Case Study

It’s all very well telling you what makes a big selling website so I thought I would show you what one looks like and give you a complete breakdown of it’s component parts.

This is a very simple example of a site that sells a niche product direct from the blog through the articles it publishes. I also want to show this to you for it’s design and layout to give you an idea as to what’s possible with the blog theme format.

As with any project I work on for a client I always start with first finding out what their objectives are. What is it they want their new website to achieve for them? Who is their target market and who are the major players?

When I know this it becomes much easier to decide on the format of the site, for example should it be a blog, an online brochure or a social network site?

Understanding who the major players are in the market factors into this simply because they’re already successful. The format of their website plays a big factor in this because whatever they’re doing right now is working for them. Because it’s working for them it stands a high chance of working for my client too.

The site I built was for SelfEsteemBreakthroughs.com. It’s main purpose was to help people overcome their self esteem issues so the design had to have a calming effect, it didn’t want to be too bold or in your face. It had to have an air of friendly authority.

We wanted to position Joe Dumas as the expert people could easily trust and relate to which was achieved by featuring a photo of him in the header panel design.

Here’s a screenshot of the top half of the site…

As you can see the layout is very easy to navigate around with all the usual sign posts and links pointing to different types of content.

With every site I design and build I always encourage my clients to build a subscriber list so as you can see in the top right corner of the page we have a subscription box.

Building a list of subscribers is critical to the success of any website no matter what niche you’re in and having a subscription box like this is just one of many techniques we can use.

For example we can use popup on entry or popup on exit windows. We can even direct people to full optin page if they choose to leave the page.

Because this blog is about building a brand identity around Joe Dumas I also introduced other elements like a signature which helps to visually personalize each article he writes and publishes to the site.

As with any blog I build it always includes a way for visitors to interact with the site and there are a couple of ways we achieved this with the site.

First we give people a selection of social bookmarking sites they can quickly access and post to telling others about Self Esteem Breakthroughs.

Then we give people a way to post their comments and feedback directly to each page of the website…

As you can see what we do is very straight forward and simple yet works like gangbusters at keeping people coming back to the site over and over again.

So there you have it, a quick case study on a recent niche blog I created for a new client.