lindakeithcpa.com | keith scale

The Keith scale for http://www.lindakeithcpa.com:

Text: 2- the most helpful text to me is the quote at the bottom of the page, but I am not familiar with the business.

Image: 1.5- there is a class being taught- by who? Given that the company is based on a personality, show us that person.

Design: 1.5- the basic layout is fine, but why the purple? It does not feel all that professional.

Call to Action (doubled): 2- there are 2 calls to action, at the top. To be a 3, they should stand out from the text more, and the entire page should be oriented around them. Also, it does not hurt to show the call to action more than once. “Do this,” then have text supporting the decision, then give them the chance to do it again.

Overall score: 9/15 (use less purple, and emphasize the calls to action even more)

What does your site rate?

and your name was?…

Even when we get the names down, the personal data (did they grow up in New Hampshire or Maine?) can be elusive. Linda commented on my post about connecting with people in business asking how I keep track of all the tidbits.

My answer is to pay attention to a very few people. Which is not really an answer, but an explanation that I do not deal with so many people just yet that I have to have a real system. If I do, I will start posting such data in our project tracking tool, within our company forum. That way anyone talking with the client (not that anyone else should be) will know that so-and-so has a newborn.

The problem with this is, maybe the information I learn about should be kept, not private, but not public. Jory calls it Stalk Marketing when someone you don’t know finds out a lot about you in order to sell you stuff.

Key point, know who you are dealing with and how they feel about their personal information. And err on the safe side.

qualifying in recruiting- crayon vs gm vs apple- keep it simple

Go to crayon’s homepage, and click on ‘people’ in the upper right corner. They end their pitch for new people to join up with “consider yourself essentially hired on the spot. How’s that for a job interview?”

They list the things they want- what is important to them. You need to have been blogging about marketing, and/or podcasting.

Because they base themselves on an island in Second Life, they can say “if you’re right for crayon, you’re right” and don’t worry about that relocation hassle.

I wish every page we built qualified this well for who we want to buy things from our clients. Simple, clear, with a pretty obvious Contact button (call to action).

Contrast this with, oh, say, the GM careers site. First, they call it careers, just like everyone else.

Now go to that page- what are you supposed to do? No clear call to action, and an overwhelming number of choices. Now, GM is huge, but that is no excuse.

I hate to be typical, but compare it to Apple’s career page. Apple says: here are 4 choices. Click one.

Look in the New Grads section (which has the button ’start your career’). It tells you the 3 things that happen next.

So crayon says ‘if you are this kind of person, we want you.’ GM says, well, nothing, because they shove so much information at you that you pass out and die. And Apple says ‘here are the 4 ways you can get in to the company.’

Now apply this to your homepage. Is it easy to buy, easy to know where to go?

Check out the homepage of BlogHer, the women’s blogging community. I am on their case to add three buttons right below the nav bar: Join BlogHer, Find a Blog, and Advertise. Because right now, there is too much information for me to know what to do right away. (Disclosure- we advertise with BlogHer, and we like them, so you should to.)

Check out our client Dessy. The homepage gives you 6 choices in the upper left (where the eye travels to first).

Check out Linda Keith CPA for a speaking business. Do you want to sign up for a class, or sign up for the newsletter? There are more choices on the left nav bar, but these 2 stand out.

In addition to my mutterings, check out Godin’s book The Big Red Fez which basically tells you to make sites really easy where it is super obvious where to click.

If you are not sure that your site does this, and you are not sure how to make it do this, comment here and I will take a glance.