Beeny's website

Beeny's website: 2009-07-15: Gotta love Sarah Beeny on the telly talking about property, she surely knows her stuff, but you could see she was outside her comfort zone with the website recommendation she made last night for the Tavistock Railway Station nutcases.; They developed their own website which looked old fashioned and text heavy, and Beeny presented them with a mock-up of a website that seemed to me had been put together by the TV team. It used their architectural model of the building, and was image-heavy. It looked fabulous, but looking good is only part of the solution.; The questions to ask are: "how usable is it?", "how findable is it?", and "how easily can it be maintained into the future?"; Part of the reason for using the architectural model was that they wanted bookings but hadn't finished the building work yet so there was nothing to photograph.; I've a few issues with this. Everyone knows that an artists' impression is a poor substitute for a photograph. It's someone trying to pull the wool over your eyes. So as soon as photographs become available, they are going to want those on the site.; Beeny said her website would cost £3-4,000. A good chunk of that would be for the graphics.; I think they'd spend that money getting a lovely website and then discover, because it's graphics-led, that it was hard (costly) to maintain. So four weeks (or whenever) later when they say "Ah, we've got photographs now", they'd be faced with another £1,000 to update and change the website. And it's unlikely to be something they could change themselves, tying them to their provider.; Really, I've got two major problems. One, I didn't like the impression given that the old site was text heavy and old fashioned and that the cure was to make it graphics heavy. The web isn't TV, it's the web. On TV, do what you like with graphics, make dinosaurs come to life, we'll all sit and enjoy the show. On the web, we're all using different equipment and have different speed lines and increasingly we're using mobile devices to access the web. I doubt her graphics-heavy website would display on a phone. The rule for the web is to provide content in the format people want it, which means graphics, showy though they may be, are not always the solution.; My second problem is there was no mention of marketing the site. It's OK to spend that budget if you want, but half of it needs to be spent on search engine optimisation otherwise no-one will find the site.; In order to generate traffic, normally you would work out what people are searching for that's relevant to what you're selling, and then write about it on pages on your site. Maybe "Tavistock holiday accommodation" would be a start.; A nice site **might** convert visitors into bookings. But you need the traffic first. It's like the old hi-fi rule, spend all your money on your turntable, then buy the amp and speakers with Green Shield stamps or whatever. Basically you can't make up for what's missing at the start so focus your energy at the source and upgrade the rest later.; If you don't have traffic to your website, nothing else matters. Spend the money on search engine optimisation. If, in fact, you spent **all** your money on search engine optimisation, that wouldn't be a bad thing. Because to do search engine optimisation you have to write content that's focussed on the search terms that mean the person searching wants what you're selling.; By concentrating on search engine optimisation, you're building a lean solution. You're answering their search query. It keeps you focussed. It saves you money.; When you've got traffic, people visiting your site with a clear problem to solve that you've got the answer to, you could put up a [don't press this] button and you'll make money.; But to make the most of your site, you can make changes gradually and test the results (you can't do that without traffic). Then choose the best option and set up another test. Websites are fluid and ongoing because the economy, your business, your market and your customers are changing all the time. Websites are not like brochures, you can keep changing them .. if you've designed it to be flexible.; Your customers will tell you what they want to see on your site and how they want to see it. All you have to do is listen.; Anyway, they didn't go with Beeny's graphics in the end. It's a lesson in not taking people's expertise out of context, something I've blogged about before. Listen to Beeny about property, but she's just an ordinary person when she talks about canal cruises, websites, or how to hunt caribou.; The Tavistock Railway Station nutcases still have an issue with price, I see.

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