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This is the support site for my program entitled, "Just How Good Is Your Website?ä that I delivered to the NAMM 2001 Summer Session in Anaheim, California on January 19, 2002. It was one of two program I did there. The other was called What's New in Small Store Websites
Before we get started --
Bookmark this page so you can get back to it easily.
This Support Website is design to cover the material I covered in the on-site program. You can go through it in the same order we did there. Or follow links to move around as your interest moves. If you get "lost" you can either use the back button to get back to a familiar place. Or use your bookmark to return to this page.
There are lots of links from this site to other sites and other pages on this site, so feel free to explore as your needs and interest dictate. And now · on with the show!!
There's a lot out there that's written about what makes a great Website. There are even magnificent award programs that list sites they consider "excellent.% Many of them remind me of one of the most popular books from the 19th Century.
The book was called "The New Emigrant's Guide to Oregon and California.% It was written by a fellow named Lansford Hastings. It was wildly popular. It told people all about Oregon and California and about how to get there. It described the routes and the equipment that you would need. Normally, we wouldn't be much concerned with a book this old, except for one of the people who happened to read it. His name was Jakob Donner.
That's Donner as in Donner Party. Actually, the book is one of the reasons that Jakob found himself up there on the mountain without having packed a lunch.
Donner relied on Hastingsā book. The only problem was that Hastingsā book was mostly wrong. It was written by someone who hadn't been there. He hadn't studied the territory. He hadn't even talked to folks who had made the trip to find out what worked and what didn't. So what he wrote, while compelling, was not only nonsense, but dangerous nonsense.
That's what a lot of books about great Websites are like. They are not only nonsense, they're dangerous nonsense. When you start evaluating the advice that people give you about what makes a great Website, I suggest you look at two things.
First, is the person who is talking to you someone who is actually been involved in some Web projects? That's a plus, especially if he or she has learned from those projects and can cite pieces of experience as examples.
You also want to know if they have researched what makes a good Website from the usersā point of view. Most of the time, that research comes under the heading of "usability research.%
You don't want to be like Jakob. He listened to one book. He didn't listen to other books written by people who'd been there. He didn't listen to the people who had been there and were giving him good advice, or to people who actually researched the route. He chose one source and it was the wrong one.
Here are my credentials. I've been on the Web myself since 1994. Because I had experience online and on the Web, I wound up getting asked to speak to groups about it and write some articles and books. To make that work, I needed to do research. I have also had several clients in the musical instruments business and elsewhere.
When I work with clients, we work on issues related to how you use the Net and the Web to build long-term competitive advantage and profitability. We look at delivering value to your customers and profit to your bottomline.
For the book and for my work with clients, I've needed to dig into the research that's been done on what makes an effective Website from both the business side and the visitors side. That's what this program is about.
I'm going to lay out for you ten dimensions of Website performance that my experience and research tell me are important for you to evaluate, in order to determine if your site is effective.
For each one of those, Iāll give you some idea of why this dimension matters and how to measure it, as well as some suggestions about how to improve your rating.
There's no magic scoring system here, but I suggest that you give yourself ten points on each one of the features I mention, which will give you a nice round total of a hundred if you score at the top on everything. No one does.
Here is my list of ten.
At the end of the program weāll also talk about some extra credit possibilities.
For now, though, let's get started with number one -- clear objectives.
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