Sometime in the short history of the Internet a fallacy akin to the famous line from the movie “Field of Dreams”, “if you build it they will come”, has captured the minds of would-be entrepreneurs looking to find fortune online. I’m not sure how this all began: perhaps it is deeply rooted in Bill Gates website building “Font Page” software. “Front Page” promised that anyone can build a website and get online to show off a prized pure bred bull dog,new born octuplets or the latest dance craze from Korea. Yes, it’s true anyone can manage to cobble together a web page for the world to see, but is it really presentable to anyone beyond close friends and family? Could it actually inspire an unknown visitor with the sense of trust required to purchase something from the site, or even compel them to pick up the phone to make an inquiry?
Building a high quality professional website with a positive ROI requires both education in the art and science of web design and years of experience. Building a profitable website requires not just the artistic talent to layout a page and the technical competence to code it correctly. It also requires experience with internet marketing, search engine optimization, Pay Per Click campaigns, website traffic analysis, conversion tracking, and last but not least, multivariate A/B split testing to determine the best conversion methods.
With today’s Internet websites have only seconds to make an impression on first time visitors and entice them to read your copy, visit an internal page of your website, allow you to convince them that you have the goods and services they want and need, and finally to contact you. Think about it, you make a search on Google for anything, you scan the results, and you select a site and click through. If the website doesn’t load quickly, easily and immediately and answer the question you’re searching for or clearly offer the product or service you need, how quickly do you click the back button on your browser and continue down the search results? If you visit a site and its appearance is not of the highest professional standard and looks dated, do you give it an opportunity? Or do you click the back button on your web browser?
Stay tuned for the continuation of this story next week.
