Fixing "Broken Windows"...

...in your business may achieve the same results as it did in NY. 37 Signals starts it off with this post:

"If you want to change big things, you pay attention to small things."
-Rudy Giuliani on C-span talking about the Broken Windows theory

The Broken Windows theory was the catalyst for solving NYC’s crime wave in the 80’s and 90’s. NYC’s administration had been focusing on major crimes, like murder, and overlooking smaller crimes along the way. But it wasn’t working. So the city started going after petty crime that it had been overlooking: turnstyle jumpers, squeegee men, public drunks, etc. The result: All crime rates fell suddenly and continued to drop for the next ten years.

This is similar to what I refer to as the 5% rule. Can you get 5% better across all the things you do? If you can, the quantitative increase is way more than 5%. Different discussion, maybe next week.

Websites for photographers have so many broken windows that it makes me crazy. Links that don't work, dead-end pages with no navigation, silly or nonsensical page names, crazy backgrounds, and layouts that hurt the eyes. Broken windows.

We could discuss boring answering machine messages, emails without signatures, noblog or news area, client disassociation and a myriad of other small items that when put together make a photographers business way more difficult. But for this post, we will discuss web pages.

Make a plan to look at your site with a discerning and somewhat cold eye. Then take a moment to answer these questions:

1. Does the site navigate well? Can someone find what they are looking for quickly?
2. Does the site intrude on a visitors time? (Long loading pages or silly intros that do nothing but show off your Flash guy's skill)
3. Is the site up-to-date with the latest stuff you are doing? Does it have stale images and copy that refers to your vacation 2 years ago?
   
4. Does the portfolio area change with new images added and deleted as you shoot them?
5. Does the copy entice someone to seek you out? Do you have any copy? (Some big-time shooters have sites with no copy... fine. They also have reps and spend 10's of thousands on promotion above the website. If this is you, skip this post.)
6. Do the images accurately reflect what you are doing? Do they reflect what you want to do? Do they have any reason at all to be there?
7. Do you have contact information clearly notated and easily clicked to?
8. Is everything spelled correctly, numbers correct, addresses and links and emails all clear and correct?
9. Do your color schemes work to your advantage or do you have colors that are hard to see - or tiring on the eyes? Is your font selection big enough? Too big?
10. Does the site offer a visitor a compelling reason to return? Are there areas that can help deliver your message in ways that could make a visitor decide to be a client... or at least consider that option?

There are far more questions, but as you can see above, the individual fixes are small, but the cumulative value is higher, far higher, than the sum of each item.

Mend the small things while working hard on the big things. Keep an eye out for those seemingly small things, that if not dealt with immediately, become aggregated into a site that says "I don't care about those who visit."

Sure you do. Just takes a little TLC now and then.