OKCOOL

There are two kinds of business website…

One *is* the product, the other *sells* your product.

Most websites don’t follow the single most basic principle of “outcome”, i.e. what is it that I want to achieve with this website.

It’s to make sales. I’ll just repeat that to be sure, it’s to make sales, if you’ve set up a blog, you’re probably selling yourself or your business.

Hypothetically speaking, I make fudge (no really), I make the best fudge you’ve ever tasted. I want to sell my fudge to as many people as possible, my fudge shop on the high street is great and makes a profit. I’m looking to expand, and the internet seems like the place to be and certainly appears cheaper than opening a new brick and mortar shop.

There’s a few ways to handle this. We could build a “brochure” site or an e-commerce site.

The brochure site, being the most common form for a business new to the online world, allows people to discover the brick and mortar shop, get a feel for the range, the quality and love that goes into each piece of fudge. This type of site is all about discovery and quality of information. The outcome for this site is still sales, but how does this static site convert browsers into buyers?

We know that our outcome should be sales, but we need to define this in a bit more detail. It could be to gain footfall into the shop, get phone based orders or get mail based orders. Which is it? Once we know, we can base the main call to action, the copy and even the site structure to this basic message.

The primary outcome allows the site owner and the designer to agree on the direction of the site, it’s at this stage that the designer brings into play his/her experience in the way that users scan web pages for information and interact with action calls. This “experience” comes from usability studies and analysis of previous websites, these days we call this “usability testing”. There may be UI, IA, graphic, web or whatever type of designers (sorry, architects) involved in your team, but at the end of the day, firmly stating this primary outcome will help considerably everybody involved.

A major part of what we now call usability is essentially “direct sales” and the principle methods of this kind of selling have been around for over a hundred years, read up on Claude Hopkins and Oglivy as the masters of this art.

A concise interpretation of these guys is to measure, analyse , tweak and repeat (concise enough?).