Have you noticed that everyone seems to be glued to their phones these days? The gym, the grocery store, public transit, the park — everywhere I go, people are gazing at their screens.
The gym, which used to be a place to meet people, is packed again post-Covid but incredibly non-social. No one talks to one another because they’ve tuned out and can’t hear you anyway because of ear buds.
This distraction has spilled over to manufacturing websites.
They’re full of what I call “tech bling”: Words and images fade in and out, headers now include fast-moving videos, and pages are super long with tons of information — to name a few things.
Often, I leave due to the sheer overwhelm of all the movement, numbers, and large blocks of info.
We’ve been testing removing distractions (or friction) from our manufacturing customers’ websites. The results have been remarkable — RFQs have gone up. A lot.
We applied what we learned to the Huff Industrial Marketing website refresh. I want to take advantage of the relatively new WordPress Gutenberg editor and also give the site a more streamlined look and feel.
It’s clean, easy to skim, and completely distraction-free.
When I admitted to a colleague on LinkedIn that it felt a little weird to be doing the exact opposite of what everyone else was doing, he replied: “You’re way ahead of the curve. I think in the future, less will become the option of choice. When you see sites that have too much stuff, your mind freezes and you wind up doing nothing.”
Exactly. Which is why our customers’ distraction-free websites are generating so many RFQs.
If you’re a manufacturer, and not getting the results you want from your website, let’s talk — 603-382-8093 — or complete our RFQ form.
Filed under: Our Thinking