Everybody thinks they know everything

Last week a guest speaker came to one of my marketing classes at Cal State Fullerton. The college has guest speakers quite often and this time they brought in Boris Bugarski, the CEO of an email marketing company called mUrgent. I am usually happy when we get guest speakers because we do not have to hear the professor ramble on about random things for over an hour. Boris gave a pretty interesting speech/presentation, but right when he said he was an expert on "usability/design" as well as knowledgeable in the area of "website optimization" I knew that we are going to have some fun.

Lets take a look at his site...

murgent homepage

  1. When I first loaded up the site, my eyes went to the heading and then to the three main options underneath the heading. So I decided to click on the title/heading within one of the boxes expecting it to take me to another page, but it was not a link. I was forced to use the "click here" link. I was expecting the whole box to be a link, but it was not.
  2. Their overall message is very confusing. There are many parts to email marketing and according to Boris, one of the main parts that they specialize in is emailing out coupons for restaurants but it is not emphasized clearly.
  3. Boris is also known as an "authority in online marketing" according to his about page, so as a smart marketer he put a testimonial on his homepage. The bad thing about that testimonial is that it is from a person on their board of advisors. Maybe they should have got a testimonial from one of their clients such as Dominos Pizza and put it on the homepage.
  4. With most contact forms that are usable if you do not fill out the required fields it gives you an error. This contact form allows you to submit blank messages and there is no "confirmation" page saying that your submission went through.
  5. There are too many calls to action on the site, which makes it confusing to figure out which ones are the most important. Some are bright while others are barely visible. The less visible ones are probably less important, but they should either be clearly visible or not be there at all.
  6. Towards the bottom of the site there is a a message in grey text filled with keywords. If the message was meant to explain what they do, then I feel it is too lengthy and in an inappropriate place. If the message was meant to be stuffed with keywords, it just proves how much Boris really knows about website optimization.

Boris was a good speaker and I enjoyed his presentation, but it upsets me when a "professional" comes in and basically misinforms a bunch of college students. He mainly covered other parts of marketing and talked about emailing out coupons for restaurants which he knows a lot about and seems to be very good at, but I wish he did not mention design. A lot of these students end up believing the speaker, since they do not know any better.

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Reader Comments (6)

Ken Burgin, September 5, 2006

Interesting - I wonder what he will say when he reads this blog post?!

Chris Griffin, September 5, 2006

Here is a few more things I noticed:

  • The contact form doesn't even tell you which fields are required.
  • When I go from page to page its not exactly obvious where I am, I didn't notice the breadcrumb until after I clicked on 3 pages. The main navigation should tell us where we are at (possibly by keeping the red line under the buttons on the active page).
  • The code resembles something straight out of 1999
  • Image headings? c'mon

I could go on but I think the case has already been made.

Neil Patel, September 5, 2006

Chris, good point with the breadcrumb. I didn't notice it until now.

Peter, September 6, 2006

You have mis-labeled 3 and 4 in the image above. 3 should be on the Testimonial and 4 should be on the contact form.

Neil Patel, September 6, 2006

Thanks Peter, will get that fixed.

Boris, January 9, 2007

Neil, you make good observations. I like your thinking and critique of our website. Not too bad. We like to change our website every so often to test out new colors, calls to action, etc. I don't think anyone will ever get it right. Too many variables. Moreover, as marketers we need to constantly change and try new things. How do you know if your page is truly optimized, right? You can make comments about pages all day long; however, the proof is in the pudding - and this site increased our lead generation by quite a bit. We went from a few leads a day to over 15 leads per day and still performs pretty well. In fact, I think we even made it to the first page of the Google engine if you search for "email marketing company" which isn't too shabby. I would make the necessary changes you suggest, which may increase our performance, but we will be launching a new site within the month (hopefully). Thanks Neil. Very insightful.