Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Just be sure you have a very tight creative brief for your web designer, so there is no miscommunication about what you're getting for your $450. Very often these low-ball offers have a way of mushrooming to much larger projects when you see what you get for the entry price.

Not suggesting that there's anything amiss. Just the voice of someone who's been there before and knows how important it is to have your "spec sheet" in writing before the project begins.

Good luck!

Larry,

Sorry. I didn't get to this in time before you closed it. I agree with my colleagues' comments on your site. I would like to emphasize the need for enhancing the copy. As others have said, you really present no reason for the visitor to buy. You start off with store-bought dip and then you never tell us why this is bad. You present a picture of your dip but you drop us off before you drive your point home. It's kind of like you put Dean's Dip in the little plastic tub on a table, with the watery slop on top and your dip in a very nice serving bowl and looking fresh and fluffy - side by side on a table in the store. And then you go away watch the home shopping channel all day, expecting the customers to walk by and figure it out for themselves. Whereas beside your table in the grocery store is a lady with cocktail weenies cooking in a crock pot and people are taking samples all day long and leaving the table with a couple cans each.

Your site needs to be beefed up so that the visitors are engaged. However, following along with Dr. Goodman's wise words, I have found that many "website guys" get deep into the techy stuff concerning templates and look and feel. They can make you a very nice looking website and it will look like a dream. What they generally miss is the "copy" part of the deal. They generally don't know how to write copy that sells and their philosophy is to regurgitate thousands of features and visitors will figure out that they will live a better life and that they should buy. This is plain and flat-out wrong.

I look at your website and I understand what you are "expecting" me to do. However, it takes two or three levels of thinking before I get there. An average person spends something like 10 seconds on a site. You have only that much time to "sell" them. This doesn't allow for two to three levels of thought.

People buy on emotion first, and in particular, emotional benefits. Not features. Your website has to exude emotional benefits of your product. Second, you want the visitor to be able to make small steps before they make the "buy" decision. For instance, if you display some emotional benefits, the "call to action" from that might be that they watch a video on the making of the dip. So they click and they can watch a group of people at a party laughing and having fun with dip for a few seconds (music in the background) and then you show how it was made. Of course, this doesn't preclude you from having a "buy now" button on every page as well - you want to make it as easy to buy as possible with few clicks required, but you want to provide little steps for the viewer to get more committed. Really, your visitor has already made his decision early on and you provide some additional "logical" input so the visitor can convince themself they made a good decision.

These are some of the things a "website guy" will not be strong on. For $450, you'll get a nice "template design" that displays whatever words you feed them in a very nice way. Probably, anyway. To write the copy for a website in a fashion that is sales oriented, you're probably talking $75 to $150 per page additional. On top of that, if you choose to go the video route, you may need to consider $600 or so to script and film a 30 sec spot.

I hope this helps. If you would like to discuss this more, I'm in NW PA - About 2 hours from you. Give me a call. Click on my name above and it will take you to my profile. There, you will find my website and contact info is on my website.

Wayde