Building Websites Is About User Experience
The most-read articles on this website are about niche sites. It’s weird, because the niche site stuff I write about is just a hobby. It’s not my main thing at all. However, it’s popular, so I’ll write about it some more.
One thing that people tend to do with building websites is to both over-think and under-think the process. Nowhere is this truer than when it comes to user experience. I think this article is heading to a “One Key Rule” type conclusion again, so let’s get on with the necessary background stuff.
How Do People Over-Think and Under-Think Website Building?
Sometimes, my freelance clients will have me do little internet marketing tricks that I’d never known existed. I can understand keyword density and having great headlines and the like, but there are weird things – like mentioning your keyword twice in the opening paragraph and then once in the final sentence – which smack of too much reading internet marketing forums.
There are a million website-building gurus who’ll sell you on complicated systems to get the websites you want. Think about the guy who has nine popups on every page getting you to sign up for the mailing list, like on Facebook and share on Twitter, all on a 600 word article.
They’re people who are overthinking it.
Incidentally, they tend to be the people who under-think it as well.
Most clients who come to me with the ridiculous requests (like a ten percent keyword density or whatever) tend to also be doing stupid things and building terrible websites.
There is no point in having a writer give you a perfect 3.5% density for your keyword if your keyword is “buy shoes Michigan brown leather.” That’s never going to work in an article, and so no reader is ever going to click your targeted text. Also, most of these people who are trying to game search engines are all going after the same keywords anyway. I must have written a hundred different articles for various clients who are going to make it selling diet pills.
These things are under-thinking it because they’re building a website which is fundamentally not built for purpose. Those clients tend to come and go like lightning, whereas the honest guy who plods along asking me to write articles for his taxi business a few times a month is still going strong and getting better results as time goes on – because his website is a part of something bigger and it does its job.
So now you’ve been given the background information, let’s talk about what the one thing to keep in the back of your mind when you’re building a site is.
What’s The One Key Rule?
The one key rule for building a website is that it’s got to work. Not in terms of you clicking a button and going to the right place, because that’s a given. In terms of coding and functionality, if you use WordPress and get a decent theme, then the hard work is absolutely done for you and there’s no excuse for your site not working properly. (Sadly, there are multi-million pound companies that don’t get this far, so don’t feel bad if your site doesn’t work properly.)
I mean in terms of user experience. Essentially, your site has to, above and beyond everything else, work at giving your reader a good experience.
Make everything accessible.
Make everything easy to read.
Don’t go for the sale over the reader.
When it comes to niche sites, a lot of people have very reasonable questions like, “Does this convert better than that” or “Should I sell something on every page?”
The answer is, in most cases, another question: “Does your site work like a “real” site?”
I’ve said in another article that your niche site is basically a set of extended sales letters, but the key rule is that your reader cannot know this!
Your reader lands on your website. They read your article. If their peripheral vision tells them you’re legitimate, then they’ll trust you and click your link and send you money.
If your website looks like a terrible junk site that has been made for $40 by someone from Blackhatworld and your sales letter does the equivalent of shouting “BUY THIS BUY THIS BUY THIS” then you’re not going to build any trust and not get the sale.
If you follow the key rule and make your niche site indistinguishable from a “real site,” then you will be more successful. So if you’re in any doubt about what to do with a niche site or where to go, think in terms of “What would I do if it were a real site?”
Questions like these will disappear:
- Should every post sell something?
- Do I need to include images?
- Should I review products I don’t know anything about?
- Should I outsource the writing?
- Should I have pop-ups?
- Should I spam my site in other people’s comments?
Your niche sites should have the exact quality that your “real site” has – or would have if you don’t have one.
For instance, my niche websites exist because people who read this site probably don’t want to read about my favourite type of shoes or what I think the best type of bowling ball is (or whatever niche subjects I write about.)
However, the quality of my niche sites is exactly the same as this one. If I had one site for everything I’d ever written for any of my sites, I wouldn’t be ashamed to have any of those articles on said main site.
That’s the quality your niche site should have.
Final Thoughts
The painful thing about people over/under-thinking website building is that it’s really not rocket science. Find a problem. Answer the problem. Give people what they want, and give them a way to find you.
You absolutely don’t need to learn a whole host of insidious tricks in order to get people to read your stuff unless it’s really badly written. To extend that, you aren’t moving heaven and earth to get people to buy a product you recommend: You’re listing why they should do it, and they’ll either want to buy the item or they won’t.
Other than that, just build a reasonably decent website.
That’s really all there is to the “super secret techniques” side to website building.