I listen to a lot of music by artists whose name starts with the letter B

As I write this, I am listening to Bonnie Rait.  Bruce Hornsby is another regular on my background play list, as are the Beatles, Ben Folds and Blondie. Seems like a weird coincidence that so many of my favorite artists would have names that start with the same letter, doesn’t it?  Of course, it isn’t a coincidence.  Those artists are great but the amount of time I spend listening to them is over represented in comparison to other artists I love such as Joni Mitchell.  Know why?  When I listen to music, it is typically on Pandora via my Sonos system. Sonos alphabetizes the musicians in my library and the sweet spot of where I am looking as I open the application is the “B” section. If I don’t have an idea of what I want to listen to when I get there, my first visual clues are all the “B” artists. The “A” artists seem to be just a slight bit higher than my eye lands (sorry Adele), the “C” artists are below my eye line and everything after “C” is lost to scrolling.

Pondering my listening habits this morning led me to think about websites and how we structure them. For most of us, when people visit our website, we have one primary goal for them; we want them to continue and deepen their relationship with us.  That deeper relationship could take the form of them giving us their email address so we can continue the conversation, grabbing our phone number to call us to set up an appointment, purchasing our product or downloading a white paper, but there is one thing we want them to accomplish as they visit our website. Yet so often, I see that one crucial element hidden away. We want clients to call us but we hide our phone number on the bottom of the page or worse, on the contact page. We want people to sign up for our email newsletter and yet they have to search for our opt in (which they won’t do.)

Is the primary goal on your website the equivalent of an “R” artist?  Are you making your intentions for how her visit can deepen her relationship with you obvious?  If not, how could you do better?

~e