“That’s a Birkin Bag! Ohmigod, you have a Birkin bag!” She shrieked…Her nails-on-a-chalkboard voice interrupting my ever-so-peaceful slumber. “An Hermes Birkin Bag. You have an Hermes Birkin Bag… at the beach no less! How on earth did you get it?”

I pretended to be dead.

In a high-pitched shrill that only a dolphin could understand, she droned on and on about movie stars and waiting lists and other things I had absolutely no interest whatsoever in.

I was doing my best to ignore her. Focusing on my deep yoga breathing (in from the core, out through the nose) while simultaneously writing a note to Bose in my head. (Dear Bose, I would like a refund for my noise-canceling headphones immediately. They obviously are defective or you are guilty of VERY false advertising.)

She continued assessing my belongings in a most officious manner. “Prada sunglasses… A Chanel bathing suit… A Louis Vuitton beach towel…. That cover-up? What is it? Looks like Dolce…” I thought for a second I should tell her it was Cavalli but I didn’t have the heart. Obviously she was taking her prospective job interview at Sotheby’s very seriously.

Despite my repeated (and most earnest) pleas to the mythological Gods of the Ocean, this woman wasn’t going to leave till I acknowledged her. Little did she know, I had no plans to do so. I tried to focus on the waves (read: summon things that could come out of the ocean to bite her.)

“All those nice, expensive things and your website sucks.”

I burst out laughing. That did it. She won.

I sat up and stared at her intently trying to place her. I had no earthly idea who she was.

“How exactly do you know what my website looks like?” I asked.

“My husband. You helped him build his business. OUR business. He goes on and on about you like you are some sort of saint so I finally looked you up last night. Your eightbyeight.com site? It’s very ugly.”

I smiled, imagining what she would have thought of it before we redesigned it a couple months ago. She probably would have had a heart attack. I instantly regretted moving to the new site.

She prattled on in her perky bimbelina sort of fashion. “You obviously have some taste, even though it’s disrespectful to bring that kind of bag to the beach. And I should be thanking you, I guess…. Maybe… But last night when my husband went out to his game…”

Ahhh… Finally… The lightbulb went off in my head… Yes, her husband. Founder of one of the most successful e-commerce companies in the last decade and one of my poker buddies. (I use the word “buddies” for everyone who gives me money!)

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think he had a thing for you but he only likes skinny, voluptuous blondes, three things you’re not.” She covered her mouth as if she was horrified by her oh-so-intentional comment.

It took everything I had to resist the temptation… If her husband preferred Barbie Dolls, he may have spent less time eyeing the Asian cocktail waitress and not have lost his shirt at the card table the night before. But I didn’t say anything. (In consulting, this is what we call client confidentiality.)

On and on she went like the Energizer bunny. “So it really must be that your stuff works. I mean our sites are much prettier than yours, but they’re not at all as nice as they’d be if YOU weren’t involved.” She sniped in a rather accusing tone.

Good Lord. Did this woman have an on/off switch behind her neck that I could grab hold of?

While I plotted plotting her imminent demise (burying her alive in the sand would be a public service, right?), she plopped down on my towel as if we were best buddies. (Note to self: Adjust our contract to say that client relations don’t extend to their spouses. Oh, and double our rates to a very specific client for his oh-so-bothersome wife.)

“So, tell me, why does your site look like the way it does? Don’t you care at all about your brand?”

And there it was. The infamous branding question. The one that we get asked day in and day out.

The query I had traveled thousands of miles to avoid even for just a couple days…

You know, the one that sends me over the edge every single time.

It would have been easier to explain to her the meaning of life. In fact, it would have been simpler to teach this Beachtime Betty about quantum physics.

“I don’t believe in online branding.” I said making sure to slowly enunciate every word just so she wouldn’t miss one.

She started to say something but I interrupted. Nirvana awaited. If I was ever going to get back to tranquility, I was going to have to make this fast. “Offline branding takes time, money or both. Online, most companies have neither. On the off-chance they do have the money, they aren’t necessarily going to have the time but even if they did that’s not what customers care about. They care about finding what they want and buying or obtaining it quickly with as little outside intervention as possible.”

I paused for a moment and then continued. “Sites like Amazon, eBags, and eBay are not necessarily pretty but they work because they meet the user’s base requirements. Most sites today ignore the users and design for the CEO (read: OR his annoying wife) completely ignoring what the users want and need. If you are a good site, you need to design it for the user which means you need a good entry page, solid navigation that works independently of your text search function, a perfect cart and checkout and…”

“But our site….” She interjected.

I cut her off at the pass. “In the big scheme of things, your site isn’t all that pretty either. You are lucky in that you have a gorgeous, multi-dimensional product. Your business is successful because you have an easy-to-use checkout, fantastic delivery and a great e-mail follow-up program that really works. Not to mention that you were also in your market first.” I said in the most condescending tone I could muster hoping that the whole authority position would work.

“If we had less of those boring words….”

In the South, they have a saying “it’s harder than putting pantyhose on a snake.” I always wondered who came up with that – sitting on a porch rocker, kicking back a couple Buds, thinking about wrestling Hanes Her Way on some legless viper.

This conversation defined puttin’ Spanx on a Sidewinder and unfortunately, it was far less stimulating.

“Those ‘boring words’ are what gets you most of your traffic. Search engines can’t read pictures. They can only read text. You use those words to get them to crawl your site to give you organic rankings. You know, the free ones, that get you business so you can stay at chi-chi-la-la places like these.” I retorted.

She kicked up some sand with her hoochie-mama-red toes. “Well, I guess it’s not my site that I am worried about anyway, it’s yours. I mean, you are our consultant after all and we are a company that needs to be cautious about the company we keep.”

I would have laughed in her face except she was so darn serious.

“I agree.” I said. “The eightbyeight.com site is not at all what I wanted.”

She looked like she had won the sweepstakes. (Correction: she won the lottery when she got married. She looked like she had won the Miss Universe Pageant or something of equal importance.)

“I wanted Flash, all sorts of animation and long-form video. But we read our stats and that’s not our customer base. People come to our site for information and we deliver it the best way we know how. It’s not perfect but it has a lot of tips and techniques you can use to build your business which is our brand. Folks don’t come to my conferences because I wear Armani and they certainly don’t see me over and over because I am the most polished speaker (I’m not) with the fanciest PowerPoint presentations. (You’re lucky to get slides.) They come because we have really good information that’s practically guaranteed to improve your business and most of it won’t even cost you a lot of money.”

She remained completely unconvinced.

I desperately wanted my towel back so I thought for a moment and then said, “One of my favorite clients bought me this Birkin Bag after he quadrupled his sales while cutting his online marketing and advertising costs in half in a down market. Do you own one?”

“No, but I wish I did.” She pouted. “Maybe you could talk to my husband while you are here about those nasty abandoner-people we have. He says you know how to make them convert.”

And it was then, and only then, that she truly understood. I guess if you have the right message (which includes the right offer and the right product), it really doesn’t matter what your site looks like.

5 Things Customers Really Do Care About (and not one of them has to do with pretty designs)

1. A solid entry page.
This is a huge determinate of your online success and really sets the tone for your overall site conversion. The rule of thumb for entry pages is to change them based on your user traffic – look at how many days it takes for your user to repeat (in other words, visit your site again) and change your entry page in half that time.

For example, if your typical user repeats in six days, change the page in three. The changes don’t need to be major, they just need to be in the top of the middle and right-hand columns and enough to make the user take notice.

2. Navigation that works.
Navigation is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You get what I give you. If I don’t give it to you, you don’t get it. If you don’t see it, it doesn’t exist.

Users never talk about searching for something, they talk about finding what they want. Three-tiered navigation tends to work best. The top navigation serves as the action bar, the left-hand serves as the index and the bottom is a repeat of the top (primarily for your more sophisticated users.) There’s no such thing as right-hand navigation. Instead the right-hand serves as the “save column” – it’s the last stop a user will look before they leave your site so you need to do everything in your power using plugs (non-animated banners) and “stickies” (recently viewed items, for instance) to get them back into your site.

3. The perfect checkout.
There are many mysteries in life, how to create the ideal checkout is not one of them. There is a magic formula that everyone should follow. It’s a five-step checkout that includes Welcome (an absolute must have), Bill-To, Ship-To, Payment and Delivery Options and the Confirmation. (Your View Cart page is separate from checkout.) After you master it (meaning you know exactly where and when your users abandon), you can move to a single-step checkout but you shouldn’t do it before then.

4. A trigger e-mail program.
All e-mails are not created equally. Trigger e-mails, aka Good Dog e-mails, go out to users after they perform specific actions. They’re typically known for thank you’s and confirmations but there’s a whole level of triggers beyond that for things like abandoned carts, failed searches, site exits, EBOPP’s (e-mails based on past purchases), EBOSI’s (e-mails based on selected interests) and many others. Triggers typically have much better deliverability and drastically-increased conversion than thrusts e-mails.

5. Easy ways to find you.
Technically this shouldn’t have been last, it should have been first because if your users can’t find you all of the above is moot. It goes without saying that you need to be well-ranked in search engines, directories, and alternates (things like price comparison engines). For those of you who are only doing PPC and not worrying at all about the others, you should take a cold, hard look at your traffic driving strategies. Organic rankings are incredibly important and should not be treated like a red-headed stepchild. Same with data feeds.

6. BONUS: Evidence.
Users go online for three reasons: speed (we think it’s faster); self service (we think we can track our packages at fedex.com better than someone who has worked at FedEx for 20 years), and to collect evidence (we want to know that there are other people just like us or who we aspire to be). As internet shopping becomes more and more sophisticated, evidence becomes increasingly important. From a user’s perspective, evidence is user reviews, bestseller’s lists and bursts, polls and surveys, testimonials, lifestyle pictures of people, ask the experts and so on. (Evidence should not be confused with Social Media. Social Media has some evidence-type things but they are different in that “evidence” takes place on your site and your site alone.