Jonothan Stribling

A website is kinda boring without content.

The semantic web has no meaning without meaningful content.

So why is content the last thing people think about when they are planning a website?

It may be because people assume that the web is a visual medium and think visually about what they want. The boring words can always be grabbed from the company brochures, the tender documents, the introduction letters.

This is why most small Australian websites have a bounce rate higher than 50%.

People do not watch a website like they blindly watch the TV, YouTube excepted, although even YouTube requires an average 2 minute concentration span. People read a website, they read headings, sub-headings, lists, paragraphs and navigation. They gaze over banners and quickly discern which information will take them somewhere and which is trying to sell them something.

People are smart about how they use a website.

This is why every small web-team should include a copywriter in addition to a designer and a coder.

Someone needs to be responsible for creating what the website says and how it says it. This person needs to be an expert about how people read and interact online.

The advertising world has worked like this for years. A copywriter will work with a creative designer and they will create the message, the concept which will have us rushing to the shop, wallets open.

So there should be as many copywriters as designers out there all pitching for work. And every designer should have a copywriting buddy.

Oh and lastly the copywriter should have a deep understanding about search marketing. But that’s another blog.

In the eighties film 10, Dudley Moore, a middle-aged musician lusts after Bo Derek, a young and beautiful woman. I don’t think her career was ever made obvious. In an iconic scene, Bo Derek runs down the beach in slow motion her body glistening with the sea and coconut oil. She is in Dudley Moore’s eyes a perfect 10.

This scene and the idea of the perfect 10 reminds me of the lust for the perfect conversion rate. Some people say that 3% is a good conversion rate. That is 3 out of 100 visitors to a website buying or doing something significant. Doesn’t sound like much does it? A quick search using your favourite search engine will tell you that the top ecommerce sites in the world achieve conversion rates in the double figures.

So how do they do this? And why is 3% thought of as a good rate?

The truth is that there is no perfect conversion rate. The conversion rate is a result of the type of audience, the product or service being sold, the price, the brand and lastly the experience offered by a website.

A website selling a commodity product at a higher price will need to work harder than a website selling a niche product at a price perceived to be good value.

Amazon.com can get a very high conversion rate because they typically sell commodity products at a fair price and have a lot of brand equity. They are seen as a reliable and trustworthy merchant.

Plus, the website is easy to use.

This obviously didn’t happen overnight. It was the result of many millions of dollars invested in product and online experience.

You can achieve your perfect conversion rate if you focus on meeting the needs of your customers. and testing different approaches. Test different price points, provide incentives, test different headlines. Your perfect number will emerge.

When I first discovered the web I found a site called Digital Diaries which allowed for creative expression online. I signed up and was soon publishing sarcastic poetry about my life and receiving the odd freakish email from someone in Ohio.

I often think it’s a shame that the Digital Diaries site didn’t take off. Soon after someone came up with web logging and blogspot had some great software and we became bloggers. Digital diarist has such a nice old fashioned tone. It reminds me of Charles Darwin diarising about his horrible discovery that we are descended from monkeys. It sounds secretive and private. A blog sounds like a vent, a slapdash dump of copy on a page.

WordPress has made blogging very easy for those with a little technical knowledge. Backed by a community of developers there is little you can’t do in WordPress. It is what Internet publishing should be. Free and easy.

Being able to publish anytime and often is the secret to any successful website. Without this capacity you cannot test what works and what doesn’t work. You remain stuck in conversations about layout, colour and call to actions. Some people may even profess to care about the audience.

Mostly the conversation is an after-thought: We need to do this and have seen it done this way. Being able to say, “Ok, let’s test it” offers an amazing view into your audience. It’s humbling to learn from your customers. It also takes the capacity to admit to being wrong; all the time.

I am interested in this right now because at the company I work for we are looking at CMS’s. Our architecture is sadly without one and not being able to update anytime and often is a handbreak. It is dependent on the goodwill of a bunch of people.

And it doesn’t need to be like this. It should be as easy as blogging or digital diarizing.

The space the company I work for is caught in is the fissure between online publishing being hard and online publishing being for anyone. Traditional publishing was something for experts.

You needed to know colour, type, the difference between offset and digital and what a plate is. Online publishing was the same. You needed to know HTML, the intricies of the in-house system, what beer the sys admins like. It was something you knew or had to learn.

Online publishing today, is easy. So easy it won an African American an election.

Publishing tools allow the content creaters, whether they be marketing or sales or the guy in accounts to own their own content. And to be responsible for their success of their content. All without involving friendly technical people.

This is what allows Amazon to achieve 31% growth in the last quarter. Publishing is easy, merchandising is easy and conversion is made easy by a fleixible and agile platform to test, test, test.

The web is a serious business but it should also be a seriously easy business.