This one's an interesting story with a very happy ending.

Our website, has been ranking page one #1 and page one #2 on Google for six years.

So last year, to save marketing dollars -- the board of directors elected to REMOVE the toll free phone number off the top right side for a year.

They thought we'd save $190 or so a month on WATTS charges. In 14 months... I saw sales go down and we actually LOST $192,000 in sales from last year compared to 2007 end of year sales. I showed this to the board in March this year and they agreed they made a mistake. 

We put our toll free number back up, and like pure magic. The very next day, calls came in and sales picked up and have remained higher than normal by 22 - 30%.

Most of the staff gets excited about this. So I go to the old book shelf and dust off an old book I had not read in six years. 

The book is tltled, "Don't Make Me Think," by Steve Krug. It's a wonderful book and there is a 2nd edition out there right now that I just bought from Amazon.

I read this book, cover to cover again and I looked at our own website, Voyager360.com.  We've been page one #1 on Google for six years now when you search for, "virtual tour cameras, or 360 virtual tour equipment."

We weren't getting a lot of sales this year and after I read Steve's Book, I figured out why.

Our website navigation (bar) wasn't as user friendly as it could be. I mean, it really sucked. Below you can see that we have drop down menus on our website. It's nice, but nobody knew to DO this.

Visitors to the site just clicked on the top leval navigation so lots of people never even found our STORE and detail pages.  Steve was right. People don't WANT to THINK when they come to a website. We never TESTED our site on anybody. 

I knew I had drop down menus off the main navigation... but every day, 500 to 700 new people coming to our site missed that. As a result, our website navigation was hard for many users and I was thinking our page rank had dropped when it hadn't moved off page one in Google in six years.

Sales were down, but how can you get BETTER than Page One Visibility on Google?   You can't.

But you can improve the USABILITY of your site. Steve Krug's book will show you how. 

So we retooled our site, and the very next few days, sales picked up, and now we're back to $50,000 plus sales of our camera kits per month.

Below is our same navigation now with a horizontal Contextual sub navigation. Now we're selling lots of kits and making fabulous money again. 

See the 2nd LEVEL? Blue house icon and the left to right sub navigation? This is what kicked our sales in the ass and started making our cash register go Kaching! again. 

Your website may be suffering the same fate. For $24.95 at Amazon, Steve Krug can tell you and show you a valuable lesson. The same one the Bartman just learned.

At 40-something... I'm a walking example that you CAN teach an OLD DOG some new Tricks.

- Bart