3 Minimalist Keys (Increasing Website Effectiveness)
A quick story.
About two years ago, I decided to make my business mobile. I got rid of office equipment (computers, phones, printers), removed extra software (lots of MS stuff), and stopped various office tasks (printing stuff and filing).
I dropped down to one laptop and headed to Paris for six weeks to test it out. It was awesome. I jumped around various coffee shops, napped in parks, and focused my energy on high-priority work tasks. I felt freer to move around both in the physical world and in my mental space.
This principle of minimizing is needed on many coaching sites as well – even small ones.
To see if your coaching website is too wieldy, sit with a few people (ideally, ones you would want as clients) and ask them to try out your website. See what they do.
You should NOT have to give any instruction at all. If you you get a lot of hesitation, umms or uhhs, or misclicking, then you’ve got some site reorganizing and copy modifications to make.
Here are three common minimizing tips for many newer coaches:
1 – Decide the most important thing you want visitors to do and make focus your copy, and navigation on achieving that. Make the rest less in your face.
2 – Put fewer items on your main navigation. A list of five to seven is good. More than that becomes tough to look at.
3 – Use fewer words. Write in shorter paragraphs. Be direct, not wordy.
Conclusion? To get more action from visitors to your website, decide what you want from them, then focus your site on achieving that.
Just want to add: For many newer coaches, building your list is a good choice for your primary invitation.
In fact, many coaches dedicate their entire first page to getting people on their email list.
One way to handle this is to do this:
1 – create a 1 pager inviting people onto your list
2 – create your marketing-hub website for use with promoting programs, building content, generating search traffic, blogging, etc. and keep that invitation to your list on the sidebar