Most web design is awful and author sites are the worst

Your website is a visual representation of your current marketing acumen.

Happy Friday

Incoming rant. Sometimes, experiences collide.

I’m helping my brother build a Wordpress site. By helping, I don’t mean the building and doing, because he’s proficient and learns fast. Mostly, I’m answering questions that start with why and how.

Why is it doing that? How do I fix that?

I answer. Then he says “Oh, ffs. Thanks.”

Wordpress used to be the easy way to build a website. Now it’s not.

At the same time, I’m updating 3 wordpress sites for clients because Google was spanking them on mobile view. Plus, building a new site for myself.

In the middle of all that, I stumbled across some “book marketer” who is now selling author websites. Because, you know. Wordpress is hard.

His sites suck. Sorry, but they do.

They *look* pretty. But they suck.

Bad. Real bad.

They won’t convert, and they’re not going to rank well in Google. Like, ever. And the more traffic they drive, the worse their ranking is going to get. That’s a promise.

Incidentally, don’t ask me his name or suggest a name and ask if that’s who it is. It’s not about who. Who doesn’t matter. What they’re doing, that’s what matters.

I’m not surprised his websites suck.

Most web designers suck.

Know why? They don’t stick around to see if what they’ve built converts. By the time the website has 30 days of stats post-launch, they’ve moved on to the next client, the next site.

They have to. It’s how they pay the bills.

But when you’re the one left sitting with a site that bounces 67% of visitors, it sucks. All the traffic generation in the world can’t fix a website that doesn’t convert.

It gets worse.

When your site has a high bounce rate, your Google rank dies. Or never happen at all. Because you know what Google’s job is? To end the search. To give the searcher what they want. When your site has a high bounce rate, they know people are just going to hit the back button. So they drop your site into oblivion. No rankings for you.

Any site with a search does that. Even Facebook. First, they show your post to 3% of your followers. If people don’t respond? You don’t get more views. Good luck getting traffic. Things that convert get traffic. Amazon does it, too. No sales, no views.

Everything comes back to conversion. Why would websites be any different?

Website design is what I know.

I built my first site in 1995, on an old beast of a computer with a dial up modem that sounded like it had indigestion when it hooked up and used my phone line to get online. Anyone else remember those?

I wrote raw html code in notepad in those early days. There was no Wordpress or “drag and drop” builders. The difference between me and most “designers” is that I came to design from marketing.

Knowing how to make it pretty isn’t enough. Knowing how to use the platform isn’t enough, either. You need both, for sure. But at the root, design is marketing.

Your website is a visual representation of your current marketing acumen.

When someone arrives at your site, you have 30 seconds. Statistically, most sites fail that test because most sites lose over half their visitors in those first 30 seconds.

That was what set me apart from most designers back when I was taking new clients. I’d tell them I will stick around to make sure it converts. Fix it if it doesn’t.

You know why author sites are the worst?

Two reasons. First, because authors are least likely to have any interest in marketing. They just want to write. They want to trust someone to do it for them. And there’s nothing wrong with that. But when you put a job in someone else’s hands, you need to know they are competent to do it. Too often, they’re not. But you don’t know that.

Know why they’re not competent? Because they don’t know marketing any better than you do. They just know how to use Wordpress. It’s not enough.

Secondly, because too many designers who don’t know marketing target authors. Know why? Author sites are dead easy. No ecommerce.

Building a “showcase” for an author is faster and easier than building an ecommerce site with 100 products in a shopping cart with tax tables and real time shipping.

The faster they can knock off a site, the more profit there is to be had.

The whole thing sucks

I don’t know why it gets to me, but it does. I wish I could make it stop, but I can’t any more than I can make any injustices of the world stop.

So I write about it. At least that’s something I can do.

Doing something is better than doing nothing.

If you have an author site, how’s it doing?

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What I wrote this week…

• She Came Home To Die And I Don’t Know How To Help Her

• “What Should I Do With My Life?” Not Read This Book, For Starters.

• Mr. Pulitzer Told Her To Get Thrown In An Insane Asylum So She did

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Thanks for reading and have a great weekend!

xo,
Linda