Seven deadly sins: Pride (hubris)

I'm up to the last of the seven deadly sins -- or seven deadly *virtues*, as I've renamed some of them. I'm finished with sin after this. Mind you, this IS the Big Daddy of them all -- pride.

How can pride affect your layout? Easily. Think about your product or services for a minute. You're proud of it -- justifiably so, I hope -- and you want to communicate that pride to your prospects. So you talk about your features. Your company has been operational for 15 years. Yours has the largest market share in a particular area. There are lots of photos of you and your staff with beaming smiles all over your faces, etc...

Let me be blunt here: as the old saying goes, "me, me, me is dull, dull, dull". And it is dull. Your prospects don't care about you or your company; they only care about what you can offer them. I can't say this enough.

There's a utility company in my city that insists on sending me bulletins with every bill. Glossy (and expensive!) page after glossy page of smiling employees working on Very Important Projects and pretty graphs and pie charts. Truth be told, I don't care. If one morning, I wake up and my hot water system is not working, I will care. I will care a lot. I will care a lot more than the utility company would like. But until then, these bulletins are totally irrelevant to me, and go straight to my recycling bin.

Two magic words are useful here: "which means". For example, "we are the largest retailer of [whatever] in [area], which means we have a lot of outlets there, making it more convenient for you." It's really all about the customer. The difference is between talking about features, and talking about benefits. You always want to promote benefits to the customer.

So swallow your pride when you do your layout, scrap the irrelevant material -- which means that you'll have more interested prospects, and more money in your pocket.

See, it's not that hard. :-D