All too often, I come across nice looking adult websites which clearly show evidence of design and marketing talent, yet miss the mark completely. Why? Because the designer is not building it for the surfer.All too often, I come across nice looking adult websites which clearly show evidence of design and marketing talent, yet miss the mark completely. Why? Because the designer is not building it for the surfer.

It’s really quite simple: design what you’d want to see as a surfer. Consider handy sites like Google or Yahoo! — they’re easy to use, load very quickly, and give what you want with a minimum of fuss. Now imagine designing a site like Google. It’s not a very exciting prospect, is it? The temptation to continue the design beyond its minimum design goal is strong. I bet most of the designers reading this article have some ideas about how they’d like Google.com to look. Sure, the site’s not pretty, but it’s obviously very effective!

Cool, so I just invented some design terminology. Sounds good to me: the minimum design goal is achieving the result you want with an absolute minimum of design. Or put another way, you’re in the business of giving a certain (not too much, not too little) adult content to your surfer. If you’re operating a free site (and there’s a good statistical chance that you are) you want to offer just enough to tantalize the surfer, but not satisfy them. Furthermore, you must make it clear that for the surfer to satisfy his/her urge, clicking on a sponsor banner is the way to go.

Now, consider for a moment the ‘standard’ free site design – some pictures and maybe a video or two slammed together with some sponsor banners flying on the top and bottom of the page. Now, imagine that you’re the surfer looking at this site. Is it obvious to you that the sponsor banners will take you to a location where you’ll get better quality content in higher quantities? I’d say, chances are, you won’t make this logical deduction. Therefore, I advocate making a personal testimonial for your sponsor’s site. For example: “Webmaster note: my favorite site on the internet is SexCamLive.com. The hottest 18-19 year old girls!” Imagine seeing this on our hypothetical site – that’d likely get your attention above any banner, wouldn’t it? I say it would. If you can apply this thinking to your entire free site, it will probably be much more effective at moving inbound traffic back out to your sponsors – where it can make you money.

Also ponder how many elements on your free site actually contribute to your minimum design goal. You say: “Oz, hold on a second… I don’t even know what my minimum design goal is!” To which I reply: “Your minimum design goal is to send the maximum number of unforced hits outbound from your site.”