Topicality plus nut and bolts

Friday, February 1, 2008, 3:48 AM
Website Design by John (Article #180)

Over the three years I've been in business for myself, I've tried to formulate some notion of what the best recipe for all this website stuff is.

Time and again, I've seen two critical drivers for page visits.

Topicality.
Nuts and bolts knowledge.

Topicality

Topicality is a monster. A website has to have a theme. A cause, and a purpose. Especially if that website aims to be profitable. Also, the audience drawn to that topic has to have some meet to it. Casual browsers and folks passing through generally don't convert into a lot of advertising value. Folks who are there for a clear reason convert.

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A good example is the ChunkySoupCurse.com website. Now, I run that website as a lark, and as long as it makes back the cost of paying for a domain name, I really don't care how well it does over the course of years.

But, as a testbed for topicality in ad conversions, the Curse is a study in how a demographic will kill you. The demographic of the website is young and male. The interest level isn't much above passive disinterest as people look for humorous content throughout the internets. The conversion rate has ranged in any month from as low 0.23% to as high as a mighty 0.70%.

By comparison, More.PunxsyPage.com is highly topical, and driven by visitors to the Punxsutawney area and locals. And of course the giant whacko fest that surrounds Groundhog Day every year. It's highest conversion rate has been 4.93%. This compares to a modest 1.51% from its mothership, PunxsyPage.com.

More.PunxsyPage.com is content-heavy. All articles, and nothing else.

www.PunxsyPage.com is user-generated and feed heavy.

Those interests contrast pretty starkly. People following search results from local news feeds, for example, are pretty heavy on tracking down dead bodies. You'd be surprised how many people come through the RSS feed aggregator looking for various murders, suicides and accident deaths from around the area.

First off, I can't even imagine what you would sell to those people.

Secondly, they're passing through. Vaguely interest in PunxsyPage.com. Much more interested in dead people they've heard of somewhere in the rumor mill, the news, etc.

The point being is that highly topical content drives more conversions into advertising.

Nuts and bolts

This website design blog gets most of its visitors from nuts and bolts people. The most popular article from January besides the Mexican hookers articles (which, really, how do you compete with that?) was the article about converting latitude and longitude into X-Y co-ordinates for drawing operations.

Nothing against fluffy articles. I obviously write my fair share of fluffy articles. But, especially with a straight-up blog, nuts and bolts information becomes very important to driving visitors.

This blog is typically converting 1.20%. That's decent, especially considering that technical people are less apt to click on ads (you oughtta see the TV station database website, which is beginning to rival the Curse in sheer advertising apathy of visitors). Also nice is that technical websites tend to yield a higher pay-out for each click on an ad.

It's a funny thing trying to pin available demographics to desired behaviors. Sure, we'd all love 50% click-thru rates from people who love to come back to our websites.

But, that isn't the nature of the internet. First off, because a certain percentage of visitors are always just passing through. Secondly, because the entire dynamic of the search engine as it relates to what people click on your website hinges on two variables. One, the visitor's strength of interest. Are they just screwing around? Two, the relationship of the website topic to the search query. Did they really find what they want?

If they found a winner, they're generally inclined to click on ads.

Why? It seems almost counter-intuitive!

First, because they're done. If their search is over, the user is emotionally prepared to start drifting off a bit. Drifting off means examining what else your page has and then clicking on it to see if it is work a look.

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Welcome!

Wonder where to start with your web design business?

This blog follows along with my efforts to build and grow a website design business, Pro Content and Design.

The goal of this blog is to fill in blanks that may be empty as you get your business rolling.

This blog, particularly the source code section, is not intended for beginners. If you are not comfortable with databases, Ajax, DOM objects and other advanced methods, I strongly suggest you go take a look over at W3 Schools before even reading -- let alone tinkering with -- any of the code here.

I hope this blog has some value to web designers as they attempt to get their businesses going.

Good luck, and happy reading.

Thank you,
John Crawford
Pro Content and Design