Some of you know that I have a passion for wakeboarding. I work lots of Saturday mornings because I love my work, but if it is over 70 degrees outside on a Saturday morning, you won’t find me in front of a computer. You are much more likely to find me upside down on a wakeboard flying through the air behind a boat.
A guy in my neighborhood has a business that does wraps, decals, and skins for boats, atvs, snowmobiles, etc. Just recently I bought a new wrap for my boat through his website, but not until after 3 phone calls and multiple tries at the shopping cart. At first I felt so dumb. Why was it so difficult to make purchase and get what I wanted? Why did I feel so unsure that I was actually going to get what I wanted? Was it me?
In the end, I got what I wanted. Here is the before:
….and the after:
You see? He has a great product. You almost can’t tell it is the same boat! I’m quite pleased with how it turned out.
If Cody and I weren’t friends I never would have bought a wrap off of his website (I won’t link to his website for now). It is such a confusing, uncertain, online user experience. He came to me asking for help with PPC advertising. I asked him how his online sales were going, and, surprise, surprise! He told me they were almost non-existent (less than .5% conversion rate).
He said he gets 2000-5000 visits per month (all organic) to his site depending on the time of year. He has over 10,000 likes on Facebook. His product is sold all over the US (mostly in the Rocky Mountain region). Offline he has built a brand that you can find on the cover of magazines with national champions and professionals using his product. Sadly, if I sent you to his website today, you would have a hard time believing any of that. His website doesn’t give you that impression.
Needless to say, Cody is about to get some help from a friend. It is time to go to work. I can’t wait to give you the before and after success story as we work to improve user experience and drive more traffic and higher conversions.
It doesn’t matter how much traffic you get to your website if your online user experience is sub-par. Website owners live or die on user experience. Make sure that you are doing what it takes to live online by creating and improving an enjoyable, intuitive online user experience.
K.I.S.S. (Keep It Simple, Stupid) It should be so easy/simple to buy something on your site that an 8 year old kid could steal his dad’s credit card and make a purchase without any hiccups. This has been another Miscellaneous Monday post. You can see them all here: