By Design Makeover Follow-up - BrandNewDad.com

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Over a year ago Pedro Sostre, president of Sostre and Associates, a Miami-based Web development firm, began writing Revenue's By Design column. For each issue of the magazine, Sostre and his team select a site from a pool of submissions and perform a visual redesign of the home page or landing page. The "before" and "after" versions of the site are then featured in Sostre's column where he details how and why he made specific design choices.

In an effort to check in on how the redesign impacted the website, we will periodically follow up with those that received a By Design Makeover and let them tell you in their words what worked, what didn't and what's changed in the interim.

Here's what Dave Trenck, founder and president of BrandNewDad had to say:

In late 2005 I submitted my website, www.BrandNewDad.com, to be considered for a makeover by Revenue magazine's By Design columnist Pedro Sostre. It was November and the perfect time to start thinking about a site redesign as I had stopped making site changes in mid-October in anticipation of the holiday season.

I'd started BrandNewDad for new and expectant fathers in 2003 while my wife was pregnant. It wasn't my first foray into building a site supported by affiliate programs. Plus, I also had more than 10 years of experience working in almost every function of website development from software development to executive management for an online subscription-based financial service.

I knew I could leverage my past and professional expertise to create a successful website and monetize it. The major problem I was facing was that my graphic design skills had stopped somewhere during my first year in elementary school. I'm pretty well versed with user interface design, but unfortunately have difficulty with drawing anything aside from a square.

BrandNewDad.com had been consistently making money for me, but I knew that with a better design that it had the potential to make even more. Unfortunately, most mom-and-pop affiliates (of which I am one) don't have the types of budgets that would allow for any sort of design firm to come in and provide suggestions, much less prototype a design that could enhance their affiliate site and potentially help increase usage and conversion. That's why I jumped on Revenue 's offer and was excited to be selected for a home page redesign.

By the time that we'd gotten together on the phone, Pedro and his team had already taken a look at the site in its current form and had some ideas for improvement. The biggest issue wasn't that there wasn't anything to highlight, but that there was too much going on.

Being the founder of the site, lead software engineer, chief marketing officer, comptroller and janitor, I felt that all the content I had should be front and center on the home page. How could one portion of my site be less important than another? This had led to an overly cluttered interface, which my wife has harped on for the last few years and something that Pedro pointed out in the first few minutes of our discussion.

BrandNewDad is what I call a vortal, or a vertical portal. The term describes an authority niche website within a broad market. In order for the site to become an authority I had recruited regular expert columnists and established a forum to promote user Interest and user-generated content.

I developed multiple online tools to help new fathers and also used as much technology as I could to distribute content including RSS feeds and mobile device (PDA) interfaces. There were shopping guides, personal users wish lists and close to 200,000 products being presented. I felt that I needed to hedge against financial disaster by not solely relying on affiliate links but also integrating both graphical and textual advertising and e-book sales, especially on nonproduct and shopping-related screens.

What part would Pedro tell me not to feature front and center I wondered?

He asked how I got my visitors, how my visitors became regular users, what I was doing to steer them into various affiliate links and what type of conversion I was seeing once they were sent to a merchant.

I explained my draconian marketing philosophy of having a $0 advertising budget and that I relied on clever branding strategies (you can find the BrandNewDad logo on parenting-related products I endorse at a store near you), press releases, media coverage and good old-fashioned word of mouth.

I'd also established multiple sites built on the same platform (including www.BrandNewMom.com and www.ToddlerDad.com) and early on had expanded out internationally with U.K.-specific versions of both BrandNewDad and BrandNewMom.

My daily unique visitor count was in the thousands but I was only getting one or two visitors every few days to actually register. I explained to Pedro all of the great (and free) benefits users have when they register: customized baby name lists, product wish lists, forum privileges and even a personalized pregnancy calendar geared toward guys.

I went on to explain that I could easily convert users to regular "shoppers" on the site if they've registered. When visitors register on BrandNewDad, they're asked to submit their baby's due date or birthday. This allows me to present the correct products to them at the correct time. For example, if I know that your wife is due in five months, you're buying furniture for the nursery now. If your baby's three or four months old, you've likely started looking at jogging strollers.

And that's when Pedro put me in check. He said the most important thing to feature on the home page wasn't all of the great content and tools that the site had to offer, but instead to highlight the personalization features and give people a compelling reason to register.

We spoke a little bit about color schemes, ad placements and screen resolution issues, but by that point I knew that whatever design creative that his team was going to come up with would make an impact, and so the rest of the ideas we talked about were just icing on the cake.

I received the design template in early January. It didn't look too drastically different than what I had but the changes were significant enough that I couldn't wait to see what kind of impact that they'd have. I'd built BrandNewDad in a modular code fashion so I knew that I could get the changes made rapidly.

A few weeks later Pedro's design was implemented along with some bug fixes and other small items on the to-do list. Now I'd just sit back and watch the money come in. But I was wrong. Graphic design and user interface play a large role in how your visitors will interact with your website and whether they'll go on to purchase products. But those aren't the only factors for success.

Like many website owners my sites got caught in the crosshairs of the latest Google update. Overnight tens of thousands of previously indexed pages were gone and I assumed that I would not be getting that increase in my monthly commission checks; rather, I'd probably be seeing substantially less.

However, I was wrong again. A few weeks after the new design launched I noticed that the sudden loss of income I'd been expecting didn't occur. My commissions were flat, but not below previous levels.

Well, although I'd taken an overall traffic hit, the daily number of registered users, the ones who I could most easily convert to sales, had tripled.

Then a few weeks later the most amazing thing happened. My commissions were up by nearly 20 percent. Advertising revenue was up an astonishing 40 percent. Because the design started to focus on getting the visitors to register, more visitors did so. For me that meant I could market more "correct" products to more users and ultimately convert those uses to sales.

So does good design play a role in the purchasing decisions of your users? Absolutely. The best thing about it is, unlike a fluctuation in a traffic source such as Google, you have complete control over it. My advice is to do the best design job you can and then seek out the advice of a design professional or submit your site to Revenue magazine for a redesign of your own.

David Trenck founded BrandNewDad.com in 2003. He is most notably recognized as the first employee of EDGAR Online, a financial information company. He is also the founder and president of CollectSports, LLC., an online provider of pricing and data solutions for the sports collectibles industry.

*See the BrandNewDad.com makeover
*See the other By Design Makeovers
*Check out an interview with Pedro Sostre
*Submit your site for a Revenue By Design Makeover
*Contact Sostre and Associates: www.sostreassoc.com

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Tags: Sostre, By Design, design makeover, user interface design, versed, affiliate programs, monetize, graphic design skills, design column, design choices, web development firm, professional expertise, expectant fathers, perfect time, foray, time to start,

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