Do I like you?
Do I trust you?

To me these are the 2 major questions that are regularly not addressed on websites and account for the high numbers of visitors that just walk away.  They came to your website because they thought you might be able to help them, but left because they were not comfortable doing business with you.

Do I like you?

This is a really fundamental question. I like doing business with people I like.  Sounds obvious and I expect you are the same.  We all have our favourite coffee shops, our favourite clothes shops, our favourite bar.  At some level I like you.  I like how it feels when I go into the store, restaurant or bar.  The way they present themselves matches me.  I feel good.  I like the experience.

Do I trust you?

I’ve decided I like you but can I trust you.  Can I trust that you will deliver on time, can I trust that you will not steal my credit card details, can I trust you.  Without this trust I might like you but I don’t want to do business with you as I don’t know if you will deliver on your promise.  This is like having a close friend that you really enjoy hanging out with but you wouldn’t let them housesit while you are out of town.  I like them but I can’t trust them.

So, what can you do?

On a website like and trust are tough things to get across.  It’s easy to show you sell what I want to buy, just add a shopping cart.

For Like

Tell me who you are including your name. Why you are passionate about what you do. Why you value me as a person and not just a paying customer.

 For Trust

Tell me stories about other peoples experience (testimonials).  Tell me your values.  Tell me your commitment (in stock/out of stock, your delivery schedule).  Tell me how I can contact you.   Tell me why you can be trusted.

Keep your website up to date.  Talking about events in the future when they happened 3 months ago shows a lack of care and attention.  Maybe you’ll treat me the same way.

Be positive in the message.  Talking in negatives, even double negatives (so being a positive in the end) sounds evasive. What are you trying to hide.

In Summary

I need to like you and trust you before I will do business with you.  Get this right and then what you do will sell itself.

Update:

I was watching a rerun of the UK program ‘The Gadget Show’ episode 16 and at the 31 minute mark Suzi is trying to convince Big Brother’s Nikki Grahame to do an extreme water sport.  Guess what 2 questions she asks her?
(http://www.channel5.com/shows/the-gadget-show/episodes/episode-16-117 – there are a few ads you have to go through to get to the program, but it’s worth it to see the interaction)

For website this just isn’t true.  The age of being able to throw up a website and getting business are long gone. Just building a website isn’t enough you need to hustle.

Assuming you have a great product that people want then doing business online becomes very similar to retail.

You need to have a good looking store (see older posts – Is your website a market stall or a high street store? & The deserted website).  I have to want to come into your store.  I have to feel you care about your website enough to keep it current and interesting.

I have to be able to find you.  Just like retail it’s no use having a great store only to hide it away down some back street.  On the web this is where SEO comes in.  Get it ranked in the search engines, get it listed, get it mentioned, and get it out there.  Put it on the high street next to the other leading stores.

I have to want to go to your store over the others that have come up in my top 5.  Make sure your business and website has fans.  People who are happy to say how great your products and service are.  Who have enjoyed shopping with you and keep coming back.  A bunch of years ago it was all about being sticky.  That’s fine as long as it’s the right sticky.  It has to be people coming back who care about doing business with you and not just hanging out with like minded people (that’s what Twitter is for)

To that end, get out there and begin promotion.

Look at other sites that you like and work out why you keep going back.  Is it the content, the style, the feeling you get being associated with them.  See how you can create the same connection for your own website.

Why, because the websites for many small businesses are not giving me a good impression of the company. From the obvious poorly designed, badly written websites to the less obvious ‘feeling’ I get when on the site.   I want to feel positive about doing business with these people.

Can I trust you to deliver?
For small businesses this is even more important as we can now source things from anywhere so the local businesses main advantage is service and connectedness.

If your website doesn’t give me the feeling that I can trust you I’ll just move on and you will never know you missed a potential sale.  Also, unless you check your website statistics you will not know you were even in the running.

Come on; show your website a bit of care and attention and it will repay you.
Give the walls a new lick of paint, hang some new pictures, maybe even update the 1950′s decor* to that your site looks like it’s somewhere I want to hang out.

*1950′s decor – in internet years 1950′s decor is anything made before 2005 and for some this could even be as late as 2008.

The question I have is whether it is the books that we miss or the feeling of being in a book place with the cup of coffee and the people watching.   For me it’s the latter.   I love the browsing, the finding of new books, the ability to thumb through them and get a feeling for how it will entertain and inform me while in a non-rushed place.   If the book stores go then it will be real loss to humanity.

In the UK we have a situation where the libraries are being shut down to save money.  I was thinking couldn’t the libraries fill the void that is being caused by book stores going out of business. They would just need to serve coffee and snacks to make it more social.   Give us more engaging libraries and suddenly they become places people want to go again.

Also, as a comparison I don’t feel a loss for record stores because you never really experienced new things there. You could look at the cases and see what’s out there but the chances are it was either on the radio, television or a friends music taste that has created the want to get new music. Not the experience of going into the store.

While a high street retailer has a permanent presence where changes made today will provide benefit in the future.  There is the potential to really tailor the experience customers have so they want to come back.

So, do you want your website to be a market stall, stack’em high and sell’em cheap or high street store where customers want to and enjoy coming back again and again?

I expect you have come across the same thing.

Well, if only you knew who the decision maker is you could go to them.
If I was driving there I would not have used this road.

You can pick holes in my approach and my actions later, but for now advice on how to move things forward is what I’m looking for.  Not advice that would be useful if I had a time machine or a magical way of making information available, change the personalities of the people I am dealing with, change my own personality or add 3 days to the working week to give time to get things done.

If I’m asked for advice then I always try to be practical with what they need.  The exercise on learning from the greater context can come later, but for now the focus is what is the next step.

He had great ideas for how to make it more commercial and even saved enough to take a year our to develop the site to the point where it could scale and be commercial.

After the year he procrastinated and never put it live.

From talking to him he was afraid to fail. He had something that made him feel good about himself in a site that was enjoyed by lots of people every day. He was afraid that if he started charging he would lose this and it was more important to feel good rather than be commercial.

This is a point we all have to be really honest with ourselves. Are we afraid to lose what we have in pursuit of what we want. Unless this fear can be overcome it’s not possible to give 100%, because if we did there would be no excuse to delay.

So, how did my friend get on. Well eventually he hacked up a bit of code over a weekend, accepted subscriptions and made $10k  with no real effort.

A years dedicated – no change.

Overcame the fear, 2 days of hacking and suddenly he is earning $10k.

Overcoming the fear is all it takes. How tough can that be.

I was talking to the owner of a small bed and breakfast and they wanted to set up Twitter and Facebook accounts.  No problem, let’s do it now.

As we were preparing to get this done I asked what they were going to use it for.
Like ‘why have a website’ they did not have an answer to this question.  They have heard of Twitter and Facebook.  Even some of their guests suggested that it would be a good idea to have them but they did not know what they were or how they would use them.

So, we stopped setting up the accounts while we spoke about what they were, how they worked and the commitment that they would have to put in to see results.  It was at this point that they realised that for a small 4 bedroom B&B the extra effort involved may not be the best use of their time.  The effort to get followers that would lead to guest might be greater than then number of guests achieved through other methods.

Social Media is great and has its place, but the more I see the more I realise that it is not for every business and every situation.  It’s another tool in the bag.  You don’t have to take it out every time.

The thing is this question is just the opener. The 1st question to get them thinking about how they use their website and how they want their clients and contacts to use their website.

If you have a website to sell then shouldn’t this be front and centre and not a little link in the corner to [store]. If it is to connect then shouldn’t it give details about what you want to connect to people about and naturally speak to the kind of person you wish to connect with. Or, if it is a personal site where you are expecting very few visitors you still need to know why you have the site otherwise there is a high possibility it will just get abandoned like so many blogs or Facebook and Twitter accounts. Or even more so for the people who have been online for a while those Geocities sites that disappeared in 2009 and nobody noticed.

The Why question can as simple as:
A place to put my pictures.
A place where I can rant.
A site to get more people to buy my biscuits
A site to introduce my new box design

Once you have figured out the Why, then it is all about the How.
How will my website get more people to buy my biscuits?

Then there’s the call to action.
What do I want people to do when they come to my website. Again it might be as simple as place an order, or it might be something a little less specific.

No matter what it is you have to build your site to guide the visitor to the action you want them to take. Expecting them to figure it out on their own may lead to a lot of visitors, but may not deliver the Why you have a website you are looking for.

By taking into account these simple questions you can improve the effectiveness of your website.

So, when I found the Arduino it fired my interest again.  It is a simple cheap electronics board that you can program to get things done.
People smarter than me have developed Segway type things, Lighting Effects, Remote control robots.  All with this little board at the heart of it.

I got my kit from Earthshine Electronics but I have also seen an intresting kit from .:oomlout:.

What is also great is that both of these sites also have PDF downloadable guides to get you started with everything from Blinking LEDs to controlling motors and reading temperature.

Also, if you need more inspiration just go to Youtube and search for Arduino.  There are some really interesting videos being uploaded every day and the SciGuy14 Channel has a new video every Monday on electronics to give you even more information.  All presented in a way that is easy to understand without being dumbed down.

So, what are you waiting for – go tinker.