Your Homepage is Your Tin

I volunteered to be a judge on the Irish Web Awards and was honoured to be accepted.  I'm a little behind in my judging so I need to finish off all the websites I have been assigned to judge before 6pm today.

That's doable, however I also have 60 million other things I also need to do today, thankfully I have made decisions & organised the other things to be done too.

I started tweeting as I was judging.  First thing I noticed was that sites make a very basic mistake in their content.  They do not explain clearly, in plain English exactly what the site will do for the viewer.  

A lot of websites fail to say "Exactly What It Does On The Tin".  Some of them are very pretty but I'm not sure what benefit spending my valuable & precious time will bring me.

When you work on a business, when you know it inside out, back to front it's very easy to forget that the knowledge you have about it is NOT common.  I've seen this time and time again with my clients.  

With ALL marketing put yourself in the position of E.T - he's never seen your product/service before, never heard about it before, doesn't know it's function, purpose, the benefits of it, doesn't even know what any other versions are like.  E.T is who you need to be communicating with in marketing.  

Don't get me wrong, I'm not for one moment suggesting patronising potential customers, but please, please, please make sure that people who have a need for what you're selling get the opportunity to buy from you.  

When I go to a website I want to know instantly can this website give me what I'm looking for, if I can't I want to go to the next one instantly.  If it can I could spend hours on it... and a lot of money too!

Your homepage on your website is your tin- make sure it says exactly what you do!