Is Your Website Copy More Important Than Your Website Usability?

Do You Throw the Dice and Hope For The Best?

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from his angle as well as from your own” - Henry Ford.

The ‘other person’s point of view’. When visitors come to your website, what is their point of view and can you ’see things from their angle as well as from your own’? Do you throw the dice and hope for the best?

“The only way on earth to influence the other fellow is to talk about what he wants and show him how to get it” - Dale Carnegie

When visitors come to your website do you show them what they want and make it easy for them to get it? Do you throw a dice and hope for the best in terms of better sales conversion?

Most website owners talk about themselves on their homepage - ‘Welcome to our website…’ Does that type of website copy sound familiar?

One of the keys to understanding the psychology of online persuasion is know what your target market is looking for and giving it to them.

This sounds easy, but it’s incredibility difficult and explains why a 5% conversion rate on a website is considered good.

If 100 people walked into your shop/hotel/business and asked for some information about your product/service, would you be happy if only 5 of them became a new customer?

What’s meant by online psychology? I think it’s quite different to psychology off-line. For me best practice web usability design, a hierarchy of web pages that actually makes sense and giving people what they are used to seeing is the starting place for ‘online psychology’. Give them a familiar experience, i.e. give them a feeling of  ‘this is the way a website should be’ …

I’ve read a lot about website copywriting and using psychology in your copy to impact on conversion, i.e. getting more sales from your website - the question I am left with is that which is more important to getting better than 5% conversion - better website copy or better website usability?

I guess it’s a combination of both, but in my view poor website usability can have a more destructive impact than poor copy.

Let’s look at a couple of examples - www.amazon.com and www.netaporter.com - do they put more effort into their website usability or their web copy?

The attention to detail on these two websites is amazing. Look at Amazon - at the top of the page there’s a search facility - search for whatever you want!

Search by department!
Have a look at ‘Today’s Deals’ or ‘Gifts & Wish Lists’.

They make it incredibly easy to find things on the website.

What about Net a Porter? Again some great usability. Again a ‘Search’ facility at the top of the page. The navigation at the top brings you easily down into more information, e.g. Shoes ->All Shoes ->Flats ->Mid Heals ->High Heels -> Boots. The URL at this stage is http://www.net-a-porter.com/Shop/Shoes

These approaches look very simple to implement, but simple doesn’t always mean easy. Take a look at Nike.com

This is the URL of the homepage: http://www.nike.com/nikeos/p/nike/language_select/

Simple, clean, smooth architecture and usability?

Now try and find women’s shoes! How many clicks can you do it in? It took me 5 clicks to get to here -

http://store.nike.com/index.jsp?country=IE&lang_locale=en_GB&ref=http://www.nike.com&sitesrc=EMEALP&l=shop,women#l=shop,pwp,c-300/hf-788+791/t-Women’s_Footwear

So, on Net a Porter it takes me 1 click, on nike.com it takes me 5 clicks to get to the shoes ‘department’

Compare the two URL’s above (Nike.com and Netaporter.com) and imagine how much easier it is for the search engines to determine relevancy. I know Nike.com is a huge brand and they are obviously relying on that to get them traffic.

(Funnily enough though, if you search for ’shoes’ on Google.com, Nike.com appears before NetaPorter.

In this case I know the brands are strong, but the Nike.com site is incredibly complicated for what’s it’s actually doing. The Net a Porter site immediately looks at my IP address, sees where I am and gives me what I want for that country. It takes Nike.com 5 clicks to get me to the right country page!

Remember, this is all before I start looking at the content or images.

Getting the website usability right, i.e. simple to follow, has a large part to play in getting more conversions.

Thinking too much about the psychology of online selling, whilst ignoring basic navigation is not the way to go.

The use of so much flash on the nike.com website maybe appealing to those higher senses in the human brain, but am I likely to stick around trying to find those pages?

What do you think?

Have you seen examples of websites where it’s all about image?  Who’s to blame for websites with little or no thought given to web usability - the website owners?

What about B2B sites, are these any different from B2C sites?