Is Your Website Doing a Bridget Jones?

I have conducted hundreds of website reviews in my career.

The ones I love the most, because they’re the easiest to fix are the ones that do what I call “the Bridget Jones”.

It overshares like a self-doubting London publicity assistant after 4 glasses of wine. It’s cluttered, a bit frantic, and very meandering. It narrates its internal anxiety in the form of 1,200-word "About" pages and endless paragraphs of words, the apparent purpose of which is to justify its existence.

It thinks that if it just gives you enough information, you’ll eventually like it.

What it fails to appreciate is that information alone will not persuade someone to buy from you. In fact, it often has the opposite effect.

When you overwhelm your visitor with every tiny detail of your process, you aren’t being "helpful." You’re making them work too hard.

They’re on your site to solve a problem. Not read an essay.

If you want your website to be more persuasive, you need to think less like Bridget Jones and more like Miranda Priestly, the terrifyingly efficient Editor-In-Chief from The Devil Wears Prada.

Miranda doesn’t overshare. She is:

When Miranda speaks, people don't just "get information." They get direction.