I spent the last two weeks writing some pretty awesome content; hopefully you’ve seen it here on the blog. I wanted to see how much of an increase in traffic I would get if I posted to the website every single day.

Geeks on steroids has been around for about 10 years. It is currently getting some decent traffic but nowhere near what I would like for it to get. Because of the age of the website and the amount of work done on the site in the past I would think the results from my daily posting would be greater than or equal to the average website. However the increase in traffic was so small that I hardly paid attention to it. By posting a couple times a day I was able to increase website traffic by about 10 visitors per day and that was posting to LinkedIn, Facebook, and twitter.

Needless to say I will continue to post what I am doing here as I attempt to raise traffic to the blog.

The next thing I want to try is commenting on other people’s blogs.

There are only a couple websites that I would do in black. One of those is photographers. Black backgrounds really bring out the colors in photos. Of course the other side is that photos say so much, that the web designer needs to get the design out of the way.

The website needs to be simple and in no way to try outclass the photos. The website should be designed around the photos and be built to bring out the photos.

If you’re looking to hire a photographer everything that matters is in that photo. So the whole website, the whole concept, the whole business needs to be built around that photo. The neat thing about a photographer website is that you can really get into some serious testing with photos.

By trying different photo positions, different photo styles, and different kinds of people in the photos you can figure out which types of photos and where they need to be positioned on the website to get the best response from your website visitors.

Web design photographer websites can be one of the most difficult websites to but at the same time one of the funniest!

If you study history, even before the Internet, people always wanted to be social. It’s built into us, we like to socialize. I don’t know what the next big thing will be. But I can tell you one thing for sure, it will be social.

Social media works online because social media works off-line.

When they invented the telegraph machine the idea was you would put one in each town and then you would have a man run around and deliver the messages to the people. When they invented the telephone it was originally designed for businesses, because no one thought anyone would want a telephone in their home. Motorola said they invented the cell phone long before anyone else, but just couldn’t imagine anyone wanted to carry a phone around with them.

Businesses have always underestimated people’s desire to be social.

The other day had a potential client call me, as we spoke I realized who was.

He was an ex-employee of one of my clients and he had not left on the best of terms. I had to make a decision.

1. Let him know that I knew who he was and that we were not interested in doing the job.
   
2. Pretend like I didn’t know who he was and if the client found out then I could say I didn’t realize who the guy was.
   

But I didn’t want to risk losing the friendship.

Within seconds the decision had been made and I was telling him we weren’t interested in any doing business with him. The fear of losing something you already have is greater than the chance of getting something you don’t have.

Let me see if I can explain that better.

The fear of losing what I’ve already got is greater than the desire for the rewards.

Okay…how about this?

Your website needs to work hard at removing any doubt of losing when someone purchases your product. The way things are worded can also makes a difference. If you have a 90% chance of winning then you are more likely to respond then if you have a 10% chance of losing. Losing scares you more than winning excite you. The way things are worded will affect how you respond as well as photos, colors, layout and content.

Your website design matters and needs to reassure the website visitor every step of the way.

Pictures Matter!

Have you ever heard that a picture is worth 1,000 words?

That’s never been truer than on your website. Did you know that our brains have a mathematical formula it uses to determine if someone is pretty or ugly?

When someone walks up to you and you’re about to buy an item from them, the way that person looks will make a big difference as to rather or not you purchase the item. There’s a lot going on with our bodies that we are not aware of. One of those things is a mathematical formula in our mind that is used to determine whether someone is nice-looking or not. We’ve also got formulas for people that are very un-trustworthy.

So when someone approaches us, our mind first looks to protect us. If everything is okay then it starts looks for mating opportunities or food.  After all there are only three things this brain is interested in, food, protection, and sex. This means that were more likely to buy something from someone who’s about our age and appears to be attractive.

And an attractive person holding a product makes the product look more attractive.

This means that when you build your website it needs to be designed with the targeted market in mind. And this is the reason that you should never stop tweaking, fine tuning, and testing your website. You have to figure out what parts of your website need to be tweaked and changed to have the biggest effect on the largest group you can possibly reach.

Every time you get ready to post a picture into content ask yourself rather or not it adds to the message, if it doesn’t don’t post it. And never post content without a photo.