It’s pouring rain outside in Hangzhou, China right now. Actually, the entire southeast region of the country is experiencing some serious storm activity, which has shut down quite a few places for a few days now. That’s not always a good thing for everybody, but for me, this kind of weather makes a perfect excuse to not go anywhere, and to actually spend some time doing one of my favorite things: casually surfing the Internet, so I can look at sites for their content and build quality, as well as check out their designs and user functionality. I know, it’s a little geeky, and to be honest I have been spending a fair amount of time watching the World Cup football matches (oops, didn’t I mean soccer?) on the telly, too… but contrary to what logic might tell you, the sheer volume of websites out there makes it a challenge to discern the difference between them all. It’s amazing to see how many sites do something, and do it badly. It also amazes me to see how incredibly well some other sites deliver their value message, and how nobody else seems to be interested in applying these techniques to their own web site designs.

Now this story is for wholesalers, so I’m not going to turn it into Website Design 101, because that would require a lot of irrelevant information that you can’t use right now… instead, I’m just going to point out one of the things I see on a daily basis when I visit wholesale and retail sites, and I’ll even refer to our own humble TopTenWholesale.com site, to help illustrate things further. In fact, we’ll even go to one of the most commonly-visited pages, Wholesale Products, to show you what I mean.

Just a small sample of what’s on the page. Notice the small and fast-loading graphics with minimal text to get the point across.

The biggest point we can make today is: creating a product-oriented page that has just about 100% functionality, and no extra stuff that takes away from the user’s experience. This will come as a blow to some egos, but it needs to be said. Yes, putting a huge graphic of your warehouse mascot or awesome company logo might be cute, but if it takes nine seconds to download, and crowds everything else out from the rest of the visible area of the user’s screen… it’s hasta la vista, baby! Studies have shown that busy people browsing content won’t even use the little wheel on the mouse to scroll down the page, if it looks like they’re going to need a search party to find what they came looking for. Same goes for the huge intro screen with the professionally rendered animations and Flash sequences. Too long to see what I want? Too bad, I’m outta here.

Good site, and my eye goes right to the search box as soon as the page loads. There’s even a video to the right, but it doesn’t interfere with my mission, even if the page gets clipped.

Another site I like is Dollar Days, because they’ve really mastered the art of creating a no-nonsense page. Notice the great selection of tiny images that effectively and efficiently put visitors on the right path? The company’s logo is right up at the top, in the style of a banner, so it keeps your eyes where they need to be: on the products. I don’t know about you, but I happen to have a nice, clear, and very bright 22” LCD monitor on my office desk, so I can see everything I need to see on almost every web page I visit without ever scrolling down. However… I use the dinky little 12” screen on my netbook 80% of the time. It’s just the most convenient one for me, and I noticed that a lot of other people I work with and meet on a daily basis use similar ones. That means most of the web pages are clipped for them too, and the most important stuff should probably be on the upper left part of your page, if you want it to be seen by all.

Hopefully this gives you the inspiration to take a good hard look at your own site again, only without being biased towards the content you’re already familiar with, and looking at it through the eyes of a busy first-time visitor with no time to play around. You might be disappointed with what you discover at first, but the good news is that web pages can be tweaked to work better in an instant. Good luck, and remember to give those great wholesale products the attention they deserve!