We fell asleep halfway through your home page
 
We’ll catch flak for this one, but we’re right. Your website is too damned big. There’s too much to scroll through, the navigation is a mess, and there’s tons of junk that we don’t need to see.
 
Still with us? Pat yourself on the back, and learn something.
 
Here’s the point: Your website is not a destination unto itself. If you’re in the business of selling your services to potential clients, then why would you ever want to tell someone every possible thing about yourself on your site? Not only would it bore them to tears, but infinitely more importantly, it would leave them no reason to call you. In a word, Duh.
 
In this article, we’ll walk through some of the rules, and the ever-intriguing exceptions.
 
“But you never saw my site!”
 
Yup. That should tell you just how ubiquitous this problem is. And just in case your site already hews to best practice for brevity, you can give yourself an extra pat on the back when you finish reading this article, knowing that there was absolutely nothing for you to change or cut.
 
And look at you. You’re still reading this one.
 
Thought so.
 
Let’s draw a distinction here. We’re not talking about e-commerce sites. Amazon.com is supposed to be huge. Heck, they tout “Earth’s biggest selection.” And unlike your professional-services firm, consultancy, or agency, you’re not supposed to call Amazon if you want to do business with them. In fact, if you need to call Amazon, they’ve failed. (That’s one reason the “Contact us by phone” link on their website is so maddeningly hard to find.)
 
Still, Amazon has one heck of a challenge, and you can judge for yourself how well they succeed at it: They need to make all that inventory immediately accessible to you, even if you’re on a little iPhone 4. How many clicks before you find what you want? (This reminds us of an old Apple joke. Q: How come Steve Jobs never wears a suit? A: It has too many buttons.)
 
You, on the other hand, have about one-millionth the information of Amazon that needs to be served up. And it’s still probably way too much. Let’s look, and carve.
 
What’s essential?
 
Your site needs to accomplish three basic things, quickly and efficiently:

• You need to explain what you offer.
• You need to establish your credibility.
• You need to get prospects to contact you.

 
And that’s about it.
 
Quick, look at your website. How many pages deviate from that scheme? Painful, isn’t it?
 
Now of course, there are details. Let’s examine them:
 
What you offer. You certainly provide more than one service. But if you offer 12, can’t you simplify that by category or audience? Look at our website. Sure, we provide everything from video scripts to investor presentations—zillions of different things—but our home page contains just two buttons. Two. We’ve bifurcated our site by audience. It just took a little perspective, and some self-discipline. You can do the same.
 
Establishing your credibility. Any website has mandatories, such as the “About Us” page. Pages like this, and those that explain, say, the various industries you serve and services you offer, should all be regarded as opportunities to differentiate yourself from competitors so that visitors take the call to action and contact you. Who are some of the impressive/recognizable clients you’ve served? Why is your methodology superior to others’?
 
Think of it this way: Imagine you’re a good prospective client of your company, and you need help. What do you do? You Google what you feel are appropriate words to search on, and then you start reviewing the hits that you get. It’s like getting a stack of resumes for an open position: You want to go through them as quickly as possible to find the right one, and then make contact and be done searching. So every single page of your site should help serve this purpose, and draw this process to a conclusion.  
 
Get them to contact you. That’s why your site exists. Sure, it’s also there for current clients to check up on your latest news, but you want that phone to ring or email to chime. So in case you didn’t know, “Contact Us” isn’t just a page. It’s a clickable link that’s ubiquitous across your site. Don’t make anyone work to find it. And entice them to do it! Give them a reason. (“Start boosting your overseas business today. Contact us now to get started.”
 
Some exceptions
 
You may maintain a library of best-practice whitepapers. You may publish a “News” section, with press releases and links to articles where your firm is mentioned. You may have a blog (heck, we obviously do, and we’ve been posting, proudly, since 79 A.D.). Does that mean that these parts of your site should be abolished?
 
Absolutely not. They just need to be put into the proper context. Think of small screens (phones, tablets). Don’t make people scroll. Don’t numb them with cascading sub-menus that are utterly un-mousable. Again, think of that prospective client, who’s trying to find you. Make their life easy, not hard.
 
And you should do it in short order. Literally. 

Need help with the paring knife? Contact us. We do this kind of work all the time, and we'd be happy to help. 

Tips for keeping your professional relationship fresh
 
You could compare the creative process to marriage: The longer you keep at it, the harder it can be to keep it fresh, new, and romantic. Day after day, year after year, you might feel like you’re simply going through the motions, and that that initial spark and thrill of excitement you’d originally felt are now dimmed and dulled.
 
How, then, do you succeed? Are there creative-process equivalents of candle-light dinners and spontaneous getaways?
 
Of course there are. Which is why we’d timed this post to coincide with Valentine’s Day.
 
Counseling
 
First, let’s examine the problem. It’s the weariness that accompanies a steady load of creative challenges. If you feel like “This isn’t fun anymore,” then you’re experiencing what we could call overload burnout. You can’t find the joy in the creative process anymore.
 
(This is not to be confused with so-called “writer’s block,” in which you feel you can’t come up with creative ideas in the first place. We’d tackled that condition in an earlier post.)
 
The problem isn’t just one of attitude. It’s one of results. No matter how experienced you are, no matter how good your inherent creative chops, your output will suffer if you’re not having fun.
 
It will show in your work.
 
And that’s not good.
 
Turn the beat around
 
There are actually lots of ways to surmount this seemingly Sisyphean challenge. Our favorite might best be described as “romancing the details.”
 
We were working on a video project recently, and the amount of footage that needed to be cut down was simply overwhelming. What should’ve been a fun project felt daunting, intimidating, and draining.
 
Here’s the attitude adjustment we employed: We threw all of our creative energies into the very next cut that was to occur between two subsequent shots. This is easier said than done. It requires self-discipline to effectively/temporarily ignore the rest of the entire project. But it gets to the heart of the problem: The project had lost its allure simply due to its size. But it truly was a fun project, and each individual edit held the potential for a creative challenge and commensurately creative solution. So focusing solely on the next one at hand made a previously-numbing experience not only bearable, but fun.
 
The best part? This creates a virtuous cycle, quickly. Putting the time, effort, and love into that one edit created—surprise!—a beautifully executed, absolutely fun-to-watch cut. We watched it over and over. It was immensely satisfying. And seeing that beautiful edit amped us up to do it again.
 
And so the next cut was a work of art. And love.
 
So the project got done. Each cut was a delight. The trick was recognizing the initial hurdle, and devising a creative way of surmounting it.
 
Other tricks
 
Don’t ever lose sight of the fact that, as a creative professional, you have a rare and enviable job. You get paid to create stuff. Many people dream about it, but few are able to actually pull it off. So it’s safe to assume that you’ve been attracted to the creative process all along; it’s just the onslaught of assignments that’s beaten you down.
 
So you can rediscover the joy with some surprisingly simple tricks. Here’s one: Change the venue. You’ve got a laptop. Take it somewhere. When’s the last time you sat on a peaceful park bench, with the crisp air to breathe and the birds to serenade you?
 
Here’s another: Use play-snacks. Indulge in a little something you can keep beside you and sip or munch or fondle while you work. It could be coffee, tea, candies, jerky… anything like that. Let it contribute to the creative ritual you carve out for yourself.
 
Here’s one last one: Solicit unconventional assistance. Ask little kids for their opinion or ideas; their utter lack of bias and parochial constraints will spin your head around. Bounce ideas off an un-creative friend or spouse. You might not get awesome ideas, but sometimes, simply speaking your thoughts aloud, and having a receptive audience for them, can help you to gain newfound perspective on a problem you might be too close to.
 
A parting shot
 
It is possible, of course, that none of the above tricks will work. You might be so burned out that you need time off. If you’re past due for a vacation, get your work/life balance back in order and take one.
 
Just be sure to pick a romantic destination. 

If you know the right kind
 
My 86-year-old father has been on a tear lately. He walks up to strangers in the supermarket and tells them, “I’m getting cremated next week!” When they drop their jaws in horror, he proudly serves up the punchline: “I’m thinking outside the box!”
 
It’s often been suggested to open a talk, a meeting, or a conversation with a joke. But not that one, for god’s sakes.
 
Still, it’s a convenient segue to the topic of this article: Small talk. At its worst, it’s an eye-glazing ritual rife with insincerity. At its best, it’s an astonishingly powerful barrier-breaker and business-builder, when you employ it properly with your clients.
 
So what is it?
 
This is interesting: Looking up “small talk” in my dictionary app just crashed it. So there’s clearly a negative bias at play here.
 
Relaunching the app gives us helpful phrases such as “polite conversation” and “unimportant.” So it sure seems that it’s useless, perhaps an archaic holdover from more formal and less time-constrained times.
 
But appearances can be deceiving.
 
The wrong stuff
 
You probably don’t need to read a lot here about small talk that doesn’t work; you’ve surely endured enough of it yourself. But let’s examine that. Why did the small talk put you off? If someone was spouting about their grandkids or the weather or traffic, it was probably boring. If they were taking a political slant, there’s a good chance they became offensive.
 
Boring. Offensive. Gee. What not to be to your client.
 
See where this is going?
 
A counterintuitive approach
 
Well, you could certainly flip the above negatives on their head and draw the conclusion that your small talk—if any—should be interesting yet inoffensive. But that will only get you less-boring, less-offensive small talk. If the point here is to break down barriers and build up business, you’ll have to do more than that.
 
Think about it. What would you like your client to do, at the very outset of the conversation? What kind of mindframe do you want them to be in? Regarded in that light, the challenge is different, and far more intriguing. Not to mention fun, if you’re the puzzle-solving type.
 
“I want them lubed up to hand me more business!” you might say. Fine. But would you ever open a conversation with a client with words to that effect? Of course not.
 
Enter your small talk.
 
The magician David Blaine once threw a deck of cards at a store window from the sidewalk. And the card he’d predicted to appear did just that… stuck to the inside of the store window! It’s a great trick and makes you wonder “How did he do that?” But if you give it more than 30 seconds’ worth of thought, you realize: “He’d prepped that outcome in advance.”
 
Ta-da! The point here is that ideal small talk is much bigger than it appears. If you’re walking into that meeting or onto that call, you already know what’s on the agenda. And you also know where you’d like to steer that conversation, opportunity-wise, before it ends. But we’ll bet you’d never considered taking a David Blaine-like approach to something as seemingly banal as small talk.
 
Stuff the rabbit into the hat
 
Now that you surely see the strategy for this endeavor, all that’s left is the tactical execution. This generally isn’t hard. Scour your previous-meeting notes for questions that went unanswered, for little opportunistic openings that never quite yielded to your touch. Then look through the morning’s news. Do a Google News search for any of the topics of interest to your client. See what crops up. Jot yourself a note or two, and you’re armed.
 
Your resulting small-talk/opener can go something like this: “Hey, did you see that story about that possible merger we’d talked about last week?” Simple as that. However the client responds—yes or no—you’re in control of the conversation, and are free to steer it that way during the ensuing meeting or call.
 
Note that that fictitious opener might not feel like classic “small talk,” but that’s okay. Note that 1) it’s probably not on the actual agenda for the meeting or call (since it covers territory you’d prefer to explore), and 2) it’s a lot more suitable to your purposes than, say, “Hey, my kid just threw up alphabet soup and you could still read the letters.”
 
Taboo or not taboo?
 
You’ve always heard that you should avoid the topics of religion and politics in polite conversation. We’ll agree with the former. But we’ll leave you with some unexpected opinions on the latter.
 
On the surface, we couldn’t agree more. We’ve seen clients of ours post rabidly political rants on supposedly-business-limited sites like LinkedIn, and it always makes us cringe. For every person you’ll win over, you’ll insult at least one more. It’s not worth the fallout. And you’ll notice that we practice what we preach here at Copel Communications. You won’t see anything that tips the scales in either direction; indeed, we’re often called upon to take up the mantle of varying causes in a professional capacity, and we do just that.
 
But let’s get back to small talk. You can sometimes plumb your client with an innocent-sounding query which gets them to open up, big-time, in your favor. Consider something like this, if the context would work for you: “I hear that the Trump administration is considering scaling back on XXXX/spending more on XXXX…” That’s all you need say. You never took a side. But your client may well not walk so fine a line. Fine. Let them spout. And take notes! It could serve you well.
 
Do you have small-talk tips or war stories to share? Feel free to respond to this post or contact us and let’s chat.