How to make a 10 page site look like an industry portal

Written by John Pitchers Tuesday, 29 September 2009 23:22

I recently completed a site with my long time client and friend, Nick Smith at Performance Marketers in Sydney. Our client is a small business who provides a specific service to large multinational insurance companies. The challenge was to take a small website and make it look like the site of a big multinational organisation just like the clients they service.

Being a small oganisation, providing a specific service to a relatively narrow market means the site doesn't have a lot of content. But, the content provided was well written and precise.

So what did we do?

  1. We created a slideshow with powerful images and headers linking to key articles.
  2. We added the same articles to a menu.
  3. We created multiple dropdown navigation boxes linking to the same articles as in 1 and 2. In fact, many links lead to the same article from the same drop down.
  4. We created small banners dotted through the home page and in the right hand column of internal pages linking to the same articles as in 1, 2 and 3.
  5. We added introductions, like little news flashes, to the home page linking to, you guessed it, the same articles as in 1, 2, 3 and 4.
  6. Finally, we used a powerful all caps, bold headline font and broke up the content with some RSS feeds from industry news sites.

The result?3red

Checkout http://3red.com.au/

Is it ethical?

When discussing the plan for this site, we asked this question, is it right to have multiple links and banners all linking to the same content? Are we misleading our visitors?

I had some reservations about it initially but if you stop and think about it, it makes so much sense to do this that it almost seems silly not to.

People want what they are looking for and they want it now.

When a visitor lands on your home page they either click a link or are gone within the space of about 3 seconds. Different people have different triggers so why not provide different ways of grabbing their attention. Really, if we have a short specific message to give our prospective customers then who cares how they get to it as long as they get to it.

Most visitors wouldn't notice anyway. As much as we like to think that our visitors consider everything on our home page before selecting a link to follow, they just don't. If something grabs their eye they'll click on it oblivious of everything else.

Web surfers scan they don't read.

I probably sound a little harsh towards our valuable website visitors. I don't mean to. You only have to look at your own browsing habits. Then go and check the analytics reports on your website. Most websites have a bounce rate well over 50%. And it's not uncommon for the average time spent on a site to be as low as 1 minute.

What really matters is that you get the 1, 2 or 3% of visitors that are your target market reading the materials that matters to them. These are the visitors that will spend 20 minutes on your site then send you an enquiry and hopefully start a profitable relationship.

What do you think?

Is this smart design or deception?