Un subscribe Story
January 28, 2009
All I wanted to do was unsubscribe from the Design Within Reach mailing list. I clicked the unsubscribe link (so far so good) and was taken to this baffling page. 
First of all it starts out telling me they want me to enjoy reading their email. But I clicked “unsubscribe” so it is pretty obvious that I don’t want to. I had to read the “Yes, No” blurbs a couple times because they’re so similar. Since I’d clicked “unsubscribe” and the radial button was pre-selected to “Yes” I assumed that option was OK, as in “Yes I want to unsubscribe.”
But no, I have to select the other radial button.
And it gets more confusing. There are 6 boxes below (5 of which are already checked) to send me mail (do they mean email?) on the following topics. If I say “no” above am I now saying “yes, send me email on these topics?” Do I have to uncheck all the boxes?
Why are they making this so confusing? I like DWR. They’re a good company and they have a good website. But this feels really spammy to me and undermines the faith and confidence I have in them.
Moral of the story: If someone wants to unsubscribe, let them. You won’t gain anything by making it difficult.
Lack of conversions = loss of confidence
January 23, 2009
screenshot of home page
Met with a potential client to discuss their 3 year-old Flash website. I admit that it’s an attractive site… simply beautiful, and almost totally unusable. For starters, dark gray text on a black background is never a good idea. Forget about SEO.
To make matters worse, the contact form doesn’t work. Worse still, the designer hasn’t returned phone calls for over a year!
It makes no sense to spend time and money fixing this site. But the client doesn’t have the confidence to invest in a new site because the lesson they’ve learned from their old site is: “it doesn’t help my business.”
Design, no matter how good, won’t generate conversions without a clear understanding of the visitors’ needs and goals: How they’re actually going to use the website. And design is no substitute for a well-thought-out online marketing strategy.
The client is in a real bind. As an interim step I suggested a blog might help raise their profile and generate the leads they’re looking for. Once that happens, they’ll have the confidence to invest in a new, usable website (and find a designer who will return their phone calls).
Go on. Show it to me.
January 21, 2009
I’ve had what I think is a great idea for how to use Twitter. It capitalizes on the Hotornot principle – people like the risk of showing aspects of themselves to others, in return for which those others will pass judgment on them.
The idea: send me your URL, and tell me (in 140 characters or less) why I should bother looking at it. I will then tell you (in 140 characters or less) what I thought about it.
And guess what? People have been sending me their URLs! My intention is to provide honest and hopefully amusing feedback that the site owner will find useful, and the rest of the Twitter community will find entertaining.
Take a look at it here twitter.com/showusyoursite, and send me your URL. If you dare!
Buy, buy, buy!
January 20, 2009
I recently read How to Get Started in Active Trading and Investing by David Nassar. It’s the first book I’ve ever read about investing in the stock market.
Armed with my now encyclopedic knowledge of the intricacies of the stock market, I want to postulate that I believe the stock market is at the start of the consolidation phase. This is the point at which stocks have declined in value, and now primarily institutional investors are starting to buy up cheap securities, prior to the next phase in the cycle – mark-up.
Another indicator, as I understand it, that the stock market is consolidating (the charts here are from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, although the trends are the same in the other markets) is that the volume of trading has increased dramatically over recent months. A lot of stocks are being sold of course, but a lot of stocks are also being bought.
If I knew just a little bit more about how the stock market works, and more importantly if I had enough money to do so, I would consider this to be an excellent time to invest in stocks. Perhaps I should do a little more reading.
Our website, redux
January 15, 2009
By Jove, we’ve got it!
Most designers will tell you the same thing – designing your own site is a painfully difficult process. It’s hard to find the time, you’re your own worst critic, distilling a client’s message online is easier than distilling your own, you think your site should be your absolutely best work ever…
Our site has evolved substantially over the past several years, and at no point have I been particularly happy with it. But this time, I am. We’ve got a site that’s clean, user-friendly, humorous, and that effectively delivers our core message. It remains to be seen if the new iteration generates more traffic and conversions, but my expectation is that it will.
David’s working on building the site now, so until then here’s a snapshot of where we were, and where we are soon going to be.
2009 – bigger, better, faster, more.
January 14, 2009
Pandering to the lowest common denominator
We’d recently been gearing up to develop and market what we were describing as ‘budget’ websites. Our thinking was that many of our potential clients just can’t afford a large, complex and expensive site, so our model would be to provide small, simple and cheap sites for them. We’d sell more of these budget sites, and would make our money that way. Good idea, right?
No. Bad idea.
Experience has shown that small clients frequently impede growth in our business, for several reasons:
- They offer less potential for growth, from our point of view
- They have smaller budgets
- They provide a less stable work flow, resulting in less stable revenue
- They are often less technically adept, requiring more hand-holding
- The diva factor – for some reason, many small business owners seem to believe that they can actually do a better job of designing their site than we can. (Huh? Why hire a design firm then?)
Hey there, big boy. Need a website?
Of course, these impediments can exist with our larger clients, but frequently to a much lesser extent. Plus, if our intention is to GROW our business it stands to reason that we should be setting our sights higher, not lower.
We’re very happy with all our existing clients of course, big and small, and we’re excited about working with all of them in 2009. But we want our smaller clients to grow with us this year, as we focus on attracting larger projects with larger clients.
Pay me. You know you want to.
January 12, 2009
We were with a non-profit client on Friday whose organization generates quite a bit of revenue via their website. It’s a bit of a mystery to me how they manage this, because their online donation system is truly awful (we were meeting with them to discuss how to improve this, amongst other things).
Online donation systems, especially for non-profits, are frequently pretty bad. You’d think they’d be better considering how heavily these organizations rely on this type of funding.
Stay tuned – I will be exploring what works and what doesn’t, and why, in order to further increase our client’s revenue. I’m hoping I will learn how to improve conversion rates on all our clients’ sites, and on our own site too.
Building a web design business in 2009
January 9, 2009
Are you insane?
This rhetorical gem frequently works its way into my awareness. It does so because I’m not immune to the widely accepted sentiments about the state of the US economy. I’m not, however, well informed enough to understand the intricacies of why things are collapsing, when they might get better, and what exactly is going to happen to Resolve in the mean time.
That being said, Barry, David and I want to grow our business this year. A lot. Partly because we want to, but mainly because we have to. Our plan is to build Resolve Digital substantially this year, and the fact that this plan coincides with the collapse of the US economy is unfortunate, but incidental.
Feel stronger, last longer! Grow by 37% in one year!
We’ve been around for a while, and we’ve been able to iron our some of the crinkles that exist in our business. Not all of them – this is a process. No business is crinkle free, but we have a number of things working well: low overhead, good ongoing relationships with our clients, good management systems, and most importantly the people working at Resolve are truly excellent.
So what do we do next? We get more good clients, we further improve our business management, and we attract more excellent staff members. Easy. We’ve shown we’re able to do it, now we just do it again, except more so.
In theory, the part of this that is likely to be least easy is attracting new clients – if businesses have less to spend on their web activities, we’ll have a harder time getting new work. But our experience over the past year or so does not suggest that this is the case. Perhaps it’s because developing a new website, or enhancing an existing site, is a relatively inexpensive investment that provides real and measurable benefits. Perhaps it’s because larger projects are deferred allowing businesses to focus on smaller projects, like their website. Perhaps it’s because we’ve become better at marketing ourselves over the past year, which has served to negate the down-turn that we would have otherwise seen.
Whatever the reason, or combination of reasons, we did ok in 2008, so we’re brazenly choosing to tell ourselves we’ll do even better in 2009.
No really, are you insane?
My response is innevitably no, I’m not. The question comes up because the economic environment compels me to ask it. But having asked it, and having rationally looked at all the component parts of our business, it’s clear that this is the time to put the effort in. The economy is consolidating (or will, some time soon), and having bottomed out people will allow the silt to settle and will ultimately find the confidence to get it growing again. We intend to be well positioned to grow with it.
