Fairy Godmother Holly Buchanan has been preparing the final draft of her book, co-authored with Michele Miller, Marketing to Women Online. I just read three of her recent posts about common mistakes made on websites for women. Holly’s uses the website, All Moms Go To Heaven as a case study.
Here is a summary of her recent posts, Common Mistakes 1, Common Mistakes 2, and Common Mistakes 3:
Developing an Effective Home Page:
- Your homepage must communicate who you ARE and what you DO in copy, not just images; Holly says, “it should show why we should care”
- Consider the “action window” (center of the page) and what action items you want your readers to do, SIGN UP for something? BUY something? what is it that YOU “do?” Are your links/buttons obvious to get them to click to your desired “action?
- Are you answering their questions? (What did they come to your site to “do”? learn something? buy something?)
Consider Privacy for Your Online Forms:
- The less info you require, the more likely you will have better results/more people signing up
- Consider requiring only “first name” rather than both first/last and email address
- Privacy Policies are a must (that you won’t sell or share their info to anyone, etc.)
- Remember that you are building a relationship with your consumer!
Creating Clear Categories:
- Provide copy that “provides guidance” for the reader to find what they are looking for and what is available
- Put your categories as text links in your active window
We’re pleased to announce that Fairy Godmother Holly Buchanan will be a featured speaker at the First National Start Up Princess conference Sept 22 in Salt Lake City, Utah! She will be sharing even more marketing to women online gems. Save the date and plan to join us! For more info to come, to get on the mailing list please contact us.
This is great info to consider for our own website, thank you. As far as the website “All Moms Go to Heaven” it looks like they have made changes to their home page and I hope this negative attention actually benefits them and gives them a lot of traffic. They have a wonderful cause of honoring mothers and reward nominated moms on a weekly basis. They also donate 10% of their proceeds to charities for women and children. Good for them! Check it out!:)
Hi Deborah,
And yes, I think they are making great progress with their site.
Thanks for your comment and sharing the good that All Moms Go to Heaven is doing. Actually they volunteered to be guinea pigs for this case study to get free strategy and advice. I’m all over that!
Kelly