Increase Interactive

You might want to think twice when adding stock photos to your website.

You want to include photos of happy, smiling people on your website, right? Of course visitors will see them, then say to themselves “Hey, I want to be happy and good looking too, so I will buy this product or service now” Uh, not so fast. Did you know that these can sometimes make customers miss important information or even leave your site?

Over the last decade or so, the prevalence of sites like iStockphoto, Stockexchange and a handful of others have become the default go-to of the lazy marketer, who can spend a few minutes browsing for their websites and advertising materials, and pay a sliver of what it would cost to get some professional photos taken.

Their process has become this: bang out some copy, find a couple stock photos candidates with good looking people on smiling, make sure the depiction of people is politically correct, and you’re good to go. It’s become the way that a lot of web content is created. But somewhere along the line, customers have started to get smarter.

The “Hero Shot” has been a huge part of marketing since the 50′s and the golden age of advertising. Models are perfect, and we know you want to be perfect too… So by buying the product, the customer can become a little more like the model, and a little less like they were before.

On the internet, seeing happy pictures of people smiling has become so commonplace that it’s become part of the noise, and in turn can actually detract from the message you’re trying to put forward. People see a photo like that and a part of their mind says “this is marketing – and therefore not important to me” then they’ll respond by skimming over the copy or leaving the page immediately.

People on the web are looking to do something, learn about something or find someone to do something for them. They don’t really “browse” – they sift through all the info that they find and bounce off of pages that look just like traditional marketing which they can spot a mile away. A well written paragraph of text that is actually useful to the customer is going to have a lower chance of getting read if it’s placed below a stock photo of someone who the customer can’t relate to. Anything that looks like an ad is often ignored.

The traditional hero shot can still have its place, and obviously in some industries you would want to use models and professional studio photographs for your products and services. I think that a lot of “little guys who want to be big guys” use stock photos to try and look bigger or better than they actually are.

Authenticity goes a long way when trying to build the trust of your visitors, aka your potential customers. When people use the web, they aren’t looking for good looking models; they’re looking for the real thing. They want to see what you look like, what your business looks like, and what your products look like – without the studio lighting and Photoshop work. Putting stock photos on your website under the guise of “looking professional” can have the effect of alienating your visitors and can give them a reason to bounce rather than read your content and even have the possibility of contacting you.

“We can get you onto the first page of Google” is one thing that I have started hearing more about recently from my clients. The claim is made in the offers that other SEO companies use when pitching them, and is usually done via unsolicited email.

The claim that “we can get you on the first page of Google” is probably the most prevalent, and I get these emails all the time too. It is made over and over by various SEO companies and consultants to try and sign up new clients that usually are on the low end of SEO knowledge. The claims are stated as a means to get a foot in the door, and then over a few weeks or months (while the client is paying a monthly fee BTW) the search results are supposed to climb. The fact is that a lot of the time, the promise is never fulfilled. The companies don’t really care, because they already have your money.

I’ve witnessed this on multiple occasions. Rather than a 1st page result, the client more often than not just gets a jaded view of SEO and how it relates to them marketing their website.

It is really hard to guarantee 1st page results for a certain keyword phrase

The fact is, there are now a lot of factors which determine what shows up on the first page of results in front of you. I mean “you” in that Google, Bing, and other modern search engines build their own profile of “you, the user” so they can learn about your habits and then provide search results to you based on searches you have done in the past, what links you clicked on, and your social connections. They do this in the hope of providing you with the most relevant results in the fastest time.

So what you see in the results may not be what I see, your neighbor sees and especially what someone in another city sees.

Did you already know this? Chances are, probably not. I talk to clients all the time who have no idea about personalized results. While Google has been providing personalized results since 2005, most people are unaware of it because most of it is Opt-out – meaning unless you manually go in and adjust your settings, your results will be filtered based on your user profile and prior behavior.

What’s changing with the results page

With the growth of Google Plus, Google has also launched “Search Plus Your World” which is one of the biggest changes to their ranking algorithms in the last 5 years. While signed in to Google, if you do a web search – the top results will most likely be pages authored by people who you have in your Circles. This is huge because authors and companies who have a presence on Google Plus will have a lot more opportunities to get clicked on than the ones that are absent from the platform. This will be covered in more detail in subsequent posts.

The changing landscape of Flash on the Web

It used to be that if a site needed built-in presentations, music, photo galleries or video – it almost always needed the functionality of Flash. Now in 2011, this is no longer the case. There have been advancements in Javascript libraries (such as Jquery) and also in newer versions of code such as HTML5 and CSS3 that bring more animation and interactive tools available for web developers. Although the animation tools of HTML5 and CSS3 don’t come remotely close to Flash’s capabilities, the fact that this content is more accessible to everyone across a range of different devices is very valuable to the web as a whole.

Considerations

While Flash has its strengths, it isn’t always the best solution. It relies on using a plug-in for its use, and some devices (such as Apple’s devices like the IPhone and IPad) do not have a Flash player, and most likely never will. If you are trying to reach people who are using a computer to view your website, then it can still be a good choice for some situations.

Alternate content

A best practice is to never assume everyone has Flash. Some people turn it off on their browsers because they are sick of banner ads and the like. You should always be inserting HTML content into the areas that have Flash content so that search engines have something to latch on to, and you aren’t showing empty content boxes to people who don’t have Flash enabled. This can be done using the noscript tag, or by using a javascript tag that can detect if Flash is enabled or not then choose to load the alternate content. This alternate content can sometimes add extra work to a project, but should always be included.

Flash Websites

Website components can be built using Flash, sometimes with spectacular results. The interactivity of using video, sound and animation to create an experience that currently cannot be matched by any other platform online. While this may be what you are after, it is always important to consider several things when setting up a website. You will want to talk to your web designer about before you determine that you want a site built in Flash. Make sure that they don’t just have their own interests in mind (like making really cool Flash work for their portfolio). Also, make sure that the result you are after is an effect that only be achieved with Flash. It might be better to create a photo gallery using HTML and Javascript, but a complicated video gallery might make more sense in Flash. This can also go the other way – you can waste a lot of time fiddling with experimental javascript and large snippets of code just to achieve something like a spinning logo. It is just a matter of using the right tool for the job.

Flash and the Search Engines

HTML has always and will continue to be the backbone of the web. Search engines can read some Flash pages, but search engine spiders (which index web pages) will have an easier time crawling HTML content and can sometimes only index the content within Flash files with extra help from developers. There have been advancements in the abilities of web crawlers to index Flash content in the last few years, but as of 2011 every single website that takes SEO and link building seriously will have the majority of their content developed in HTML.

Should you redesign your whole site?

Well, that depends. Redesigns are sometimes considered when the current design is outdated or when the owners are tired of the current design, which happens a lot. This isn’t the best reason to completely redesigning a website however; as it puts the focus on the subjective opinions of a few individuals and can sometimes override the facts. Analytics must always be part of the project, even if the only info available is – what pages are getting traffic? Which have a high bounce rate?

Redesigns are often attractive to the executive decision makers in a company because they make the website into a project, which has a beginning and end. The best websites are continuously improved, but that approach is not as common as doing a big redesign every few years and spending a lot of money. Why do people do this?

Sometimes it is easier to find a large sum of money for a big project than it is to allocate money and responsibility to consistently measure traffic analytics and make small changes. A lot of companies still think of their website as a brochure that is published; then updated every few years. The slate is wiped clean. This approach is old and will not provide much value on your investment.

Sometimes a redesign of a website is some kind of badge of honor for a marketing manager or someone else who wants to have a lot of projects under their belt. It is rarely about the customers who use it.

Redesigns are also more fun to work on, no question. The continuous improvement and testing of a website is boring. No committee meetings, no sipping of coffee while looking at mockups and there is rarely a “big reveal” at the end. The fact is that people love talking about the graphic design but hate talking about the content. The content is more important because people don’t go to websites just because they look pretty.

What can happen when you start over

SEO is put at risk

Unless your web designer knows what they are doing, a redesign can have a really bad effect on your traffic from search. If you have pages with inbound links from other sites, if they are not properly redirected with “301” htaccess codes then all the links pointing to the old pages will be broken. If the pages have been gaining SEO link juice over time, then if it suddenly loses a lot of those links – rankings will be affected negatively.

Current users were hunters, but now they are finders again

Users generally hate redesigns – especially if they consistently use a website and the navigation has changed. This can make them angry. Something that used to take them seconds, now takes longer because now they have to try and figure out the new site and what is going on. The people who use your website the most are often your most loyal customers. Always keep this in mind when approaching a redesign project. It’s always better to make a series of small changes and test along the way. If a redesign causes someone to discontinue using your site out of frustration that you caused, the fact is that they simply may never return.

Useful Resources

Resist redesign – Gerry McGovern
Long Live the Redesign – Get Finch