Podcast 22: How your website sells
Posted in Podcast on: Monday, February 6, 2006 by Paul Boag
Whatever your website is about, it has to sell something. From selling an idea to a product or service, every site has its place in the sales process. This podcast looks at what that process is and how your website plays its part.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (23.8MB)
News and stuff
This week we look at the new beta of Internet Explorer 7 as well as correcting a heap load of errors we have made in previous podcasts! However, most importantly we tell you about the geek dinner being held in honour of boagworld.com.
For more about the geek dinner check out my post
Win a ticket to SXSW by visiting the geek dinner website
Technobuster: Validation
This week’s technobuster section looks at Validation. What is it, why bother and how it work?
Read our validation post for more details
Main Feature: How your website sells
As I said at the start of this post, every website is selling something. Even the most dreary public sector site is trying to convince somebody of something (selling an idea). In many ways most of life is about sales, we are always trying to get people to see our point of view, to do something we want them to do. Unattractive though it is, sales are the cornerstone of web design and yet so often it is overlooked.
In this episode of boagworld, we explore some of the underlying sales principles that have been around for years and try applying them to the web.
Seven steps in sales
It is widely accepted that we pass through seven states in the purchasing process:
Satisfied ignorance
We do not believe we have a need and so are making no effort to fulfil that need. For example if you have just eaten, you feel no need to eat more.
Awareness of need
You are aware you have a need but have yet to take action. Gaining an awareness of your need can be triggered by external or internal sources. For example you may start to feel hungry (an internal trigger) or you might smell some food cooking, which makes you hungry (external).
Information search
You now actively look for a way to fulfil that need. Either we rely on internal sources such as a memory of a nice place to eat, or turn to external sources, such as a recommendation of a restaurant from a friend or family member.
Evaluation of alternatives
This search process will lead to a number of alternatives. Do I eat in a restaurant or cook something myself? We weigh the pros and cons of different options in order to settle on a decision.
Purchase decision
In this stage, we begin to look at the specifics of our decision. If we have decided to cook ourselves, we decide on what we will actually cook.
Purchase
This is the actual decision to act. In some cases, this will be a literal purchase while in others it might be a call to action like volunteering ones time or changing ones point of view. Understanding what your site’s objective is (your purchase point) will help you position it in the sales process outlined here.
Post purchase
This is the point where we decide if the "purchase" was the right decision and whether we intend to stick with that decision.
Applying the sales process to your site
Understanding these steps are one thing, applying them to your site is quite another. It is especially difficult if your site is not an ecommerce site. The goal is to understand which of these steps you perceive your site addressing and which are to be dealt with by other methods (such as on or offline marketing). Before you can do that, you need to understand what your ultimate goal (sale) is.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. Headscape is a web design company that offers a variety of services that are tailored to individual companies needs. They do not sell a tangible off the shelf product and so the web is not an appropriate environment to complete the transaction. Instead, the actual purchase point needs to be reached from negotiation between the client and the Headscape team. Therefore, the Headscape website is primarily geared around helping prospects with the "evaluation of alternative" stage. Anything before this point in the sales process and the prospect wouldn’t have found the Headscape site, anything after this point and we would prefer to be talking to them face to face.
Knowing where your website fits in helps determine factors like supporting marketing, content requirements and general design/functionality.
Useful questions
The following questions might help you to better understand the positioning of your site:
- Does your site need to convince the user of their need before you present them with a solution? For example, the majority of visitors to the Headscape website already know they need a site and so this part of the process is unnecessary.
- Does your site need to explain the solution to the users need before selling your particular proposition?
- Does your site seek to maintain the prospects attention while they investigate alternative solutions?
- Does your site manage the purchase process online?
- Does your site provide post purchase support?
- Are there methods in place to raise awareness of their need and help in finding your site?
I realise that this is a bit of a tricky concept to explain so have a listen to the podcast and if it still isn’t clear post a comment on this site.
Web resources: Choosing a colour palette
This week Paul and Marcus looked at three sites that help you choose the right colour palette for your site.
Dark-i.com
This site lets you view example sites based on palette to see how other designers have worked with certain colour combinations
Colour blender
This site allows you to quickly and easy try out different colour combinations together as well as making suggestions of colours that will work well.
Colour Schemer studio
The colour schemer studio is the best colour theory software around. This excellent little tool helps you create the perfect colour palette. A great buy!
26 Comments
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ROFLMAO!!!!
Awesome ;o)
You tell those Geeks on Tech DUDES!
It’s very nice to listen to people speaking English without having to watch old shows on PBS.
Thanks for mentioning us on your podcast; it was really quite nice!
Keep up the great work!
Tom, Jay, and Danielle
You mentioned that the IE 7 beta has a new feature that allows you to see a thumbnail of all the open tabs. You also lamented that Firefox doesn’t have this feature…
If you’d like to have this feature in Firefox, then I suggest you take a look at this excellent plugin! :-)
foXpose
https://addons.mozilla.org/extensions/moreinfo.php?application=firefox&id=1457
Thanks Richard, nice but not quite as slick as IE. It will be interesting if this becomes a standard browser feature.
I was a bit surprised by your reference to one of the colour palette websites. Quite innocently I typed in darkeye.com and was a bit surprised by your choice of recommendation.
This appears to be a site dedicated to degrading pornographic material. Try as I might I attempted to find a colour palette, but the site only offered shades of different skin tones, which I must admit worked quite well together.
Yours sincerely
Lewis
Not sure if I mentioned the URL mentioned on your podcast – I typed in darkeye.com !!!
I just wanted to comment on the best web sites coming from the states. This is very true but had it not been for the talent of a 21 year old millionnaire and his website milliondollarhomepage, I myself would not have been motivated to enbark on a similar venture in online marketing. Great advice on sales, and i hope to see what you can do for me and my first of many sites in the near future.
Marcus, turn off your instant messenger! You’re causing Paul’s voice to raise and its getting unpleasent. lol.
I think we all went to darkeye.com – oops! There goes a half hour of my afternoon.
I enjoyed your thoughts on the sales process – I’d recommend to people that they check out ActionPlan.com for an understanding of the sales process specific to ‘info gurus’. I wrote a bit about it at http://the-making-of.signal7.com.au/index.php?id=10
Just a request- could you spell out webaddresses in the podcast? I listen at work and logged onto blackeye.com, which is completely inappropriate. In hindsight, I should have seen that coming….
Anyway, I love the show! Thanks for putting it together.
Im sorry Paul, I have to call you on this one. What is “Beeta”? Its Beta! its pronounced “bay – ta”. Not “Beat – a”. You crazy brits. Love the show!
Oh Tyler, are you sure you want to open this can of worms ;)
What do brits say instead of trashcan and diaper? As for podcast 22… very nice indeed ;)
Trash can is Rubbish Bin
Diaper is Nappy
:)
Wow… that really changes the meaning of when someone has a “nappy hairdo”. The mind, it boggles.
Nappy, I’m guessing, is short for ‘napkin’? I’ll never wipe my mouth again…
While not quite as snazzy as your examples, I’ve been using a coloschemer located at wellstyled (http://www.wellstyled.com/tools/colorscheme2/index-en.html) for quite some time. It’s really quite functional.
Thanks very much for the hours of entertainment.
I never knew education could be so much fun! I really enjoy your show you and Marcus are probably some of the most entertaining folks on the other side of the pond that I have ever listened to. Keep up the good work guys. You got me hooked
You must appreciate how more folks have commented on your accents and vernacular than how to sell their website.
I’m truly getting a kick out of this.
Yes I have noticed Dustin. Quite demoralising really! ;)
Last time you left out mint, this time you left out ColourLovers? It’s even spelled incorrectly for you guys over there!
http://colourlovers.com/
I have to say, I’m actually fond of the english accent but you have to admit, some of you guys butcher it more than we do! Haven’t you seen My Fair Lady ?
Good site jyoseph. Better than Mint :) As for my fair lady, well okay you have a point. Alot of the British dont exactly speak the queens English (myself included), but that arguement doesnt make for as amusing podcast does it!
First of all, I love the podcast. Also like the british, because I can understand what you’re saying. Not like those american podcasters that just can’t articulate.
Thanks for fixing the acronym-mix up of the last podcast. Loved the way you mis-pronounced my name :-) . It’s dutch by the way, so I won’t hold it against you.
There is just one thing I’d like to add concerning the technobuster-part on validation. Mike wrote a nice article about search-engines and there supposed love for valid html-code. It turns out that SE don’t care that much. He even posted the most ugly piece of HTML code I’ve ever seens from a site that was ranked higher that his site.
Hi Gerben,
I am sorry if I am being really stupid but I am reading this article the complete opposite to you. As far as I can see test 3 was supposed to:
“To determine if invalid code penalizes search result ranking, and to what degree.”
And the result was as follows:
“The answer: Yes, to a draconian degree, in fact.”
How did you conclude validation doesnt matter?
The answer you quoted was to the question if invalid code can (not will) get you penalized.
The testcases…
<table cloth=&checkered><invalid>
…he did are very invalid and don’t even render in browsers. I think in this case google didn’t even penalize the page, but just didn’t know what to do with it.
I don’t thing minor validation error make google like you less.
In my comment I was actually refering to the Mike Portnoy site he talked about. More specific the fact that this site didn’t even have a html-tag. This case makes me believe that google doesn’t care that much about validation. I would however recommend trying to get your code as valid and even more as symanitic as possible.
Just caught up on this podcast, and when you were correcting your technobuster from the previous podcast, you said that the flash image replacement wasn’t ‘FIR,’ but rather ‘SFIR.’ This is actually ’sIFR’, which stands for Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. I doubt there’s much need to correct it yet again. ;) Here’s the site:
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2004/08/sifr