Website Thinkinggetting the horse to drink

Website Thinking: Continuously incorporating marketing and sales considerations into web sites and web design to deliver bottom line results (i.e. going beyond making it technically function and graphically appealing).
aka: making your website sell, conversion optimisation, effective web design,
Almost synonymous with: website planning, persuasion architecture, continuous improvement, split testing, user testing, wire-framing, calls to action
Not to be confused with: website programming, graphic web design, procrastination

Have you ever had a web marketer say to you “You can take a horse to water”? At Attacat we’ve known for a long time that if you can’t persuade web site visitors to drink when they’re on your website, that there will be no more Internet marketing budget. As a result, over the past 11 years we learned a thing or two about making websites that sell.

Web Design

A website can look fantastic but still not sell. A website can be technically perfect but still not sell. They can be both, yet still not sell. Why? Because sales and marketing is not incorporated into the web design.

Just because you offer the ability to buy online does not mean your customers will buy. Just because you have a contact form doesn’t mean people will fill it out. You need to persuade people to do it.

Your website visitors are continuously asking “What’s in it for me?”. This question and what can be done to provide a satisfactory answer is what Attacat’s “Website Thinking” is all about.

This thinking needs including (and tested continuously) from day 1 of a web design project.

The First Draft and Beyond

And it doesn’t stop the day the website launches. Pat yourself on the back yes, avoid pausing for breath if you can. Your new website is simply a first draft.

From here on in always look for ways to increase the proportion of visitors turning into buyers. Get ideas from visitor behaviour & feedback (there are tools and processes for doing this efficiently) and then test and measure the impact of the idea. If it’s an improvement it get’s incorporated into the site and move on to the next, if it doesn’t simply move on to the next.

Attacat Web Design & Website Services

We can project manage the entire web design process to incorporate design, appropriate technology and of course sales and marketing. For existing websites we offer training, one-off reviews and fully managed continuous improvement programs.

(For the geeks: tools we use include split & multivariate testing (Google Website Optimizer), informal user testing, heat maps and other analytic tools, mystery shopping, personas and surveys)