This week I’ve been doing some work with the team over at Mighty Ape to improve some of the site’s key conversion points.
The exercise really highlighted to me how similar building a web site is to building an America’s Cup yacht.
I’m serious.
A web site is like a yacht. It gets designed, built and launched. All things going to plan it does what you designed it to do.
And then the tweaking begins. The optimization.
Teams in the America’s Cup spend hundreds (or more?) of hours testing different sails, different rigs, different bulps and different combinations of all of those things until they settle on a combination that might go a couple of seconds faster round the course than the boat you originally launched.
And so it is with web design.
If you change the copy on this page how many people click through to this page? If you change the colour of this text how many people click this button? If you change the size of this button how many more people click it? And so it goes on.
Just as it is on a yacht you may only milk an extra 2 or 3% but over the course of a year that may add up to a significant increase in people joining, people buying, people making an email enquiry or whatever it is you want people to be doing on your site.
Tweak the boat. Tweak the boat…