*** WARNING! Click the Image at Your Own Risk! ***

Too many websites are like Muzak; kind of safe, kind of boring, kind of forgettable. None of these terms apply to Ling Valentine’s LingsCars.com. It’s busy, crowded, eye-achingly garish but, in a train-wreck sort of a way you can’t help but be drawn in by its break-every-rule-in-the-web-design book approach.

And with a reported 500+ links on the home page alone it’s impossible not to find something to click on.

Does it work? Apparently pretty darned well. Ling is reported to be one of the leading car dealers in all of Britain (where she’s located) and draws in over 70,000 unique visitors a month.

By the way, I was introduced to Ling and her crazy site by this post at Ninja-nerd.com: Website Atrocity – Things you Should NEVER do to your Web Site.

Three Things You Should Do

I recommend that you …

1. Take a trip to http://www.LingsCars.com. Don’t just pop-in, say ewww, and bounce out. Scroll around. Click a bit. Take a real tour.
2. Read the Website Atrocity post AND read all the (65 as of this writing) comments. You’ll see some real gems, most agreeing with Ninja-Nerd Daiv Russell’s view of ‘atrocity’ but a few contrarians (me included) who wish we were bold enough – and creative enough – to be as ‘bad’ as Ling. By the way Ling Valentine – in the digital flesh – posts a couple of must-read comments herself. Very cool.
3. Weigh in with your take. Come back here to comment or leave your views at Daiv’s place but make sure you add your voice to a very interesting debate.

Oh, and if you’re aware of any other sites that are successful despite their flaunting of accepted web design dogma, throw a shout out to them as well.

It’s not a big stretch to go

From…

This house is really you. A model home is designed to target a specific buyer. Someone who will say, “I can imagine living here.”

To…

This website is really me. They understand my needs and they have everything laid out in an easy to navigate format to guide me in my buying decision.

Reading today’s Denver Post article about how model home decorators pursue their craft, creating an environment that says, “…What an interesting, tasteful family lives here; boy, I wished I lived here too…”, reminded me of persona driven website design (or redesign) as advocated by the Eisenberg boys, among others, of Call to Action fame.

Their premise is to “Speak to the dog, about what matters to the dog in the language of the dog.” In plainer, non-dog, language, they promote the idea of developing your website not to some designer’s aesthetic but to the personalities, tastes, motivations and demographics of your most desired visitors (what the Eisenbergs et al, label personas).

Chances are you don’t have a one-size-fits-all customer. They have a particular type of job in a particular type of industry or corporate department. Or maybe they tend to be women or men, younger or older, who earn within a specific range or engage in similar types of activities. So the idea behind persona driven design – whether in hot selling model homes or high-converting websites – is to speak to the needs, desires, motivations, aspirations and/or ego needs of those you would have visit your website.

The more closely you can match your sites persona to that of your desired audience, the better your website will convert browsers to customers and the higher a return on your website investment you will realize.

Do you like your site’s design but your graphic artist or web designer is no longer available? Now you want to make changes but you have images that use fonts and color schemes and you don’t which fonts or color schemes were used? 

Aside from things like ftp login info, domain registration documentation and all of that stuff, you also should know what the colors and fonts were used in creating your site graphics. It can save a lot of aggravation later.

By the way, a couple of nice tools that will help you solve these mysteries if need be…

To find the name of the fonts used, check out “What the Font”. I used this on a recent client site where we were building a new header for his blog which used the existing site header but needed a new label. 

To figure out the color I use a Firefox addon called Colorzilla - it’s simple and works quite well. 

Cleaning up my inbox and came across this list from the folks at SiteLab. I work with a lot of clients on redesigning their sites and this list rings true. I’ve condensed the content a bit but you can probably find the entire message online at www.sitelab.com.

SiteLab’s Top 10 Reasons to Redesign Your Company Website

1. Rookie or a Pro? – The site looks amateurish and parts of the site are broken.
   … studies have shown that people form an opinion of a website within the first three seconds of viewing it.
2. Is this thing on? – The site doesn’t ask viewers to do something.
   … Give your customer an easy way to take action.
3. One and done – Viewers don’t have a reason to return to your site.
   Give visitors a reason to return… Make your website an important part of your customers lives.
4. So last year – The information on the site is obviously dated.
   …consider using some kind of content management system … to keep it fresh. 
5. This is taking forever to load!?!? – The pictures on the site aren’t “optimized.”
6. Quick Info – The body text is too long.
   … optimize your site for search engines.
7. I found you – Get Better Search Engine Optimization For Your Website
   … For the best search engine optimization results, you should definitely consider having your website redesigned.
8. 404 Error – The site is down or can’t be found.
   … consider a new hosting service … Search engine optimization is the answer.
9. If you can’t beat them join them? – Your website looks like all your competitors websites
   How unique is your website?…
10. Are you a luxury brand? – The design of your website doesn’t reflect your company image.
    …make sure your website fits.

SiteLab had more to say on the above topics but you get the idea. If your site is old, dated, poorly optimized for search or suffering from poor design, consider an overhaul. 

If you don’t have an inhouse or outside web development team call or email me and I’ll be happy to do a preliminary review and phone consult for free. Mention this post and contact me at 303-800-5522 or tom.gray@gemsolv.com

Mark Sanborn is a hall of fame speaker and the best selling author of The Fred Factor and You Don’t Need a Title to Be a Leader. He’s also a friend and client. He has a new web site and, in addition to his books and training products, he makes several free resources available. One of them that I highly recommend is called The 10 Commandments of Customer Service: 150 Ideas for Improving Service.

Diamonds, gold & rubies abound in this customer service treasury. For example every e- or retailer needs to embrace Idea #47:

Flight attendant: “Sir, would you like the chicken or the beef for dinner?”

Passenger: “Which do you recommend?”

Flight attendant: “Neither. I don’t eat this food.”

Question: Does the flight attendant not eat the food because it is bad, or is the food bad because the flight attendant doesn’t eat it? When you don’t use your own products or services, you lose touch with the customer’s experience.

If you haven’t walked a mile in your customer’s shoes, eaten the food you’ve served them or drank the Kool-Aid® you’ve poured into their mugs then I guarantee you that you are leaving a ton of sales by the trailside. (In a 2006 survey of online shoppers, Marketing Sherpa discovered that nearly 60% of these shoppers abandoned their shopping carts. Deludedly enough, online retailers guesstimated their abandonment rate at 20-30%, less than half of the actual number!).

How many times have you been frustrated by an on or off line shopping experience due to byzantine checkout procedures, missing-in-action or clueless sales associates or impossible to locate products? Do you find yourself wondering who would design such a travesty? I find myself wondering who the owner is and asking myself if they have ever shopped there themselves. Shopping cart abandonment is a significantly larger issue in the online world where it is so much easier to click to the next etailer’s site than get in your car, hazard traffic and cruise the lot for a parking space that’s not halfway to Toledo.

So what do you do to improve your customer’s experience?

First, drink your own Kool-Aid®… At the most basic level, you shop your own site. And then you shop your competitor’s and if you prefer the competition’s experience that’s a big, red flag right there. Even if your happier with your site’s results than your competition you still need to be looking for new and better ways to improve the customer service you provide. Jeff Bezos, founder & CEO of Amazon.com, allocates time every day to come up with several ideas for improving his web site. The man’s a multi-billionaire yet he’s obsessed with providing an ever better experience for his customer. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why he’s a multi-billionaire.

Second, have a Kool-Aid® party… invite your employees, friends, neighbors, golf partners, kids’ friends and anybody else you can think of to shop your site and give you candid feedback. Establish some basic scenarios and see how easy it is for them to accomplish. Sit back — quietly, no intervention — and observe. Give ‘em a few bucks or buy the beer and pizza. It will be one of the best investments you ever made.

Third, don’t fixate on perfection… Try something, measure the results (so many great tools for this; Google Analytics is a great place to get started), if it works, improve it, if it doesn’t, do something else. The web is an instant feedback mechanism. With just a few tools you can tell what’s working and what’s not quickly and for relatively few dollars.

Fourth, steal Your Competitor’s Kool-Aid® Recipe… If you see somebody doing it better and it’s not copyrighted or patented, adopt it for your site. You don’t have to be the master innovator, just the master executor.