Web design is broken. Ok so today I
feel like this is almost like a public
service announcement and it's something
that has really been bugging me about
this industry ever since well really
like day dot. That thing is the
shop window analogy. You've all heard,
you've all been sold it. Your website
it's like your shop window. Whoever came
up with this as an analogy, ok it might
have been a little bit right back in the
late nineties but it's been wrong for at
least a decade now. It's like this and
myth that I just want to destroy, I want
it gone because it leads people to
make the wrong conclusions about their
websites. The problems that I have with
it that, for a start are this. When you
take the shop window approach to web
design what often happens is that you
forget that if a website was a shop then
it wouldn't just have one shop window, it
would have multiple shop windows. It
would have a shop window for pretty much
everything you sell in that shop. People
often forget to make that point because
people don't always enter your website
through the homepage it's typically if
they know who you are and they're
looking directly for you they'll land on
your homepage or unless you've got such
good optimisation on your homepage that
you appear in wider, non branded searches.
So often though you'll find that if
you write long-form content about I
don't know something that your customers,
your prospects care about that will
be one of the most visited pages. We've
done some work with a charity recently,
they have quite a lot of traffic even
though they had Google Analytics on
their website, they didn't really
understand how to make sense of it. So
they thought that well because the
website isn't quite performing in the
ways that we wanted to it's probably to
do with our homepage.
We sat down with them and we looked at
their Google Analytics and we said hey
look your homepage could be improved
yeah great
but this blog article that you wrote
back in 2002 that is by far and away the
most visited page on your website. That
for all intents and purposes is your
home page.
Now the shopfront analogy completely
just does away with that and it's wrong.
Another thing that the shop front
analogy fails to recognise is that you
need a lot more than just a pretty shop
front to actually engage and attract
people to your business. So often what
happens is that company's, web design
companies focus so hard on that shop
window, on that shop front that someone's
walking down the high street and they
look to their right and they go oh well
isn't that a pretty shop window and it
has some things in there that I might
like to buy at one point. But because so
much focus has been put on what the shop
front looks like when they get inside is
it's like Primark on December 24th. It's
an absolute mess in there they can't
find that it can't find an assistant to
help them, they don't know whether
fitting rooms are, everything's badly
categorised and organised and they're
like wow I am NOT sifting through this
jumble sale. I'll just go to that place
across the road which doesn't have quite
as pretty a shop front but actually at
least I can see what the hell is going
on in there. Another thing that the shop
front analogy gets wrong, is that only
engages one of your senses People don't
just buy things because they look good,
they need to touch those things, they
need to have personal interactions with
those things, create feelings about those
things. There needs to be trust that is
built. It's not for most of the
businesses that I deal with, which are a
lot of them professional services and
things like that.
There's the whole chain of trust that
needs to be built before someone is
comfortable enough to even sit down and
have that initial conversation with them.
And the shop front analogy just doesn't
take into account
that there's trust that needs to be,
built knowledge that needs to be shared,
there's a relationships that need to
have happen. Most importantly the
shopfront
completely fails to address the fact
that a really high performing website
isn't just a pretty shop window, it's a
fantastic promotions team out on the
high street
handing out leaflets, getting people
engaged, showing people offers. Then
showing them to the front door going
inside, helping their customers, helping
the new customers to find what they're
looking for. Then it morphs into a personal
shopper and then it's there at the
checkout afterwards going awh have you
found everything, add-on sales, things
like that and then afterwards it can
even help get feedback and make sure
that people are happy with their
purchase and finding out if there's any
other things that could be done after
that. Your website isn't like a shopfront,
it's not like anything it is like a
website and the success that you have
online as a business is really gonna
come around from understanding and treating your website like a website and
not just a shop front. My name is Aaron
Taylor, I'm helping you to have better
conversations, make better decisions when
you're buying a website. Until next time
