In 1287 a man named Marco Polo changed the face of the western world making one of the first significant connections to the eastern world. His established connection was more than an anthropological one. The connection eventually opened up a trade route named the Silk Road. Its connection yielded a huge benefit to the western world.

What happened to people like Marco Polo?

Do people like Marco Polo still live today? Or are the days of exploration of new parts of the world over? Is there still room for exploration of new and lucrative venues of business? Are there still people like Marco Polo connecting parts of the world in a new way?

The Silk Road.

The Silk Road was a series of ancient trade routes stretching across Central Asia to Europe, its name still evokes imagery of caravans drawn by camels packed full of Chinese silk, ivory, jade and gold. These caravans traversed across snow topped mountains through deserts and every imaginable geographic and cultural obstacle. The great explorers that piloted these caravans spent years making journeys, but only a few completed the task and the ones who did reaped tremendous profits.

Why we need more Marco Polo’s.

Men like Marco Polo were so successful because they were willing to fail. They were willing to challenge the unknown. Influential people find solutions to problems where it would otherwise be detrimental to the welfare of the team and the kingdoms that relied on them. There are still people like Marco Polo in the world today. But they don’t ride camels or pull carts; they sit in front of glowing monitors, pioneering the digital universe.

A digital Silk Road.

The biggest difference between explorers during the times of the Silk Road and now is how long it took to fail. You can fail much faster on the internet. When I talk about failure I don’t mean forgetting the planning stages of your journey or forgetting to make an accurate risk management assessment. I also don’t mean that you should intentionally fail. What I do mean is that by having the ability to fail faster it allows room to make changes in a more agile way. The internet allows you to track and improve your steps much more quickly. Failing faster in this way allows explorers to meet and exceed expectations and reach success faster.

I believe explorers of the digital age will see much faster incremental changes in product development. I also believe that this process of faster incremental change is in essence the new Silk Road. Where just as curiosity of the unknown drove these explorers to see and do new things, so will explorers of the digital age. And just as the explorers of the Silk Road learned to face failure, so will explorers of the digital age. Except in the digital age explorers will fail much faster, make faster incremental improvements and pave a new Silk Road for all others to follow.

What is a conversion you ask? A conversion happens when a user on your site takes an action that you intended. If you have an eCommerce site, and a visitor makes a purchase on your site, that’s a conversion.

Light vs Heavy

Now that we know what a conversion is, let’s talk about Heavy Conversions and Light Conversions.

A Heavy Conversion is an action that takes a lot from the user, such as a purchase, filling out a contact form, or becoming a member of your site. Typically, a Heavy Conversion requires the user to give something up, such as money.

A Light Conversion, in contrast, is one that requires very little from the user. Some examples of Light Conversions might be the time spent on the site or requesting a whitepaper.

Let’s face it, we all love the Heavy Conversions, but we need to remember the Light Conversions as well. If you pay attention to the Light Conversions, you can change your tactics and increase the amount of Heavy Conversions you get from your website.

The 3:1 Rule

As a rule of thumb, you should always have at least 3 Light Conversions for every 1 Heavy Conversion. The Light Conversions must back up or contradict the Heavy Conversion as well.

A Light Conversion that backs up the Heavy Conversion will show users are aware of your Heavy Conversion, but they need some more convincing. Whereas a Light Conversion that contradicts the Heavy Conversion will tell you that users are not aware or completely uninterested in what your Heavy Conversion is offering.

Why is simple better for our clients? Because our clients hire us to build them a website that does something. That something could be a user purchasing a t-shirt or joining a mailing list. It could also be a user simply finding out more information about our client.

A simple navigational structure is easy to navigate. A simple cms is easy to update. Most importantly, a simple website doesn’t get in the user’s way.

Silly right? In the same respect (although not as life-threatening), when a client (let’s say an electric company owner) demands certain aspects of his website be built his way based on personal opinion or emotion, he is telling the developer that his own knowledge, training, and experience as an electrician is more extensive in the web industry and supersedes that of the web developer.

The patient needs the doctor in order to live, and the doctors need to understand the patient and his problems in order to know what techniques to apply.

So the next time you find yourself thinking “the client is always right”, consider the patient and where he would be if he had said something like that.

Let’s be clear, I am not saying your opinion doesn’t matter, it does. Without your insight into your own business your developer has nothing to go off of. But you did hire that experienced web firm to help you mix your vision with some industry experience and ingenuity, and create you the best website for your users. You did want a website that was best for your users, not you, right?

When building a new house, it would be a good idea to plan for your future needs. Maybe you don’t have kids, but one day you want one or two ankle-biters. It would be wise to tell your architect, “I would like to have two extra bedrooms.”

Now let’s imagine you are building a start-up website based on skateboarding. The main purpose of the website is to provide training videos and articles about the topic. It would be wise to concentrate on developing the content management system necessary to allow you to control the content on the website and easily add new content. Then you can focus on the content, and driving interested users to your website.

Here’s the twist.

You have a great basic concept for the website, it’s all based around a topic that’s popular and you plan on having a lot of content for users to read/watch. But the next thing that comes out of your mouth throws us for a loop; “I also want it to have a MySpace-like profile for each user, a YouTube-esque method for users to share videos, oh and one of those instant messaging thingamajigs like AOL has!”

Back to the analogy of the house, the last statement is sort of like telling your interior decorator to design the two extra bedrooms for one boy who likes Transformers and a little girl who loves Winnie the Pooh. So many detail for kids you haven’t even had yet.

Now my anology of the house and the unborn-yet-already-defined children may be a little extreme, but look at it from your user’s perspective. Are you really 100% sure that your idea is that great, and that you can really steal your user’s attention away from MySpace? Why build something that you think might work, when you can build the basics, then ask your users what they want. If you can’t handle that, and you think your website needs everything else to be great, then maybe your “great idea” really isn’t so great afterall.