This is why you hire a web designer. You want someone that can give you a good looking outside, and a good engine that actually makes the car run and work like you want it. It’s not rocket science, but in my 10 years as a designer, I can say with absolute certainty it’s more of a science than an art. It’s about making the site do something rather than just sit there and look pretty. It’s simply just making it do what you need it to do. The sites that focus solely on visuals fail miserably because they forget what the site is supposed to do.

Look at Google for instance. When Yahoo and others garbled up their pages with 9 billion other things besides the search box, Google just kept to their goal of being a search engine, with nothing more than a logo, search box, and a few other minor links. Now, Google is the dominant search engine out there while Yahoo and the others are on death’s doorsteps. I may be oversimplifying it, but they just took their eyes off the ball.

So how does this apply to your site? It applies when the visual aspects that you want interfere with the actual functions that you need. Load time is a big factor, but the biggest one is in the time that a visitor takes to fill your call to action. Plus some of those actions can be so distracting that the visitor doesn’t even get to filling the call to action. They just sit there admiring your visuals, and not get your message.

In closing, when you’re talking to a web designer, be prepared to leave most of your ideas at the door. It would be like going to a cardiologist for a triple bypass, and telling him what to do. Yeah, your heart might look pretty, but odds are it won’t work.

Back in the early days of the web, the fabled “Million Hit Sites” were the ones that everyone were talking about, and the ones people thought were the most successful. And really it sounded so good that people took it as gospel. But what those sites weren’t letting out was the fact that out of those million hits, only less than 1% of them actually turned into sales. Then take into account that a TON of those sites were paying per hit via CPC or traditional advertising, and you can see why the million hit sites went bankrupt well before everyone noticed there was no money being made from those sites.

And that’s only part of why the bubble burst!

But back to reality, I take the simple approach of looking at sales instead of hits. It’s pretty simple really… Instead of going through tons of analytical data and stats, all you need to do is look at the bottom line. If a site isn’t bringing in sales, it’s doing nothing for a business. Whether you’re selling a product or a service, your site should only have one call to action… “Call Now” or “Buy Now”. To drive a customer there, you need to look at a site and see if the site has enough information about that product or service. That’s where a lot of sites fail… they look good, they function well, but they do not have enough info to drive a customer to the call to action.

For a site that has “Call Now” as the call to action, the formula is simple. All you need is clear content describing in detail what the service is, and answers to the most common questions that a customer has before they commit to an order. Then when a customer finds the service, the call they make to you is less of a call for information and more of a call to order. If the web site can answer the calls for information, you’ll have more calls for orders just because customers who have all the information they need are more likely to call you.

The same goes for sites that has “Buy Now” as the call to action, but a little more goes into it. While “Call Now” may seem harmless to any potential customer, “Buy Now” may seem risky to those same customers. There’s 3 common questions that are associated with this…

1. Can I trust You with My Information?
2. How Much Will This Cost in the End?
3. How Soon Will I Receive the Product / Service?

The good sites answer these questions before the “Submit Order” button is clicked, But the great sites answer these questions before the “Add to Cart” button is clicked!

So really, It’s not about hits…. It’s about how well a site can turn those hits into sales. And in the business world, nobody cares about hits also… we just care about sales!

It’s actually pretty simple to make up. And it should have the following:

• Domain Registration Info (who you registered the domain with and the username and password needed to renew or modify it)
• Web Host Information (who you have your web site hosted with and the username and password to renew or modify the hosting plan)
• Site Administration Info (if you have a page you log into to administer the site, you need the page link, username, and password.)
• SSL Information (if you have a SSL Certificate, who you registered the certificate with and the username and password needed to renew or modify it)

And that’s it really! Having one page for each site is what you need for several reasons, if something were to happen to you, or the person maintaining the site, the person taking over has all the info they need to keep things running. And this puts you in control of your sites too. If your unhappy with who you’re working with and decide to make a change, you have all the info needed to change passwords and give the new guy the information he needs to get the job done.

And if you don’t have this info, demand it from who has it. Because after all, it’s your site! A lot of designers try to keep this info to try to secure themselves a job, but in reality they’re doing you a disservice. If your site goes down, and something happens to them…. you’re screwed. And trust me on this, getting things back to normal is a nightmare that I would wish upon nobody.

So with all that said, it just pays to be prepared!

Ask yourself this… If your website was a sales person for your company, would he be worth his salary (i.e web expenses)? If not, then your site doesn’t work!

When looking at a re-design, theres two things you need to look at. You need to look at your competition’s sites, and you need to look at what you want to promote the most. Looking at your competition is actually pretty simple thanks to compete.com, and it can tell you a lot about what people are looking for, where they’re coming from, and how many people are looking. It’s data that can help you get a better grasp of what your site needs in order to compete.

After that, you need to determine what you need to promote the most. It usually is the product that has the highest profit, but it could be anything really. You just need that core group of products that the re-design surrounds. And those products are going to be the biggest part of your site design, how the site is positioned when it comes to search engines, and where you put your promotional dollars.

The biggest mistake people make is they spend a ton promoting the business, and not the product. It should be the opposite. A good product with competitive pricing will promote any business better than anything.

Sadly, 90% of re-designs are just wiping the slate clean and starting from scratch. Not just with code and images, but a new idea that the web site should actually work… and not just look pretty!