YNOT EUROPE – I’ve been working in web design for almost 10 years, watching it evolving in time. In the beginning of the internet there were no experts, just a bunch of enthusiasts making first blind steps. They made up their first pages, testing first online sales. The field was very new and full of expectations where surfers were hypnotized by nothing more than an embossed, blinking button.

Since that time market players and surfers have learned a lot. It became harder and harder to make a surfer swipe a credit card. Market players needed new ideas to expand their influence. This is where we have heard about guaranteed designs.

Guaranteed designs are based on a click-through ratio and income history that designers are able to analyze. They offer sales growth to the client and often involve several design tweaks.

Talented designers took the gig to another level and built tons of sites that many surfers still pay monthly for. Eventually, the adult industry became sophisticated enough that simply throwing up a website no longer guarantees success. Online adult entertainment today is as risky as any other developed industry.

Thus was born the phrase “designs that convert.” Though the phrase seems to promise another “next best thing,” I can’t help noticing it’s nothing more than an iteration of the cycle. Each state of the industry, each micro crisis we’ve been through, called for an action, for new ideas to start pushing things onto another level. And each time designers created suitable ideas and designs that converted, helping the industry grow.

Meanwhile, the notion remains that the internet is a game of big numbers: If you keep shooting into the skies, you will get a bird. Back in the day, things worked that way. Today, however, a shotgun approach to marketing most likely will guarantee you only epic fail.

Shooting big for success today means choosing your target precisely and then mass-rocketing it hard. Answer this, webmasters: Based on your experience, which would sell better — a well designed site about fine wine or a bunch of non-professionally created blogs that promote beer and chips? I suspect the response would be split, meaning each niche has its own savior; its own designs that convert.

It’s not a secret today that some companies analyze page CTR to tweak designs so they convert better. I used to work a lot in adult health and diet niches and learned from industry leaders. Studying their sites, I noticed they create pages to look like print magazines. The approach offers surfers easy reading and pushes sales with call-to-action graphics that have been placed to match the product organically. The sites create a “shopping” feel for surfers — a comfortable way to swipe the credit card.

Tube sites have been remarkably successful for several years now, and there again a simply design with common elements works well for most. The purpose of a marketing tube site is to feed traffic to pay sites or their own paid-content areas. By providing previews to surfers, they function much like review sites used to, creating the impression there is lots of content inside the paid area. Tube sites are built to get attention, to earn a surfer’s curiosity and hopefully trust.

Today, “designs that convert” have become powerful sales tools, almost scientifically developed and fanatically supported to suit a market full of offers of similar type. Designs that convert are a product in themselves, incorporating well-balanced graphics and thoughtfully prepared copy that together compose a perfect sales machine.

Sid Andrews, aka Adultmix, is the owner and lead designer for web design studio Halifaxo. He has designed websites for worldwide clients in both the adult and mainstream sectors since 2001, and his studio has been nominated twice for Web Design Studio of the Year. Contact him by email.