You’re in business to sell something. You have some sort of action you’d like customers to take while on your website. Are you making that action and how to take it clear? Or are you setting up roadblocks that make the process frustrating which leads to lost business?
Even if your business model is based on advertising, there probably is a major action you’d like people to take on your site. Take StumbleUpon – built upon sharing of webpages. The major action is probably submitting (or stumbling) content. Without content, they have nothing to provide. How can you stumble (submit) content? Multiple ways. Pretty much anyway that is most convenient for you. And the submission process is fairly streamlined. Submit a URL, let them know if it’s safe for work, add optional reviews, tags and comments, hit submit. It’s also super fast (which is also important).
Now take Sphinn – an Internet Marketing news and discussion site. They also rely on content submissions, but their process is 230923 times harder (maybe I’m exaggerating a bit – It’s only 23239.3 times harder). For both sites you have to have an account to submit (which makes sense), but Sphinn requires you to also pass a captcha test every time. Then you’re taken to the page where you can change the title, pick a category and add a description. Oh. And it’s all really slow. Sphinn is smart enough to make the voting (or sphinning) process fairly easy, but getting content into the system is a complete pain.
Obviously Sphinn is probably concerned with spam. But I’m sure StumbleUpon is too – they’ve just taken the process behind the scenes so they’re not erecting roadblocks for their users. The same could be said for any business website. What’s your call to action? What do you want people to do on your site? Are you making it as easy as possible for them to do that?
Thoughts?
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