For a small startup company like, TechDiversions.com, we’ve learned something immensely useful - it’s not always wise to mimic your competition when designing a front-page layout for your website. This is especially true when your competition is highly brick & morter based while you’re purely an online entity.

For instance, a few of our competing sites have very un-friendly front page designs when it comes to looking at the site from the perspective of a google, yahoo or msn web crawler. Yet, they have a high page rank! Why? Because gamers around the world link to them because they know the name, the company and might even be in an affiliate program with them.

For a site startup, the front page needs to be more than a few pictures and a splattering of text. It needs to call your customers to action, show them why they want to use your site (testimonials for instance) and have a clean sales copy to let them know what you are all about. Larger companies (for example wal-mart) do not need this type of activity because they’re well established. Let’s face it, if wal-marts homepage was purely flash based or was just a big picture of a goat they’d still get millions of hits per day.

You want to build a web presence? Don’t copy them - beat them; they’re site designs can be as bad or misguided because they know they’re only getting roughly 5% of their sales to come from the website (or so some say, it may be less). Drive by a walmart and count everyone that goes in and out of the store for an hour; you’ll tire quickly. Considering the amount of humans moving in and out of that store to those on the web, the brick & morter store is above and beyond that of their site. So, dressing up the store to be clean and tidy with a “nice design” is more important than their website design!

Look to sites that are highly web based, newegg.com for example or amazon.com. They strive to keep their computer savvy friends happy and allow for navigation that gets customers to the product and to the credit card screen in the least amount of clicks possible. This is your goal as well. You want to make sales, right?

Consider all your options, internet marketing techniques and whatever you do, don’t copy your competition unless they too are striving for a huge Internet market. They’re going to have an instant audience by their name alone - you are not.