There are a lot of great ideas out there.  Some are all-too-often misunderstood, and the simplest ones are often blown out of proportion – not necessarily by the person presenting the idea but by those who are interpreting it.  Entrepreneur Glenn Llopis was interviewed by BusinessWeek about his idea for making innovation and humanity come together as a side of business that we often overlook.  Llopis suggests that we as small business owners need to learn to not cling to the bottom line so tightly and to start focusing more on the people involved, primarily employees.

While I don’t necessarily see Llopis’ point that small business owners should be all about “increasing your employees’ market value and relevance in the workforce,” I think that he makes a few other points that cannot be stressed enough to entrepreneurs and small business owners:  We can’t let go of the vision we started with; the company benefits from employee branding just as much as the individuals do; and tradition is no longer valid in most areas of life.
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The feeling of autonomy is great. We’ve likely all enjoyed the excitement of getting that first car, moving off to college, finally nailing a job that doesn’t nail us to a desk… But do we necessarily want to have free-range in roaming around a website? In most cases, the answer is simply no. Many people simply don’t have the time to learn how to navigate each website they visit.

There is a such thing as too many possibilities, especially when it comes to offering visitors the option of going wherever they want on your site. It may not make much sense, but think about the ideal website: You land on the main page and you see an attractive, easy-to-understand navigation bar with, say, five links. Generally, you can read about the company/person, read about any products they have to offer, contact the company/person, see a list of references (portfolio or clients), or you can move right in to buy their products or services. The best websites will have these links conveniently intra-linked or otherwise tied together to take you from a page of reading about the excellent products/services offered to buying what you just read about.

On the other hand, if your site’s visitors have been fishing around your site, hit any dead ends, or can’t find an easy way of getting from point A (learning) to point B (doing) as you want them to, they will ‘walk’ away. To avoid losing potential clients to the frustration of a complicated website, lay it out ahead of time. Go through, step by step, to figure out exactly what you want visitors to do when they land on your website. Sure, you’d want to give them some autonomy by not locking them into a hallway with only one exit door; but be sure to include conspicuous links on each page to show visitors where they can go without having them wander in circles.

LymeLight will gladly help you work out the floor plan for your website, so you can be sure that you’re taking care of your visitors and increasing your site’s number of accurate leads.