I find that the lessons we learn early in life can help in surprising ways later on. Even fairy tales can provide useful guidance for solving common website problems.
Take the tale of Goldilocks, exploring the options in front of her and opting away from the extremes of too – too hot, too cold, too soft, too hard. (We’ll skip over the part of her waltzing into the nice home of bears and helping herself for now.) In the end she finds there’s a happy middle that works best.
These days, Goldilocks might well find gainful employment as a web designer. And if she did, looking around the internet at websites, she would again find herself confronted with the Problem of Too Much and the Problem of Too Little.
Examples of the Problem of Too Much
- Too much text, long paragraphs of multi-syllable words (tech or marketingspeak) that no one will ever want to read
- A list of everything the company does or has ever done
- Photos of a dozen “featured products” rather than one or two features
Examples of the Problem of Too Little
- Hidden contact or location information, or no contact information
- No single sentence to say, very simply, what the company offers or sells
- No tie-ins to the rest of the company’s marketing/advertising
Solving the Problems of Too Much and Too Little
Both the Problem of Too Much and the Problem of Too Little have the same root cause: Not looking your site the way a customer or prospect would. (Of course, your website can have a number of audiences: prospective customers, current customers, potential employees, current employees, vendors. The same issues apply no matter which type of site visitor you need to serve.)
To think about how to solve the Problems of Too Much and Too Little, consider an example of a site with a great home page: Duolingo.
If you’ve never heard of or looked at the Duolingo site before, you can tell within seconds what the site is about — or at least, what they want you to know about them: they want to be known as “The free, fun, and effective way to learn a language!”
New visitors to the site see that message loud and clear. Everyone can see examples of available languages at the bottom of the page, and if you scroll down to get a better look you start
to see more about how Duolingo works and why they say it would help you learn. And members can sign in to jump into the meat of the site. It’s a clear and appealing home page.
How can you improve your home page?
1. List the people/kinds of people who you expect (want) to use your website.
2. Prioritize them. You can’t help everyone equally, so you need to be selective. Who’s most important for your business right now? Prospective customers, current customers, investors, press? Rank the order in which you want to serve their needs on your website.
3. One by one, define what each kind of visitor wants from your site, and revise your content and design to make sure they can get that information quickly.
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