Get Me Some More Dolphins!

I have spent some time during the last day or two looking at websites to get ideas for the new design for my own site. I’d like to say I was bursting with inspiration after this task and I’d also like to say I am stunningly handsome with the body that Zeus would kill for and the wit and wisdom that would have had Oscar Wilde sobbing with shame, but neither would be very accurate.

 

I know I am stepping onto thin ice here because I am about to, if not attack, then certainly poke gently with a pointy stick, my own profession.

 

It seems to me that a lot of life coaches seem to believe to be a successful life coach you have to have a website that contains several of the following:

 

A picture of a sunset/sunrise
Ads sponsored by Google
A soft focus portrait or other picture
A picture of a mountain
Poor optimization
A 5 page deep site map that means nothing to anybody other than Google
Testimonials by people with no names that live nowhere
A dolphin
A blog that hasn’t been added to since August
Famous quotes sprinkled liberally round the site
A hundred different links for every Blog reader under the sun but no way to contact the coach
A testimonial page with only one or two testimonials on it  - that’s reassuring!
Cliches
Untagged pages including the home page whilst paying for Google PPC
A picture of a starfish
Terribly worded language patterns designed to influence but more likely to cause uncontrollable laughter.
A picture of somebody jumping for joy

 

I could go on but there’s not really much point. I am guilty of at least one of the above but I was stunned at how bad most of the sites were I looked at. On the whole they tended to be unattractive with no real call to action and waaaaay too much information on the home pages. 

 

I have had this belief for some while that because Life Coaching is unregulated (a mistake in my opinion) that people drift into it as a job but approach it more like a ‘hobby’ They have probably been told by friends or family members that they are great listeners and they have helped people in the past so hey, why not set up as a personal coach, right? The overheads if you are a telephone coach are low and it can help bring in a few $’s.

 

This approach is then carried over to the marketing of the business and they design or have designed, a website that is set up to their tastes and what they think a life coaches site should look like. A quick trawl of the Internet confirms their belief that they are short in the dolphin department and could do with another starfish or two. So the belief is perpetuated that this is what a site for a life coach should look like and few stop to ask, “Will it work though, will it make the phone ring?”

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