Because Laine is building her identity through her individual name and not a company name or logo, it doesn’t give visitors much to go on, as would The Juice Shop or Writer’s Resource, etc. I was thinking if we add a simple tag line under her name in her heading… even if it was something like Author, Shaman, Public Speaker as an example, it would immediately identify who and what Laine Cunningham is.

I was also thinking we could move the copy on the landing page and replace it with a sort of mission statement, a paragraph long that stated who she is, what she does and why she is here. Then we can link the text or direct them to the more detailed pages of all of the different aspects she has to offer. This should clear things up and catch their attention.

Is this on the same lines of what you both were thinking and Laine is this a direction you may want to go in? Do you think these changes would resolve the issues you both saw and accomplish Laine’s desired results?

Thanks again for both of your help,
Michelle

An interesting site and concept. I visited a couple of time to get a flavour for what it is you do. As a visitor to the site I think you have to persevere to understand your offerings. Are you looking for public engagements, to sell books, workshops, seminars etc.? It looks like all of the above but as TJ mentioned, sometimes you have to be up front and centre about what you trying to achieve. Don’t be shy as you typically don’t have long to grab and keep the attention of us low attention span surfers!

I see you are using Twitter and the like to get yourself out there. This is a good thing, but an observation is that I don’t see you driving people to your site or posting enough items relevant to what it is you’re about. It goes without saying that you can’t just keep hitting people with your URL but you can post linked and relevant content that helps you build an identity that links back to you and your business concepts. Incidentally, if you’re using Facebook for business you might want to open it up as I only got your photo and everything else is locked. Nice photo by the way!

I would encourage you to have very clean and uncluttered pages for each selling point. Then when you Tweet or post you can push people to specific, relevant, easy to view pages. And don’t forget calls to action and special offers..

You mentioned having a problem finding someone for publicity who has connections to your fields. My view on this is that a good PR needs to have an understanding to be effective. However, they would get this from spending time with you, whilst agreeing the brief. At that point, they then engage with their network and likely suspects to get you out there. It can be really useful to have an objective PR agent that can engage with all levels of the media, whether it’s MSNBC, glossies or serious ‘high brow’ journals.

Keep going, I’m sure with some tweaks you’ll get there! Incidentally, your intro music scared the hell out me – speaker volume left up from yesterday!

Regards,

Andrew

From a sales perspective, my immediate reaction is that you need a call to action box right up in the top left of the site. You need to answer the question for the prospect — “Why am I here? Where should I go next?” The question you can answer is this: How does my customer view my website?

As a prospect, I have to hunt to figure out what you do and what you are offering. If you are selling a book, say so. A DVD? The workshops, presentations or seminars? Make it easier for me as a prospect to understand what’s available. There are lots of resources and ideas you have to share: I would make those available by PDF for download and make sure each one has your contact info in the footer or somewhere.

I might suggest that you make the podcast, music an option for a listener rather than have it automatically. That’s a personal preference. You may have feedback otherwise, so keep it if that’s the case.

More thoughts to come. Feel free to converse with us here as we work on this. Thanks.