Month: February 2015

Overlook This and Your Website Will Fail

Building a website is quite common place today. However, getting the right website design is a challenge. Characteristics of a well-designed website are a clean, crisp and professional design, a strong call to action and relevant information on the appropriate pages. The most important page is the home page and the most important trait of a good website is identifying, crafting and communicating the right message to your audience.

The process of arriving at this point is no simple task. It is a work-in-progress. When we think about creating a website the first resource considered is a good web designer. However, a web designer is just one of the resources required. In my opinion, the most important resource is a copywriter to help craft your message.

The steps below will help you reduce the learning curve and time taken to define and communicate the right message to your audience.

  1. Purpose of Website

So you are going into business. You know what you are about and what you want to achieve. You have a vision of the website and have identified other websites to use as examples. The main thing is to differentiate your website by what it offers, aesthetics (look and feel), ease of navigation, and clarify what your customers need to know.

  1. Get a Copywriter

A copywriter is a person who will craft the texts on your website to clearly articulate your message, the information your customers need to know and the call to action. This is no simple feat so do not necessarily think that you can do it. Copywriting is a science and there is no substitute for getting the right message across to your audience.

Engage a copywriter and communicate what you want to the person. The copywriter must have experience working with websites and with your type of business.

The body of texts produced by the copywriter for inclusion in your website is called the copy. You can find a copywriter locally or on the freelance service called www.elance.com.

  1. Do Mockups

Next engage a designer. Before he or she designs the website have the person do mockups of the site. A mockup is a basic sketch version of the site. There are online tools like www.gomockingbird.com that make the task fairly easy. The purpose of this exercise is to show the main pages of the site, layout and navigation. Here you can experiment with different draft layouts using the copy and understand how best to design the site. Include the copywriter in this process.

  1. Select a Design

Select an appropriate design for your website store front. There is no need to build a store front from scratch. There thousands of themes you can select. They are readily available on the internet. An example of such as site is www.themeforest.com. It will save you time and money.

Work with the copywriter and the designer to select the best theme. If your website has many images it is important that you identify a source for your images. Options include a photographer and stock photos from sites like www.istockphoto.com. Unfortunately, online options for local photos are limited or non-existent. Copying pictures from other sites is a poor long-term strategy.

Next the designer customizes the selected theme. You and the copywriter will review the changes and give feedback until you are satisfied with the modifications.

  1. Programme the Site

Once the design is complete the programmer will take over to write the backend code to add functionality to the website. Today, depending on the platform use, there are many plugins to make the process fast and less costly.

Having the right resources from the start is crucial to the success of the website. Normally, we focus on the hard skills like design and programming. However, the copywriter is a resource often overlooked to the detriment of the website.

Bull by the Horns

Bull by Horn

Many times we try to do the least to accomplish the desired results. However, this does not always work. Sometimes a Herculean effort is required. In other words, you have to take the bull by the horns.

Local online payment acceptance is a problem in Trinidad and Tobago. Enterprise is crippled by the absence of easy to use and affordable payment system to monetize entrepreneurial ideas. On accepting the challenge to create an online payment system the idea was to have a workable solution with minimum development work. There is nothing wrong with this philosophy at the onset. However, the nature of some projects demand a level of undertaking that goes beyond the minimum effort, in order to get off the ground.  

The first version of Paywise worked as follows. Merchants integrated Paywise into their website. During checkout when the customer selected the Paywise payment option an invoice would appear stating the list of banks at which the buyer can deposit the payment to the merchant’s account. Later, the buyer goes to the bank of his choice and makes the deposit. Simple.

The system had several drawbacks. I recall having a long debate with a friend who was adamant that no one will not go and stand in a bank line to make a payment. I countered by saying persons do so now. However, she was right. This version did not offer much in a way of a solution to the problem. All it did was handed customers a list of payment banks. This is not what people were looking for in an online payment solution.

The version also required that merchants open and maintain bank accounts at each bank in the country. This was to facilitate customers making payments at the most convenient bank location. This posed another problem. Instead of one bank account merchants now had to maintain several bank accounts at all the banks.

No one used the system. They liked the concept. As entrepreneurs developing a solution you will soon understand that customers have a sense of how thing should work, even if they have not seen a similar solution. They understand this from the premise of several key evaluation points: ease of use, convenience and perceived value. This version of Paywise did not meet their expectations, especially when they have used similar systems.

The experiment cost a few thousand dollars but it was a learning experience. You cannot cut corners on a straight line. Some tasks are inherently complex despite being simple in concept. While this is true sometimes we only appreciate the full gamut of the undertaking once we have dispensed with our simplistic viewpoint. The initial Paywise was an experience that provided greater insight into what was needed and how to go about it. After all, the first car produced was not the Ferrari.

So the second version of the system was created. This was more akin to what the aesthetics, functionality and convenience of a payment system that people wanted. There was no standing ovation but at least there was appreciation for the strides made and a general consensus that it was more practical than its predecessor. We continue to make efforts to improve the payment experience.

The least effort principle should be used to test the waters initially. Once you have answered the relevant questions and understand what you are about…take the bull by the horns.