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.

So what then is the key to ensuring this doesn’t happen to your site?
Limit rather than confuse.

Ok, ok, so what do I mean? Quite simply, if a feature seems unnecessary or would benefit less than a fifth of our users, abstain. Don’t build it. Building a feature that is only useful to a small percentage of your users doesn’t make sense, especially from a return on investment perspective.

Remember MySpace? They let users run wild customizing and adding everything possible to their MySpace page. The result? Users were able to customize images, CSS, and it eventually lead to their pages being so complicated and confusing that usability went out the window. Each MySpace profile page had its own navigation scheme, or lack thereof, color scheme, and varying content. Users had too much choice, too many features.

The trend of limiting features is happening in Social Media sites, just look at MySpace versus Facebook, and Facebook versus Twitter. Users want great features but not at the expense of being confused. Build a few features and build them great.

To not have a proper understanding of the cultural framework of your audience could be disastrous.

Not having an understanding of cultural context limits your capability to communicate. Effective communication in itself requires that both parties have a frame of reference or a context from which words are being expressed. For example: Let’s say you are from the United States promoting a fresh line of designer jeans to a new market in Britain. You decide one way to break into that specific demographic would be by using a Facebook fan page. A few months pass and you notice that a British girl is wearing your new pants and posts a picture of her on your fan page. So you thank your British friend for wearing your “pants”. But in England “pants” are what we would call “underwear”. The frame of reference for the understanding of the word pants from a British perspective is entirely different from the American perspective.

The British social context requires that in order to complement a British lady that you adapt your language in order to fit. This is just a trivial example of how cultural context plays into social situations. But imagine a place where as a facilitator you have to contextually adapt to multiple cultures across the entire world. As brands enter into social media marketing they must be aware of social context. Ok, maybe your brand isn’t international yet. Maybe it’s not even national. Even so, you can’t escape cultural contextualization.

Even micro cultures require a level of contextual understanding from both parties. The music industry is full of sub-sets of micro cultures with their own unique understandings of words and ideas. Many of these words and ideas become popularized and eventually become buzz words. For example the word “boo” was originally used as an interjection to startle or frighten. “Boo” is now used in the hip hop sub-culture as a word to describe a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Here are a few points to think about:
1. Social media is not limited to one culture.
2. Understanding your audiences’ context will bridge the digital gap.
3. Relating to your audience in this way will foster more authentic relationships.
4. Understanding cultural context should be part of planning your social media marketing initiative.

And thus a great irony should have been exposed in reading this blog post. I don’t know who you are. And I may have not been contextually relevant. Please drop me a line and let me know who you are, I would love to hear your thoughts on this topic too.

So, how on earth do I draw the conclusion that Facebook could be the future of web design. A couple of points that I draw my crazy idea from:

1. Facebook’s traffic is rising at an extremely fast rate, check compete.com to see how it compares to Google (I also included an another in there for fun).

2. Optimizing for specific keywords on Google is only getting harder and is even more difficult for smaller businesses.

3. Domain names in particular, the .com tld, are harder and harder to come by. In fact there are over 88 million .com’s compared to a mere 13 million .net domains.

4. Facebook recently launched their “Pay with Facebook” feature, how long until there is a Facebook shopping cart for company pages?

5. People say they love choice, but in reality they choose convenience and value (Walmart vs. downtown America). This point is key. People are being bombarded with different search engines, advertisements and more of everything on the web. Facebook solves that problem.

I am not saying the day is here, Facebook has to make some changes for it to really become an option for small business. For example, Facebook needs to allow more customization of the company pages and the ability to remove ads. If Facebook does take this direction I think it will make sense for a lot of small businesses or new start-ups that would not be able to get the traffic elsewhere.

There is a lot of irony in the fact that our last blog post was on commitment issues and social media and how to test yourself to make sure you are up to the challenge. Well, apparently we were not up to it.

Now that we have that out of the way, let’s talk about the damage:

1. We had a good amount of traffic coming to the Inovator, and now it’s dropped, significantly.

2. People were talking with us via the blog, emails, tweets and yes even the good old phone. But we left that conversation and it’s cold now.

3. Lastly, I can only imagine how many people must have thought the worst had become us and we closed up shop. Quite the opposite I can assure you, but actions speak louder than words.

So why am I telling you all of this? For one, I am sorry, and secondly and most importantly, I don’t want you to make the same mistake.

Regardless of whether or not you can make money via social networking, the bigger question is, do you have the time to commit to it?

Everything in life takes work. You can expect to get nothing in return if you put nothing into it. So try this, before you take the plunge of signing up your company’s brand on Twitter or creating a Facebook fan page, sign yourself up. Yea, you personally. And instead of tweeting about random things such as what you had for lunch, try to tweet about things related to your industry. How many tweets can you come up with? How many followers can you get? How many useful conversations can you have?

I think you might be amazed at how hard it is to stay on topic in a social network. There are a lot of companies who’s social networking presence is either just a “me too” dialogue or is just used to spam users with promotions. Social networking is about being real, well as real as you can be in the digital space, and people quickly see through fake and feeble attempts of companies just trying to push their brand.

The webinar is about Design and Search Engine Optimization, two things that you don’t hear much about together.

Proper Search Engine Optimization is not just about programming, its starts with the creative. Learn how your agency can be designing new projects to be properly read by Google, Yahoo, and the other major search engines. You will also see real world examples of how designing a site properly can make a huge impact on your rankings.

Here is a list of some of things you will learn from attending this webinar:

• Valid XHTML/CSS and what it means to you
• Web safe fonts and alternatives
• How to properly use Flash
• Top mistakes made in the Creative Process

Want to attend? The webinar is on July 15th at 2PM EDT. It’s free and you can register here: www1.gotomeeting.com/register/291566936

Goals: sell online & offline products, sell user’s content & items, sign up new users, extend website’s reach

Audience: consumers, sellers, writers, businesses, developers and advertisers

Clear, consistent navigation.

The header of the homepage features the logo that doubles as a home button, a left hand navigation bar, an expanding search bar, a shopping cart button and a login for returning users. All of the elements remain consistent throughout the rest of the site, even the left hand navigation bar which condenses into a drop down on subpages to allow for underlying content to fill the full width of the page.

User specific content.

It’s true, Amazon knows what you like. At the top of the homepage it prompts you to create an account to receive “personalized recommendations”. It remembers what items you have searched for before (even if you haven’t logged in) and displays relevant and even alternative items.

Lots of content, many ways to search.

Content is king, at least on this site it is. Just in case you didn’t know how to navigate the site, they have you covered. You can list out every category of products with one click, browse every category from the homepage and search in any category or sub-category of products. Pay attention to the drop down menu to the left of the ultra-wide search box, it lists all the product categories alphabetically whereas the menu bar to the left lists all the categories by popularity.

Expandable design.

I am usually not a fan of websites that expand to fill the width the browser, mostly because it looks bad and rarely serves purpose beyond filling the screen. However, in the case of Amazon, they do a pretty good job of implementing an expandable design. The center column houses several rows of products based on the users browsing history that display anywhere from 3 to 7 (or more) products depending on the width of their browser. The only thing that doesn’t expand is the top row that houses an advertisement (currently displaying the Kindle 2), it simply center aligns and leaves an awkward white space to the left and right of it.

Ads in a Box.

Let’s face it, the whole site is an advertisement, even the content is well… selling content. But what they have done, is place all of the “real ads” in boxes on the right hand side, this not only breaks up the site a little, but it lends creditability to the “content” in the middle which is more specific to the user.

Conclusion: Although Amazon’s homepage is not the most creative one ever, it is extremely relevant and engaging. It is also extremely easy to navigate and takes into consideration multiple different user browsing habits. All in all, Amazon does an exceptional job of engaging and converting their users, and their revenue is proof of that.

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.

The homepage is a lot like the cover of a book. It needs to quickly convey to the user what the purpose of the website is, much like a book cover must convey what genre of book is. It also has to convince the user to spend more time reading and exploring its content.

The homepage must inspire the user to go deeper into the site, just like a book cover must convince the browser to read through its contents.

Let’s get down to it, below is a checklist of items that you should strongly consider when reviewing your homepage. I have put them in order of importance. Keep in mind, based on the goals for your website one or more of these may not be applicable for you.

1. Does it inspire the user to go further?

2. Does it empower the user to quickly navigate the site?

3. Is it clear to the user what you do?

4. Is the navigation established here or does it change? See article.

5. How easy is it to get to your contact information? Products? Services?

6. Does it show the latest and greatest things happening at your company?

That’s it for now. Feel free to leave comments and suggest more points for the list.