Sites that Win

You are building a website to boost your legal practice. You want to talk with the Conversion Rate Optimization ("CRO") Guy First. There are Three Reasons:

• Money: Your CRO Guy makes sure you don't throw good money at a bad design,

• Money: Your CRO Guy makes sure you don't waste money creating unnecessary content,

• Money: Your CRO Guy makes sure that your first iteration, and each subsequent one, increases the rate at which your site visitors become your customers, and

• Time: Your CRO Guy keeps you from wasting time on stuff that doesn't advance your business; so that's really about money as well.

So Who is this CRO Guy?

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This is the blog of David R. Herz. My mission is to foster the best practices to design websites that drive our businesses to perform better than they ever have. We are committed to:

1. Knowing our customer's business,
2. Knowing what action our customer wants from his site visitors,
3. Knowing how to drive that action,
4. Knowing how to integrate his website into his business model, and
5. Knowing how we can continue to add value - and generate recurring income - long after the website is built.

If you share this commitment, you really ought to join us. I invite you to get on the list and I'll send along our Checklist for Websites Designed to Convert.

If everyone else does it, it must make sense. Well if everyone else were jumping off the bridge, would you do it too?

That's right. It's that bad. Let me explain:

When people read, the emphasis is thrown to the beginning and end of a sentence. When the sentence starts “Home, About . . . ” and runs on for five or six other items, we all know what else is coming and we don't even bother to read it. And heck, we know that to get home, you just click on the site logo anyway.

According to Tony Haile, CEO at Chartbeat, the average reader spends 15 seconds on your site. Maybe you shouldn't care if your visitor skips over your menu to get to the good part, but it could also be that you've lost him before he ever gets that far.

Most web pages still have their menus right at the top. So that home button is something everyone will pass over, especially if we're talking about a site that hasn't yet been optimized for the small screens that Shopify says more than half of us are now using.

Now, that's some valuable screen real estate you are playing with.

What should it contain? Well, let me ask you this: What do you want your site visitor to do? book an appointment, get on your list, contact you about designing a website. These are actions. What you want your potential customer to see is your enticing call to action. That home button doesn't call anything. It's probably where they are anyway.

But don't take my word for it. Try it out. Pick the one action you most want from people. Give people that “Book Now,” “Call Me,” or “Join the List” button instead. Split test it. See what happens. Then start having some fun with it. Why should they Book Now, Call You, or Join the List? Maybe you'll try instead “Book My Site Review,” “I Want More Business Now,” or “Join the Experts.”

David Herz helps businesses, website designers, and front-end developers optimize websites to drive business. He maintains that just about anyone these days can create a website, and even make it look pretty good. So to stand out in this business - and demand a premium for doing it - a designer's got to shift his mindset from building websites to Building Businesses. To keep up with him, just press this link:I Want More Business: Keep me in the Loop