The Alien Test

There are many rules of thumb to apply to good site design. One of my personal favorites is the “Alien Test”. The alien test asks, “If an alien from mars landed on earth and visited your website could he understand what is about in less than 5 seconds?” How you answer that questions says volumes about how well your site is designed to generate leads.

The window of opportunity that your site has to hook a visitor and funnel them into becoming a lead is extremely narrow. One of the reasons for this is competition. If a visitor cant engage with your site quickly they can always go to another. According to website monitoring service Pingdom, in December of 2010, there were 255 million websites. That number is astounding especially when you think about it in terms of competition. Can you imagine trying to sell cereal in a store that stocks 255 million brands? That cereal better have more than a plastic toy at the bottom of the box.

The bottom line is just keep it simple. If your product or service is of sufficient quality you don’t need fancy images and tons of text to prove it. Don’t let your homepage content distract from what you are offering. Remember the alien test.

Written by on November 14, 2011

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