If you don’t think like a monkey, you’ll hate yourself later
Your website is costing you money. It's also filled with simple mistakes that turn off visitors before they have a chance to become customers.
According to marketing guru Seth Godin, a website visitor is a lot like a monkey looking for one thing: a banana. If that banana isn't easy to see and easy to get, your visitor is gone with a click on the "back" button.
This is so true.
You can have the best looking website money can buy, but if you put obstacles in peoples way (flash entry pages, obtrusive adverts) or don't make it completely obvious what to do, the visitor will lose interest.
Here's what we know
People don't visit many pages considering how many there are.
When they do visit a page, they decide if they're going to stay in less than three seconds. If they don't know what to do they hit the "back" button.
The vast majority of people who visit your website aren't going to figure out what to do in three seconds.
The first page people see when they arrive at your website is critical to your success.
If the visitor has to stop, even for a click, to read some useless information, or wait for something to load, they're going to flee.
Think like the monkey
Remember you're the monkey looking for the banana.
This means your visitors are busy, ill informed, impatient, not very thoughtful and eager to click on something right now.
So you need to make is easy - why have 3 clicks to something when 1 will do. Make it obvious - literally spell it out. Give them what they want, when they want it.
You can get Seth's book "The Big Red Fez - How to make any website better" from Amazon for about £2.50 second hand.
