Here is a guest post I did for FragDominant.com over the weekend.
The most powerful and profitable websites today are starting points of something. They work hard not to keep you within the boundaries of their sites, but rather to become a path to your destination, wherever you want to go. The most obvious one, of course, is Google.
Mistake #1: Many business websites assume that they are the starting point for their customers. They spend hours and hours working on their homepages trying to create a user experience with navigation paths which they want their users to take. If you sell something online, chances are, you website goes something like this: Home -> Product Category -> Individual Product -> Features/Spec/Pricing/etc. -> Where to buy or Call to action. The process flows in one direction and if you turnaround to go sideways or backwards, all of the sudden, the website doesn’t not make a lot of sense. That’s the old millennium way. Today’s web users don’t surf, they jump. The starting point is Google, and they jump from Google to a place, and when they don’t find something they look for, they jump back and start over. So instead of treating your website as a spider web with your homepage sitting in the middle, you should decentralize — think of it as a lake full of islands: i) each webpage serves a single purpose and stands on its own, ii) none is more important than the other, and iii) when a user lands on any of them, he could look further into any direction and he will be presented with the options to go to another island. The process should be random, logical and endless.
Mistake #2: Most businesses websites don’t work on becoming the starting point for their customers. They spend all of their effort on pulling a customer in and trying to make a sale, then couldn’t wait to send the customers away, hoping that the only time the customer returns is when he wants to buy something new or needs technical support. While there isn’t anything wrong with that, you are also not taking full advantage of the resources you spent to get the customer there. The basic requirement of a starting point is to be either unique or complete, or perhaps both. Provide information and/or knowledge that couldn’t be found anywhere else, and/or put together everything that a visitor needs to know on the topic. The key of becoming a starting point, however, is to go way beyond expectations. Whichever method you choose, you must present your story in a way which is not only relevant and useful to your users, but also pleasantly surprising: being 10% better won’t make a difference, you have to aim to be at least 10 times better than anyone else in the world who is doing the same thing. Here is a simple checklist I came up with a while back which might be helpful. Keep in mind that the checklist should be applied to every single webpage on your site.
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