Quote:
Originally Posted by inthecrack
Addressing the join link issue that people seem to be critiquing..... I believe that it is both discrete and yet obvious enough that people will notice it without being annoyed by obnoxious join graphics and blind links. Actually that's my biggest peeve with most membership sites. It seems that literally everything you click on sends you straight to the join page instead of what you were hoping to see when you clicked on whatever it was that caught your eye. When I see stuff like that I also cannot help but wonder what else they might try to trick me into once I have bought the membership and will the site be full of spam advertising and blind redirects. I think people don't have to be force feed the join page in order to find the incentive to buy. That only gets in the way of what really sells people on the site which is quality content.
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You don't have to come across like a sleazy porn slinger by using a call to action button on your site (without scrolling).
Making it frustrating to find the main thing you want people to do is certainly unwise.
At the absolute very very least, you should attempt to approve or disprove your theory by doing A/B tests. A being your current design, and B being your current design + a large easy to see join button on every page. (top right corner imho).
I think you'll find you make more money with B.
You could do this easily with a third party solution like Optimizely (
https://www.optimizely.com/ab-testing) and I'm sure there's many more.
Also, I see that as a free user I can see the size of the files and attempt to download them, but the download button doesn't function. This is a great opportunity to remind people that you're a membership based paysite that relies on its users to buy memberships. A little unobtrusive pop-up button could appear once per session when people click that download button, and provide a link to your join form. Without it, people aren't sure if your site is just broken or what. They may not understand your business model at that point. It just feels like it doesn't work. So that's bad user experience just as much as hitting them with a little popup is. Popup is a dirty word, it's just a little notification, could be very small on one line of text.