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But How Can You Tell It Ain't Broke?
by Donna Schwartz Mills, The ParentPreneur Club
I have just undertaken the most harrowing, hazardous -- yet exhilarating adventure of my life as an Internet marketer: I overhauled my website.
Now, if you've ever done this yourself, you know what I am talking about. Change is never easy for we humans, and when you're satisfied with the way things are going, most of us go by the ancient philosophy, "If It Ain't Broke, Don't Fix It."
And one year after launching my first online business, I was fairly happy with my results. My ezines are thriving, I sell out ads regularly and I'm earning a tidy little income from them. So why did I decide to spend the time and undergo the hassles of changing my site around?
Because as well as my business is doing, I had a nagging feeling that it can do better.
Like many online entrepreneurs, the initial attraction of an Internet business was the ease and speed with which one could open shop. Learn a little HTML, throw up a couple of pages, submit your site to the search engines and you're done -- right?
It doesn't take long before we learn that there is a growing *science* to website success. Billions of bits have been devoted to such topics as search engine optimization... navigational structure... interactive "stickiness" programs... Java, JavaScript, and an alphabet soup of SSI, CGI, PHP, DHTML... and so on.
My site had none of those. I'd put it together with metatags in place, but as one of my new online friends was kind enough to inform me, I'd done a rotten job of it -- they were not formatted properly and were next to useless to the search engine spiders.
But did that mean my website was "broke?"
It had grown from an initial 10 pages to over 200 (most experts advise that you archive everything, which gives the search engines even more pages to spider, resulting in a better chance of bringing you traffic -- which in my case, was kind of useless with non-functioning metatags). Navigation, which was very clear-cut at the beginning, was now a problem. There were forgotten pages buried within the site that contained old email addresses and other outdated information.
Of course, all those things could have been fixed without radically changing the site's look.
"I think your original layout was fantastic," responded one of my online mentors. It gave one a feeling of being a club... The new format misses that warm feeling... what is it you want the viewer to see or sense about the site?"
He did not think the site was "broke," and his is the essential question to ask before undertaking any change (or beginning to design a website from scratch).
All I knew was that in spending the last twelve months focusing mainly on building subscribership for my ezines, the website was almost superfluous. My site statistics showed an abysmal pattern of traffic, and the majority of people who came to the site left after viewing the home page. I knew I was offering a lot of useful information for my target audience (work at home parents) and I hoped more of them would want to make use of it... and benefit enough that they would sign up for my ezine. Because by now, the cost of maintaining my circulation -- let alone future growth -- was becoming quite expensive. How nice it would be if the website was pulling its weight in providing the ezine with new subscribers.
So I concluded that it was time to make a change. I grabbed
a professionally designed website template from FreeSiteTemplates.com and a nifty pull-down
menu to help with that pesky navigation from
The new design has several areas for links to other areas of the site and I've been taking advantage of it by locating related articles in our archive and highlighting them. I am hopeful that this will entice my users to stick around the site a little longer.
I re-worked my meta tags with help from the following sites: United Webmasters, GLDev Meta Tools and Scrub The Web.
The experts advise that you come up with pertinent keywords and then make dense use of them in your keyword meta tag, title, and page content. Coming up with the right keywords, though, is another matter. I used these tools to help guide me through the selection process: Key Word Wizard and Analog X.
Armed with all of these new tools, I went to work and converted my main pages to the new look. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll move over the rest.
"Don't fall into the trap of trying to get a number one ranking on the search engines," my mentor said. "Because even if you succeed, one week later everything will change, and someone with limited time and resources will have more success with other marketing efforts."
Again, good advice. I'll settle for getting just a little more traffic from the engines. I'm continuing with my monthly submissions, hopefully better armed with tags that work.
So, was my site "broke"? And has all the effort I've put into a makeover "fixed" it?
Time will tell. The funny thing is that no one can know for sure until we see the results.
But the process has helped me to focus on what I really need my website to be: A partner in the success of my ezine and an income-generator in its own right. I'll let you know how it all works out.
In addition to editing NOBOSS Online, the newsletter for home-based entrepreneurs doing business on the web, Donna Schwartz Mills is the editor/webmaster of the ParentPreneur Club, "For Parents Who Want Choices, Not Office Politics." See her new site design at http://www.parentpreneurclub.com and compare to the old one at http://noboss.com/ppc.
Copyright 2000 Donna Schwartz Mills - All rights reserved.
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