How not to design a website

Here's how most businesses go about designing a website to generate sales leads.

1. They see a few sites they like.
2. They commission a designer to build them a new one based on what they've seen and what the designer wants to do.
3. They spend a lot of money - especially if the designer really insists on using Flash animations and so on.
4. They make the new site live.
5. Finally they find out if the site is any good at generating sales leads.

Here's how you should design a website.

1. Set up a range of different style landing pages and throw targeted traffic at them from AdWords. This is a low cost thing to do.
2. Measure the outcome in terms of how effective each different page is at generating sales leads by using conversion tracking or Google Analytics.
3. Identify which style of landing page works best.
4. Build the rest of the new site using that tried and tested style.
5. Continue to test small changes in the landing page as part of your on-going web optimisation process.