Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Homepage Hocus Pocus

The website was the single most important thing. All along I knew this, and the resulting procrastination was severe. First impressions count. Because my business was to be solely on line, the biggest influence on visitors would be how I looked on-monitor. Of course, you have to have good copy—nothing substitutes for that. But your home page says so much, not necessarily in words but in style.

Studying my competitors’ websites meticulously, I hated each and every one of them the entire time for having a share of the market that couldn’t yet see me even if they tried. What was surprising about the homepages of the most popular mineral makeup websites—the ones showing up consistently in the left-hand column of Google searches—was the proliferation of bells and whistles: ads, blinking discount offers, seals of approval from official entities of one kind or another, imprints of logo designers, website creators, and hosting companies.

But was it this that made them popular? Instead, I settled on the look of sites in other areas in the Beauty category – the sleeker sites of small companies selling clothing, skin care, and giftware.

I still surf my competitors’ sites, at least weekly, in part to satisfy myself that I made the right decisions, or what I think were the right decisions. Today I continue to get glowing reviews about how beautiful my site is. These are not from friends and relatives, and at some point you just gotta believe. Weigh in, anyone!

Posted on Thursday, June 26th, 2008 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Alice Cosmetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.