Site Design for Your Market

By Rick Carbone

A common mistake that many web site owners make is “over designing” their sites.  Let’s use a fictitious example of a classic car replacement parts website as a case in point. This company has been in business for 10 years and they enjoy a strong catalog following. They want to increase their sales and expand their business by utilizing the Internet as an additional sales platform. Although not necessarily a home business per se, but a small family owned business that has been highly successful in offering post-war classic car replacement parts. The time has come to expand or stagnate.

The company begins to research web site designers and settles on one that has an impressive portfolio.  Lots of flash animation and state-of-the-art design technique.  After many weeks of information gathering of product photos and data, design meetings and cost discussions a site is born.  It’s even been optimized to rank well with the search engines.

The site has been indexed by the major search engines and receives a modest amount of traffic.  The site designer assures them that it takes time to get correctly listed and rank well in the search results pages for their top keywords.  Almost a year has passed and there is no appreciable increase in sales.  The cost to build and maintain the site has not paid for itself.

Should they abandon the site and revert back to a catalog only business?  The answer is no, no and no! 

What they need to do is understand their internet customer base better.  Here’s what I would suggest as a consultant.

1.       Immediately install site tracking software.  This can be accomplished for free by using Google^© Analytics which is part of creating an AdWords^© account.  This is pretty simple stuff.  You get coding from Google and place it on every page of your site.

2.       Create a keyword Advertising program through Google or Yahoo Marketing.  This will help to drive traffic to the site and at the same time should help to defray some of the site costs.

3.       Allow enough time to analyze site visitors.  Another words, wait.

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