Creating Effective Websites
— By Creating the Right Message

Websites are a unique form of communication, and they require appropriate thinking to make them effective.

Lots of articles discuss the technology and design aspects of websites. While these articles frequently stress the need to have “compelling content,” they generally provide little or no guidance on how to create that content. This article will show you how to make your website more effective by making your content much more “compelling.”

To make your website effective (which, for our purposes, means developing customer relationships), you need to deal with two important issues that are somewhat peculiar to web-viewers.

Web-viewers are focused on your message when they arrive; and
Web-viewers are quick to leave if they don’t easily find relevant and useful information.

In traditional forms of mass marketing, we’re first challenged to grab the viewer’s (or listener’s) attention from whatever else the viewer is focused on. For this, we can employ a variety of attention-grabbing tricks. After the viewer’s attention has been obtained, the central message can then unfold.

In contrast, there’s no attention grabbing needed in your website. Most web-viewers are focused exclusively on your website when they arrive. Not only are web-viewers already focused when they arrive, they’re searching intensely for specific information.

Knowing what they want, web-viewers are impatient to find it. Making this matter worse, web-viewers realize that many websites will fail to provide what they’re seeking. And like the rest of us, web-viewers encounter so many marketing messages that they’ve learned to strictly filter the messages they pay attention to. As a result, most web-viewers are quick to abandon any site that doesn’t immediately appear to be relevant and useful.

These factors require us to think very differently about websites as compared to traditional marketing methods. The challenge for websites is to keep the viewer’s attention, rather than to grab the viewer’s attention. Your web-viewers will be focused when they arrive, but they’ll leave in an instant if they don’t find what they want.

How Do We Keep the Viewer’s Attention?

To create compelling content for your website, you need to present two ideas, in this order.

First, you should briefly and concisely present your core message — who you are, what you do, and the benefits you provide for your target audience;
And then you should demonstrate that you are a credible source, and that you can deliver on the promise made in your core message.

Your Core Message

Your core message should be presented at the very beginning of your website. Your viewer needs to immediately know who you are, what you do, and the benefits you offer, all of which should entice the right viewers to read further into your website. This information needs to be presented in simple, easy-to-understand language, visible without scrolling within the first few lines of the landing page.

Most viewers are going to quickly scan the visible portion of the landing page for relevant and useful information. If the viewer cannot quickly determine that relevant and useful information is available on your site, he will likely leave without reading further. Therefore, the visible portion of your landing page has the important responsibility of drawing the viewer further in. If the viewer finds your core message relevant and useful, he will likely read further.

Optimally, your core message will be presented in just a few short paragraphs. If you need to provide more information to properly educate the viewer about your offerings, this information can be placed deeper in your website. [We'll leave a deeper discussion of what makes a good core message to a different article.]

Your Proof That You Can Deliver

It’s important that your website move fairly directly from the brief and concise statement of your core message to a demonstration of why the viewer should have confidence in you. Your credibility is part of the viewer’s determination of your “relevance.” Therefore, you need to prove without delay that you're a credible source, and that you can deliver the benefits promised in your core message. In other words, you need to prove that you’re “good enough” for the viewer to consider buying from you.

You can provide this proof in a number of ways. Hopefully you’ve begun this process by presenting your core message in terms that are relevant and interesting to the viewer. Among other things, you’ll want to address the context in which you can help your customers. This usually means discussing the actual problems that may need to be fixed. Beyond this, you should demonstrate your ability in a variety of ways, which might include:

A process or method that you use to deliver the promised benefits, particularly if this process or method is clearly superior and likely to be highly effective
Examples of past work with demonstrated success, such as:

Case studies describing how problems were solved and goals were achieved, and
Testimonials in which clients speak glowingly of how you've helped them solve problems and achieve bigger goals

Past experiences that demonstrate superior abilities
Education that suggests superior knowledge and ability
Associations that verify or imply superior skills, including as business organizations, past employers, and client lists
Writings on relevant topics to establish expertise

Throughout this process of proving your ability to deliver, it’s important to stay consistent with, and continually promote, the core message presented at the beginning of your website. For example, you should consider whether examples of your past work, and the terms of your other proof, effectively support the core message. Your goal is to create a set of mutually reinforcing statements that leave viewers thoroughly convinced that they’ve found the right resource for whatever it is you offer.

Be sure to include on the landing page both the core message and a reasonable amount of proof regarding your ability. While some of your proof will likely be located on different pages (maybe including more details about your offerings, a biographical sketch, expert articles, etc.), you need to develop the viewer’s confidence quickly with what’s presented on the landing page. By doing this, you’ll substantially increase the likelihood that the viewer will explore your website further.

And to help viewers explore your website, your pages should be linked, one to the next, in a logical manner. Each page should end with a reason to move to one or more additional pages, similar to how a good book encourages you to continue reading into the next chapter. Don’t rely exclusively on the typical navigation buttons at the top of the webpage. At the end of each page you should encourage the viewer to visit the next page with a question to be answered or a preview of the interesting next topic to be addressed, and with a hyperlink to that next page. And always include appropriate calls to action, either to purchase your offerings outright or to engage in further contacts that may eventually lead to a purchase and sale.

What to Avoid

What I frequently see are websites without any message design at all. The core message is in the wrong place and hard to find, or it's poorly articulated, or maybe it doesn't exist at all. Similary, the proof of ability is often poorly conceived and fails to effectively promote the overall goals of the website.

A common mistake that leads to this problem is that we write about the things we find interesting, rather than create an effective message for the intended viewer. The result can be a lot of rambling talk about everything but the core message and our ability to actually deliver valuable benefits.

Also, be careful to minimize the need for excessive page hopping, especially at the beginning. If your site requires the viewer to drill down through several page layers to find useful information, you're more likely to lose visitors. I recommend that the home page not be just a jumping off point to other pages, but include enough information (the core message and some proof of ability) to make the viewer actually want to explore more. Navigation aids at the bottom of each page leading to the next logical topic also will help in this regard.

And avoid distracting elements that push the core message out of the visible portion of the landing page. Frequent culprits are flash intros (usually more interesting to the business owner or the web designer than to the target audience), excessively large logos, useless wecome messages, and graphics and pictures that should be supporting the core message rather than bumping it off the visible page.

Conclusion

Remember that you don't need to grab the viewer's attention with bells and whistles and flashing lights. You need to keep the viewer's attention with relevent and useful content that's easily accessible. By following these few simple methods you can make your web content much more compelling — which will make your website more effective and successful.