If you’re a Richmond, Virginia local, you’ve probably visited the Style Weekly web site [click at your own risk]. I Googled “style weekly” tonight and noticed in the search results a message that reads, “This site may harm your computer.” (shown below)

I clicked on the search result anyway, and I got the following message:

I’ve never seen this behavior from a Google search result before. Has anyone else?

Certainly, this isn’t good for Style Weekly. Not only does Google warn against going to the site, they post an interstitial page that doesn’t include a link to continue to the web site.

GrokDotCom’s “If Architects Had to Work Like Web Designers” blog post gave me a good chuckle today. Buildings are properly constructed by following blueprints. The same principle applies to web sites, but for a variety of reasons, most aren’t build from a pre-defined set of well-conceived plans.

GrokDotCom article quotes Seattle designer Shae Allen’s interpretation of people treating the process of building a house in the same way most companies construct their website:

Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion. My house should have somewhere between two and forty-five bedrooms. Just make sure the plans are such that the bedrooms can be easily added or deleted. When you bring the blueprints to me, I will make the final decision of what I want. Also, bring me the cost breakdown for each configuration so that I can arbitrarily pick one.

Allen’s mock letter continues for many more paragraphs (you can read the rest here), but you get the point. Companies who want to build new web sites often fail to think through the details and often leave them up to their web designers.

Small business owners shouldn’t leave the details of their web sites to the “web designer next door.” Likewise, big companies shouldn’t rely on in-house design staff to form the vision for their web sites. Web designers are terrific people, and they can put very attractive web sites together. But do the web pages work together? Do they represent a consistent user experience? Do they consider how people will arrive on the pages they build? Do they sell?

Designing or redesigning a web site should be a collaborative process — one where the “business types” and “creative types” share knowledge and ideas. Business types may not understand the plethora of ways to implement an idea on the web. Creative types may not understand why a deep understanding of the target audience or marketing vehicle is important. As long as a knowledge gap exists between “business types” and “creative types” exists, collaboration between the two is integral to a project’s success.

A good design firm or agency knows that it takes business acumen to design a great web site. They know that the client will say they want “this” when they actually need “that.” Good firms…

• spend time up front learning about the client’s business and market
• know how to combine the right technology with the right creative
• are more interested in the client’s success than winning fancy awards
• understand that it’s not just the creative that matters, it’s what comes before and after that guide the creative direction
• know the value of competitive research
• can communicate clearly enough to guide the client in the right direction

A good construction team always has a blueprint. A good web consulting firm will partner with their clients, and the collaboration will produce an effective web site.

Last week, we launched the 3 Fellers Bakery web site. 3 Fellers Bakery is a startup run by a Goochland woman who has invented her own gluten-free cookie dough. Since then, she has created a line of gluten-free products.

The site allows users to purchase online and runs on the Yahoo Merchant Services platform.

Whether you’re talking about a landing page or a website, the first consideration when optimizing a website is to take it one page at a time.

When you examine a single page of your website, you can carefully evaluate search engine optimization factors like titles, content and meta tags. You can scrutinize your content to ensure that it addresses all of your customers’ questions. You can inspect the design and evaluate whether the page has the optimal eye path.

Most importantly, a critical factor in optimizing your website is to have a single goal for each individual web page or landing page. Just one — no more. Many marketers and designers make the mistake of trying to do too much on a page. A page, however, should do one thing well rather than distract users with multiple themes.

One example of maintaining a singular focus on a page is removing the site navigation in checkout. You’ll notice that on MaroonHelmet.com and 3FellersBakery.com, two clients of ours, there is no site navigation on any checkout screen. We deliberately did this to keep visitors focused on the task at hand, which in this case was buying products.

Focusing on one goal per page is an idea that has been reinforce time and time again through research. The latest research (May 2007) from Marketing Experiments found that “Focusing the landing page on the primary objective increased conversion by more than 19%.” The same study found that “by clarifying the offer and providing only one call-to-action option (button), conversion increased by 65%.”

Optimizing your website should be a page-by-page process, and all content, illustrations, photos, etc. should directly support the one goal for that page. It’s this continual analysis and improvement that will keep your website running at peak effectiveness.

One popular trend in website building is to create a Flash intro, which is an introductory screen that contains animation. These intros are rarely useful and are a point of frustration for site visitors.

As proof, a Marketing Sherpa study revealed that “80% of web site users hate Flash intros.” As a rule, the web is an interactive medium where visitors naturally expect to navigate a web site and find the information they are looking for. Web users expect choices, not to be spoon-fed content that probably is not be useful to them.

Take a look at the First Capital Funding web site. In the first 8 seconds of the Flash animation, the only content that appears is their name. As reported earlier, it only takes customers 1/20th of a second to form an opinion about your web site. 80% of First Capital Funding’s customers likely left the site before the end of the Flash intro or they were aggravated when the site finally loaded 28 seconds later.

I highly recommend not including a Flash intro on your web site. Instead, work on optimizing your homepage so people instantly know a) who you are, and b) what web visitors can do on your site.

If you must include a Flash intro, make sure the intro is only a few seconds long, provide information relevant to nearly all of your customers, and give them a prominent link to skip the intro.