SIAServices.net

We’ve all seen them. We type in www.Google.com (if it’s not already our homepage) and type in something that we are looking for. We click on a link with a promising description. We walk away to grab a drink while the site loads. We sit down and carefully put our Diet Pepsi on a coaster in the chaos which is our desktop and look up at the screen.
What we see makes our pupils expand and contract, positive there is an optical illusion there somewhere. Clashing colors, dead image links, gaudy design that couldn’t be louder if it wanted to. The design is so bad you just stare at it wondering where the punch line is. So much flashing your sure this site has claimed its fair share of epileptic browsers. You wonder how God himself could have allowed such an atrocity to be unleashed on the cyber world, clicking on your back button before your screen and retinas are permanently etched from the chaos on the monitor.

Another fun day for me. A customer comes in to pick up an order from their Account Manager. I make the mistake of asking them for a sample to use as a marketing tool. Once they learn I am a marketer they want to tell me how great they are and get my approval for what they have accomplished. Yes this may seem a little on the cocky side, but imagine being in my shoes for a second; You spend over a hundred thousand dollars to hone your trade, countless sleepless nights to stay on top of the market, and have won awards for your work. Then in someone walks showing you what they did and you smile at them like a kid explaining to you that the blue thing on the paper in crayon that looks like someone had convulsed mid stroke is a dragon.
That happens a lot for me. But in this case, the customer took it even further. Proceeding to follow me into my office he showed me his website for his landscaping company. He loved it, and I mean if he could take it to dinner he would, loved it. I quietly listened as he told me how proud he was of designing the site himself and all the effort he put into it. For a good ten minutes he painstakingly showed me how he made each button and got the crude flash to work. All the time I saw slow loading page after page of bad pictures, little text, and frames that had no business being there.
Then came the inevitable…..
The question you never want to ask me…..
“So what do you think?”
Damn.
How do you do it? How do you tell someone that the pictures of their son are the ugliest thing you have ever seen and that there should be a law against displaying him in public? How do you tell someone that it isn’t the dress that makes their butt look big, it’s the Doritos? At what point do you finally let someone know that they will never have a career in singing, dancing, or movies? Yet here I am, looking at a doe eyed thirty something year old contractor who is trying, yet failing, and asking me how his most important marketing tool looks to me, the guy who does nothing else for a living.
I often try to put the shoe on the other foot. How would he react if he came in my back yard and saw all my amateur attempts at trying to build a koi pond which is off level with a fountain pump that sprays off to the side? What would he think of the garden I built out of five gallon buckets with holes drilled in the base? If he saw the dead patched because of my faulty sprinklers, what would he say when I asked him the same question?
Anyone who knows me, knows what happens next on the outside, but I want to paint a picture of what is going on inside. It’s not easy being blunt, curt, and up front. But in marketing, sugarcoating just doesn’t get the message across.
If you see someone standing in the middle of a road with a bus barreling down on them because the driver is too busy flirting with the half attractive girl sitting behind him, you don’t waste time. You don’t ask the person if you can help them look for something or tell them the year, make and model of the bus, the speed at which it’s coming and how they may want to consider taking 6.2 steps to the southeast while avoiding a freshly dropped piece of gum that may plant itself at the base of their loafers.
No, if you are any kind of person you don’t do that at all.
You yell “BUS”
So guess what, I yelled BUS!!!
I watched his face drop as I tore into his site and everything that was wrong with it. I felt I was telling him the baby wasn’t his as I dove into the back end of his site and found no code to speak of. He slouched and looked slightly to the floor as I told him that he built his site to work for him, not his customers.
He sat there silent long enough for me to run through all the variables of what was about to happen. I am bigger than him, but that doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. Is he going to walk out and never talk to his account manager again? I was trying to locate everything in my office that could be used as a weapon that wouldn’t cost too much money should it get broken. He looked up after thinking for several moments, talking to himself, possibly contemplating the same scenarios I was. Or at least, so I thought.
“You’re Right. What should I do?”
So we sat down and drew up a plan, as we went through detail after detail he wrote progressively faster. Once he saw the direction he should go he started a fire and was soon writing faster than he could think. Then he suddenly stopped in the middle of a sentence and looked up at me again, this time with much more clarity.
“Can you guys do this for me?”
“SIA Professional Services has been serving the greater Sacramento area for nearly 15 years. The company was built around my marketing. I’m pretty sure we can design your site for you.”
He asked what he was looking at pricewise. I think he was shocked when I told him I didn’t know. But he understood when I told him that I simply gave the suggestions and that his account manager would be able to write up his quote for him. His account manager, who was with me the whole time, got him a quote while we finished talking and once he finished up his next job, he came in, with credit card in hand.
Website Design is like automotive repair; yes there are some things you can do on your own. On the important jobs however, like your business, you need an expert before you and the family are flying off the side of cliff during a Sunday drive, causing you to remember what that spare nut you had left over went to now.
Just like mechanics, not all website designers are equal. When you go to a mechanic for major work do you just look for the cheapest place you can find to work on it if you care anything about your car or the contents. If you had a brand new Ford you would probably look to someone like Eric’s Automotive who specializes in your car rather than some mechanic who has more reports with the BBB than Enron. Yet, so many people are content to have substandard websites that either doesn’t tailor to their demographic, or doesn’t have the back end support to get it running right on the search engines.
Keep in mind that your website, much like everything else in your business should be designed with your target customer in mind. It isn’t a matter of what you like; it’s a matter of what they like. If you absorb this one thing, you will be better prepared than over half of the small businesses on the market today.
“You are not Your Target Demographic.”
If you came to you and offered you your products and services at your price would you use you??? Of course not. You would do the work yourself and save the money while getting your exact vision out. But you are hired by customers who either can’t or don’t want to do what you do. Rather they hire you to do it. You have to identify your key customer and try to see your business through their eyes.

You should not design your logo, your company, and especially your website to look appealing to you, but rather those you want to do business with you. If you have a restaurant that serves American BBQ and you are Korean, you should reflect on who you are wanting to serve and who will be your best demographic and match them. The feel of your website should be the same. What colors, what styles, what format best matches your potential customer’s preferences. Look at their websites and look at your competitors websites. Between these you should start to get an idea of what you want your business and your website to look like.

The bottom line question is this; How many customers do you have to lose to make a bad website too costly?

Joseph L. Zeleny
Chief Marketing Officer
SIA Professional Services

SIAServices.net

916-361-0792