September 26, 2006

Sucky Web Site Design? Sucky Web Site Traffic.

Really, I'm sorry to write such a seemingly boring topic, but if you have a badly designed web site you deserve to have low traffic. A bad web site is like having a retail store that has clothing in the aisles, glue on the hangers and shoes not in pairs.

When you go to a store, don't you want to see a logical layout of things to make your shopping easier?

A web site is no different. IT must be well designed.

About 100 years ago I wrote, 10 Web Site Musts and it's still relevant to this day.

Startupjournal.com authors a good case for WHY good web site design matters.

Mr. DiPadova is a co-owner of Due Maternity, a San Francisco purveyor of hip clothes for pregnant women. In the past six months, he has seen 24 new competitors emerge on the Web -- which makes it harder for his store to stand out in search-engine results and has driven up the price of ads on Yahoo and Google.

So Mr. DiPadova decided on a new strategy to distinguish his business. He would supplement his online ads with a site makeover.

In Mr. DiPadova's case, the efforts have paid off. Since Due Maternity added the new features in January, about 50,000 people have registered with the site, and traffic and sales are up. He expects his company to reach $5 million in sales this year -- two-thirds of it online -- up from less than $1 million in 2003, Due Maternity's first year in business.

There's much more to this story and you should check out the full article. But the bottom line is that on a regular basis you should check your web site, check your competitor's web site and see how you can improve your web site. Look at design, navigation and FEATURES.

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