Redesign fail

Redesign graphicRedesigning your site especially if its an e-commerce site is almost always a bad idea, yet people do it all the time and for no good reason. If you have a blog and your income isn’t dependent on it then redesign your little heart out because the drop in traffic that always happens when people redesign wont interfere with your bottom line. If its an e-commerce site, then wham look out.

For example one of the clip sites I sell though Clips4Sale just did a major over hall on their site. I sell a fair amount and on a consistent basis on that site. I’m sure they had some internal reasons for the changes as far as functionality, though they have not conveyed that to the producers. They did say the redesign should help customers find content they are looking for more easily. Thats a pretty broad statement and not very specific information and hence producers like me will need to play trial and error with how the new search works to try to make their studios visible on the site and get some eyeballs to their stores. Also this redesign looks terrible. Its an all text solution to an unknown problem. Maybe it solves some issue i dont know because the motivation for the change wasn’t shared but visually it looks like crap.  One thing i do know about design in general and adult entertainment design is that the visual is important as “reading” porn doesn’t drive as much traffic as “seeing” porn. I have my fingers crossed that they will tweak this over hall to not only make it function better so that people can get back to the business of making money but that some work will be put into making it look better too. Time will tell.

My sales have dropped off, as in molasses slow. My traffic has dropped as as well. The right eyeballs are not getting to my studio. The benefit with Clips4Sale versus selling though your own site and processor is that c4s brings eyeballs… their own traffic. They take a big cut for that and its part of the deal. You give them 40% they give you eyeballs, process your sale and host this content. 40% is a lot.

Others producers are noticing similar effects. This is always what happens when a site does this. When you change how people are used to finding what they are looking for traffic decreases and sales diminish. Sometimes permanently sometimes its temporary. Which one will this one be? Its hard to tell this soon. I wish Clips4sale would have given notice that the over hall was coming so we could plan accordingly. There were rumors but rumors are not communication. Since they take 40 percent of every sale i make and i think for that chunk of change a heads up was in order and maybe a better explanation of how the changes would effect studios moving forward but alas that didn’t happen. I’m generally not very critical of c4s as usually their is no reason to be but this redesign and the roll out of it is far less then stellar.

Put this on top of the changes in the Google algorithm and this feels like insult to injury as a result i am not having the happiest couple of months. I know i’m not the only one. A hypnosis social networking site i’m part of Inraptured that drives a bit of traffic to my site is also going to undergo some changes in the month of June as well but at least they let their users know it was coming.

Its going to be a bumpy summer!

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