Site redesign & how to lose 50% of your business

A couple of months ago I wrote an article about service marketplaces, and one such marketplace I gave as example was guru.com. This article is again about the same site, which was recently poorly redesigned.

How to kick out 50% of your potential clients

There are two categories of companies, or for that matter could be people too, that need a website. First are the ones that do not currently have a website, and then are the ones that have a website but want their website improved. Improving is the sole purpose of a website redesign. However, Guru missed that completely in their redesign process. They did many changes, some are actually good, but you need to sign up and log in into your account to see the improvements.

The big issue is that their new homepage misses half of their potential clients. A service marketplace is a portal where companies that have projects sign up and post them, while others (service provides) check out the posted projects, bid on them, and then develop them. A service marketplace requires employers with projects and employees (freelancers or companies) with skills and resources to develop solutions.

Guru's homepage contains a lot of information for employers. It has a big chunky menu with links to "hiring, posting a project, finding freelancers". It provides means to manage your projects, pay freelancers, check your messages. But did I say you are logged in? NO. You're not logged in. They didn't adapt their site for first time visitors. Then, after a big header with guru's greatest features (a slideshow about safe payments, their million freelancers etc) you get three big tabs. Guess what? They are practically the same menu, only now in big chunky tabs. Find freelancers, post projects, discover Guru.

I must say that posting a project is really nice. Without having an account, you can add all your project details, then sign up et voilà, your project is posted. That's ok, but I have just finished reviewing the homepage. So, did you catch the glitch? I have been talking here only about Employers! No Employees!

No freelancer information on homepage

Guru misses half of their clients because they didn't put any information for freelancers on their homepage. First time freelancers probably get lost in the site and don't ever get the chance to register, bid, work and make money. Awful strategy from Guru.

But they do care about 50% of their business

There is information for freelancers on their newly designed homepage. I am going to give you 10 seconds to discover it in the above picture. Should you not find any information for freelancers, check out the next image.

All you have to do now is to always remember this issue and never do it in your own sites and wonder why things don't work smoothly. If you have any other examples or pointers please leave them in the comments section bellow. If you liked this article you can subscribe to the full content rss feed and stay updated as we post new information.

Published on Monday, September 14th, 2009 at 2:52 pm in articles, design, layout, usability.