The fallacy of "Everybody else is doing it"
Published: Wed, 10/05/16
And he's right on the money. I'll share his email in a minute.
But I have my own story to share first. Be patient. You'll get the tie in.
I have a client who wants his website to look a lot like another website.
You know, because it's "so Fortune 500." It "looks rich." He wants his brand to "look expensive."
And because a very successful guy's website looks a certain way, then my client thinks his should look the same way.
Any web developer can mimic another website.
But what my client doesn't get is this:
That other guy's website sucks. I bet it gets very low conversions.
You know what? The conversions it does get is because of the guy and not his website.
Did you catch that?
Amazon is the greatest business in the world of retailing.
But if I were a new retailer, I'd make my site better.
Now, Amazon does of a lot of things right...
But there is a fallacy here - it's one of correlation not causation.
That guy is successful and he has this website...so let's copy that website.
No.
Let's do something different.
One thing he really likes is sliders. UGH.
Sliders suck. They really do.
Here's that email from Shane of Thrive:
This is a bit of pet peeve of mine, Bill...
If you look at any collection of WordPress themes, what do you see on every homepage?
A slider.
Often a full screen, animated, auto-forwarding slider with layered animations.
Very fancy stuff.
And also a great way to kill your website's conversion rate.
Yep, you read that right. An auto-forwarding slider is pretty much guaranteed to make your website perform WORSE.
I know that's hard to believe, if for no other reason than that sliders are seemingly everywhere.
As human beings, we have this very strong instinct to do what others are doing. So when you see website after website using sliders (even websites belonging to big, successful corporations), you can't help but think that maybe you should use a slider too.
And here I come along with my "sliders are bad" crazy talk.
Can so many websites really be so wrong?
Well, I've put together what I think is a damning amount of hard evidence against sliders.
Check out the post here to discover exactly why sliders make websites suck so much.
--> Why Sliders Suck
All the best,
Shane
Catch that? Sliders suck, in case you missed it. Shane backs up his (and my) assertion with data and examples.
I know, as a user, I hate sliders. As a marketer, I hate them even more. They don't work. They add zero value and just confuse and stymie website visitors.
Bill
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