By Rick Sloboda

 Looking at the ROI

Before making the decision to do things on the cheap by taking the do-it-yourself route, it’s important to consider the bottom line. Let’s say a professional website costs Dean the Mover $7,500. That’s a lot of pocket change. But, if it generates just four sales a month at an average of $300 a pop, that’s $14,400 worth of business in the first year alone. 

Those are conservative numbers, but regardless, the site’s paid for in about six months. And the business will continue to benefit from the website with minimum costs for several years. That’s an outstanding marketing investment and ROI. Our copywriting firm has teamed up with designers to create websites that paid for themselves in as little as three months. 

So, while many business owners view design as a fluffy, abstract, let’s-play-with-colours-and-move-the-logo-around activity, they’re missing the point. Design is not art that merely exists. Design serves a specific purpose, forming a connection and relationship, as award-winning designer Gonzalo Alatorre says, “between object, business and consumer.” A good designer can solve complex problems and create a wealth of opportunities with direct, measurable impact on a business’ bottom line. 

Meanwhile, a $500 website that doesn’t generate business and merely shows up on sites like www.webpagesthatsuck.com will only hurt a brand and business.

Good Design Gains Importance With Information Overload

More than 75% of North Americans are using the Internet, and more consumers are seeking products and services and spending more money online. As a result, businesses are swiftly transferring their marketing dollars online and delivering more content to consumers at an explosive, unprecedented rate. As people are bombarded with information overload and have limited time to observe, orient, decide and act, they may increasingly rely on instinct and intuition.

Living in a world where we assume the quality of a decision has direct relation to the time and effort that went into making it, it can be difficult to trust our primitive ‘gut feelings.’ But consider the fact that we don’t need to understand mass x velocity to leap out of the way of an oncoming car. It just “feels right” and ultimately results in a decision with an optimal outcome. The old adage that you should always trust your instincts is supported by scientific studies. 

Dr. Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with brief glimpses of Web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly jarring, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television footage, their verdicts matched judgements made after a longer period of examination.

 German social psychologist, Dr. Gerd Gigerenzer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, conducts breakthrough studies on the nature of intuitive thinking. Based on his research, he told the New York Times, “When a person relies on their gut feelings and uses the instinctual rule of thumb ‘go with your first best feeling and ignore everything else,’ it can permit them to outperform the most complex calculations.” 

In the book, Blink, Malcolm Gladwell wrote about a marble statue from the sixth century BC, which was bought by a California museum for $10-million, following a 14-month investigation with an electron microscope, electron microprobe, mass spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, and X-ray fluorescence. The point is that they had top industry authorities use all sorts of high tech equipment to confirm the statue’s authenticity. 

However, the were a few observers who — in a single glance — felt an “intuitive repulsion.” They felt the statue was a fake. And they were right. Letters used to trace the statue’s history were found to be phony and the statue didn’t come from ancient Greece. It came from a forger’s shop in Rome in the early 1980s, when mullets, the Rubix Cube, and Madonna were ‘in.’ 

Blink also documents a study where psychologist, Nalini Ambady, gave students three 10-second videotapes of a teacher with the sound turned off. The students had no difficulty coming up with a rating of the teacher’s effectiveness. Then the clips were cut back to five seconds. The ratings were the same. The ratings were remarkably consistent when students were showed just two seconds of videotape. Then Ambady compared those snap judgments of teacher effectiveness with evaluations of those same professors made by their students after a full semester of classes and she found they were also essentially the same. 

Gladwell noted, “A person watching a silent two-second video clip of a teacher he or she has never met will reach conclusions about how good that teacher is that are very similar to those of a student who has sat in the teacher’s class for an entire semester.” 

Stay tuned for Part Three on Friday!

 Rick Sloboda is a Senior Web Copywriter at Webcopyplus, which helps designers and businesses boost online traffic, leads and sales with optimized web content. Clients range from independent retailers to some of the world’s largest service providers, including AT&T (formerly Cingular), Quest Diagnostics and Scotia Bank. Rick advocates clear, concise and objective website content that promotes readability and usability, and conducts web content studies with organizations in Europe and the U.S., including Yale University. He speaks frequently at web-related forums and seminars, including Small Business BC, Content Convergence & Integration, SUCCESS and HRMA. Rick also serves as a consultant to various organizations, such as the Web Development Advisory Committee at Vancouver, B.C.’s Langara College.