What is the purpose of your website? Is it to drive traffic for ads? Is it to get click through on AdSense? Is it to garner a community? Is it to sell a product? Education? Don't Know?
The guys at Duct Tape Marketing (on my 'to read' list, which is easy to get lost in) luckily maintain a blog, so I can learn their ideas without having to read their whole book (I really will get to it eventually). Today they wrote about web sites...and asked a great question. Does your site really need all the fancy technology avaliable today? To quote them 'The web site that makes the most sense for your business is the one that helps a prospect gain trust and get information'
Lara Bar, as I wrote about earlier, maintains a very nicely done site with all the information I could possibly want about their bars, in an order that is logical to me as a user. They use technology well.
My church's service, Illuminate (At Overlake in Redmond, WA), offers an extremely technically attractive
site, which is a pain in the butt to navigate. I go to do one thing: download sermons. It is a many step process that I still can't remember how to do (I have to figure out the arbitrary navigation words every time).
Be like Larabar.com. Figure out why people come to your site, then give them what they want. I blogged on the 'How to Get a 4.0 in College,' which has little to do with my blog, because people were googling that phrase and finding my blog. Might as well give people what they want. You can't fight your customer. Your customer defines who you are.
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