Opinion on website design vs marketing

[mattison]

My competition for my product has horrible color schemes like orange and turquoise. The websites look horrible and unprofessional. No logos which i have. I know one company who somehow makes at least 5,000 with a really crappy yahoo storefront. My goal is to do both.

I was curious what all of your opinions were on good looking websites vs non and if it plays the difference in the overall sale. Or is it all about the marketing. I know the goal is both but i would really like to know people's opinions. When i looked at my competitors i felt good cause seriously orange and turquoise are way ugly.

Thanks in advance guys!

[sub8hr]

The short answer is.. everything matters. The web game is all about traffic and conversion. First you have to get them to your site through marketing, then once they are there you have to convert them into customers.

That said you don't need a radiantly beautiful site. Most eCommerce sites out there really don't look that good, even ones that are 'professionally' designed.

[DaveCraige.com]

yea traffic > design

http://www.plentyoffish.com/
is a crappy design but makes a killing.

the number one rules of website usability is load speed and uptime.

[Jimmydee]

They both matter...

The design will keep the readers engaged with the site. For example, check this site out:

www.doubleyourdating.com

It's a simple straight forward design, but it brings in 20 million dollars of revenue every year.

In short, the design will capture the visitors. The content will convert them to customers, and the marketing will get them to your web site.

You need everything.

[kamakiri]

This is not a chicken/egg problem. It is very clear. The best, fastest, prettiest web site in the world will fail with no customers. If you are selling something, people really don't need to come back daily to look at your 'nice design', they need you to be there standing out in a google search when they are looking for you.

It isn't hard to have a decent looking site, even templates these days are pretty good looking, and there are so many out there that you can have a decent site in under $100. Mine cost $300 on elance.

Once you get people to your site is it going to be the copy that keeps them. Copy trumps design as well. Spelling mistakes, broken links, and broken html will blow your credibility, making all that marketing money valueless.

This whole process really hangs up a lot of people. The perfectionist in all of us wants to dominate here. Do your best to stamp it down. Crush that perfect image. For design, good enough really is good enough. If you had a 100 person staff, then anything less than perfect is unacceptable, but for our purposes, 80% is just fine. Get that 80% perfect site up there, and then focus on driving people to it.

Running after 2 rabbits at the same time is a sure way to catch neither.

[camdengirl]

Thinking about how I buy from websites - I detest putting my card number into dodgy looking sites, but would also be put off by obviously expensive design as I'd think I was paying partly for their fancy shopfront.

A bit like me being outraged by my wee sis buying all her groceries at Harrods - her argument? It's near her flat and she would need to get a cab otherwise. My argument? You're insane spending £4 on a loaf of bread! I'm quite happy to shop at the local supermarket instead but would be reluctant to give my credit card to the dodgy corner shop...in fact this is one of the reasons why wee sis was shopping in Harrods - her card got cloned twice at the corner shop!

[sub8hr]

Yeah, design is important up to the "good enough" stage. People should have a nice comfortable "that's nice" feeling about your design and not an "oh wow, this is the most beautiful site I've ever seen."

Or more to the point, really what you need to do is build the site to the point that you have a solid bedrock that won't turn away customers. Then forget about it and focus on the traffic building and marketing.

[DaveCraige.com]

does he really make 20mil of that!! jeesh.

[Marcie]

Since I'm a graphic designer by trade I find this topic very interesting. I guess I am sort of a snob when it comes to web sites, sites that I really find visually appealing are few and far between. I was recently looking at a friend of mine's site who has the #1 position in Google for the search term "koozie" - he's getting plenty of business but I personally think, if I didn't know him, I would click off of his site pretty quickly because it's so - ugh:
http://www.kustomkoozies.com/
(The home page isn't terrible, but look at the FAQ, for example). Anyway, do you think his business could potentially even double with a better-designed site? Does it matter that much?

[sub8hr]

Yeah, that site design is pretty horrible. You just don't know what to look at and can't figure out what's going on right away.

In my mind the site is really an extension of the sales process. If you say only the external marketing matters, you are wrong. If you say only the site matters, you are wrong. The marketing gets the prospect in the door, then what's on the site has to be congruent with the marketing and move prospects down the sales funnel to purchase. Each one of these steps has to be "right" to convert at all. I think this is one of those things where there's a night and day difference between sites that have all the minimum basic success factors in place and those that don't, or are even missing just one. Super tweaking on top of that is probably best left to after your marketing is close to maxed out for the channels you're in and you have enough traffic to get meaningful data on the smaller changes.

[reapr]

My competition for my product has horrible color schemes like orange and turquoise. The websites look horrible and unprofessional. No logos which i have. I know one company who somehow makes at least 5,000 with a really crappy yahoo storefront. My goal is to do both.

I was curious what all of your opinions were on good looking websites vs non and if it plays the difference in the overall sale. Or is it all about the marketing. I know the goal is both but i would really like to know people's opinions. When i looked at my competitors i felt good cause seriously orange and turquoise are way ugly.

Thanks in advance guys!

I would not knock the color of orange. I would also not know a crappy site. It is about traffic and conversions. Your competitor could also be targeting better converting keywords and phrases that result in more sales.

Now back to the color orange yes it is fugly ... but it is a color that sells. I can not remember where I found the info but I noticed my conversions go up a few percent and it was already sitting at 12% for that site. This site I mention is ugly but in a tight niche.

Yahoo storefront ... could have been a good server, pageload or branding.

I once notice that by removing a few logos my sites conversions went up and it may have been due to the speed it took for the pages to load because the bounce rate also dropped. Colors, logos and page design are all very critical elements regardless of fugly colors or design.

[nghs22]

Dude you can get a great looking website for less than $500 bucks. I got mine done (and 6 others to go along with it) on elance for $400 using a wp template I wanted customized. Adam Purcell of hungry dog media did it for me and did a great job.

NOW, seeing as I am a cheapskate and want to see if it can be done, I am TRYING not to spend any out of pocket costs on my muse. Crazy I know, but I want to see if it can be done. It takes alot more work for sure, but I think when my story is a success, it will help people by showing them they don't need $1000's of bucks to make a profitable muse.

My site is: http://www.thegmatcoach.com

the others I got done are (but haven't done anything with):
www.gmatmathaustin.com
www.gmatmathmiami.com
etc for other cities

I focused on posting on CL and doing my own SEO to get my site some visitors. Type in "GMAT Coach" or "800 score gmat" or other gmat terms and you'll see me near the top. This automatically adds credibility.

Anyways, I made a few flyers, hired a great tutor, developed materials and BOOM.... I made $3000 bucks in 3 days after running my first GMAT workshop.

Crazy I know right?!?!

I wanted to test my muse to see if it would actually work, but once I made money with it, I knew it was viable.

Now I have GMAT Workshops lined up in Seattle, D.C., and another in Atlanta this coming weekend.

NOW, before I am going to go spend thousands on professional marketing, I am taking a step back, defining my target market, writing a full biz and marketing plan, and doing my own research as to what cities I should go after next. With everyone's pockets thin now, I have to really think of the value I can provide people as they will be more discretionary with their spending. I know alot of ppl are going back to school now, so that is a plus, effectively making my business recession proof :)

And I saw the previous posts about someone jacking a muse from here.

Go Ahead. Steal my muse. I've worked my ass off to develop proprietary materials and find a world-class tutor. I challenge you to do the same. If you are ripping off ppl's muses, you obviously aren't willing to work hard enough to develop your own.

Ok off the soapbox.

The point of all this is not me pumping myself up (though it does feel cool to actually read my story, even I don't really believe it sometimes :)) BUT to show you you can have a professionally designed website for pretty cheap. Then, you can be responsible with your marketing $$$ to get the best bang for your buck. Calculate everything, but don't be so stuck in stone that you can't make decisions.

As soon as something looks viable, go after it. Their are great solutions to every problem you have.

Need a site? Elance.
Need adwords training? Google does it for free.
Need a muse idea? Search ebay and google for what people are looking for/buying.


During war, the people that live don't wait to be shot at, they go in ready to shoot. Managers are the same way. If you wait until you have all the data, your competition will be ahead of you.

Good Luck!