For those of us with short attention spans, lists with more than 5 things on them often get passed over. Stoney deGeyter fails to expound upon his great little list of ways to keep our visitors sailing on toward conversion, which makes it perfect for us Spontaneous types.
But is this just a link-bait article that Stoney tossed together to generate links back to his site and raise his page rank?
There are some things in here that designers will rebel against, such as "Navigation must maintain simplicity of use." This means that three-tiered auto-rollout javascript menus are a BAD IDEA.
Has your designer ever wanted to do something cool, like put navigation in bubbles around some central image? Stoney's got it stone cold. "Location of main navigation should be near the top and/or left side of the page."
Some of these things don't necessarily make design sense, but are now Web conventions. An example of this is the requirement that the company logo ("Site Indicator") link to the home page, rather than the contact us page or the CEO's blog.
Link Bait?
Stoney has a good SEO back-link to his company's site in his sidebar bio "search engine marketing company." However, the destination of that link is hopelessly broken.
The URL tells us that this page wants to contain quotes, perhaps a testimonial page. If Stoney's building the page rank of this page, he's wasting energy.
Stoney's written a number of articles for ISEdb and there is value there, so I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Yes, this article is link bait, and it's done in the right way: by providing good content.
20 Ways to NAVIGATE to Higher Conversions by Stoney deGeyter
Brian Massey
Brian, Holy crap! Thanks for pointing out my bad bio link. Not sure how that got in there or how long it's been like that. Talk about bad usability! Anyway, thanks for giving me the heads up. It goes to show that now matter how much we know about usability and try to make things right we can't always bet 100%.
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