessions. I was fortunate enough to be one of the three, so on Thursday night we spoke via iChat.
Since this website is new I was a little nervous about inviting direct criticism. It felt a little like handing my homework in to a teacher and waiting to hear my result! In truth, there would be no better time, and thankfully I didn’t get an “F-, See me after class.” It was a very positive experience and I am more confident than ever that this website is on the right track.
It would be unfair to reproduce his advice in full, but I’ll touch on three points that relate specifically to this website:
Uniformity in design
This is my most urgent priority, and something that Ian also identified. In order to get the website launched without any delay, I postponed some tasks. The blog, forum and product documentation need to be integrated with the navigation and graphical identity of the site. I will also modify the colour schemes of the applications themselves in their next releases.
This will result not only in the improved customer confidence that comes from visual consistency, but also the SEO benefit of making sure the site’s pages are properly interlinked.
Screencasts
I’d already thought about creating some screencasts (video clips that show the application’s behaviour), but Ian confirmed the necessity of this. All the written explanation in the world is no substitute for simply showing the the user what is meant. I’ll look forward to making screencasts for this site next year. I think it will be fun!
Trust
Well written copy is important, but trust is hard to come by on the Internet. Ian suggested that I put more of a personal stamp on the site, explaining who I am and linking to other parts of my online identity. I should also offer social proof of the product’s popularity, which I hope the buzz section I am working on will help to do.
Over the next few months I have a lot of work to do! I’ll be putting a lot of Ian’s advice into practice and I hope you will see the benefits. I look forward to going back for 10 More Things in future.