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What Makes a Great Business Website?
The objective of this part of the program was to have participants leave the room with an idea of how to evaluate and improve your Web site, based on what we know from usability research.
Here's how I set out to achieve that goal. I began with an overview of how to get good Web site advice and why so much of it is bad. We moved from there to looking at the general criteria for great business Web sites. Following that, we went through ten things to evaluate on your Web site, to determine how good it really is.
There's also a link to a Special Resource Page with links to Resources for Web Site Improvement.
We'll begin with the overview. There are four basic things we want to consider in this section.
There are an awful lot of ways you can get advice on your Web site. You can talk to the people seated on either side of you. Extend that by talking to the folks in front of you or behind you. Youāll get lots of opinions, but they may not be so very informed. You can also read books or talk to "experts.%
Even so, you may not have a good idea of whether or not you're getting really good advice. You'd be in the same situation as folks in the mid 19th Century, who read a book called "The New Emigrantsā Guide to Oregon and Californiaä by Lansford Hastings. The book was one of the most popular books of its time, and it described how to get from the East to the Oregon and California territories, along with what you'd find there.
The only problem with Hastingsā book was that it wasn't accurate. Now, normally, we wouldn't think much about the quality of a book published over a hundred years ago except for one of the people who read it. His name was Donner. That's Donner as in Jakob Donner. That's Donner as in Donner Party.
The significance of Hastingsā book was that it was one of the things that Jakob Donner relied on, and one of the reasons why he wound up in a mountain pass with the snow all around and not enough food. The consequences for you might not be as bad as they were for Donner and his party, but they can be pretty substantial in terms of time and money.
What went wrong for Donner? It wasn't that there wasn't good advice around. There were people at the base of the Sierras who knew the territory and had been over the mountain. Jakob chose not to listen to them. There were other sources and maps available besides the Hastings book. But Donner relied on the Hastings book.
Consultants like me bring certain things to the party when we presume to give you advice on what to do with your Web site. Essentially, we're like guides in a new territory. And there are essentially three ways that we, and you, can learn about that territory.
You can travel the route. If you've done a Web site before and you've tracked it against your objectives, youāll have a pretty good idea of some things that you want to do differently. Youāll know some things that work -- and that don't.
Some of us on the consulting side have not just traveled the route with our own businesses, but we've led expeditions. In other words, we've helped our client navigate the territory by working on their sites.
Finally, you can learn about the territory by studying the documents. You can look at the maps and the diaries of travelers who've been there before you, and the satellite imagery.
To be effective in learning the territory, you need to do all of these things. The very best folks coming with advice on what to do with your Web site bring all three kinds.
We've done something ourselves and have Web sites that we can point to as examples. We've worked with clients of different kinds, in my case both speaking clients and consulting clients. And, we've both done and looked at the research. There's a lot of good usability research that tells us what visitors want and don't want in a site.
Usability Web Sites
That's what I'm bringing to the party. I've had a Web site for my business, and I've tracked what works and what doesn't. I've done the same for several of my clients and audiences. And I spend a lot of time studying the research. That's what this program is based on -- research into what works and what doesn't.
If you'd like to review some of this research yourself, let me suggest two sites.
Jakob Nielsen is probabaly the best known of the writers on usability. He's got great credentials. Back when he worked for Sun Microsystems, Jakob was responsible for producing a site for engineers that consistently rated highest with that working group. He's since left Sun and gone into consulting and authoring on his own.
Jakob's site reflects his research, passions, and opinions. It's called useit.com. If you're going to read anything about usability, this is the best place to start because everybody else takes note of Jakob and his work. You'll also find Jakob's site listed among the Web Site Improvement Resources.
For a broader range of writers and research, there's an excellent site by Keith Instone called UsableWeb. Instone has done an excellent job of creating pointers to several usability experts and artfully classifying them.
So, what does the research tell us?
My own experience and research on my own sites and those of my clients, as well as the research of others that I've looked at, tells me that effective business Web sites do three things.
Effective business Web sites help achieve business objectives. Effective business Web sites give visitors what they want. Effective business Web sites use technology wisely, beginning with conversational design.
Effective business Web sites help achieve business objectives. In order to do this, you actually have to have objectives. Those are clear, measurable statements about what you want your site to achieve. They can relate to increasing revenue or decreasing expenses. Those are the kinds of objectives that measure hard, bottom line results. But they can also look at other things that happen in your business that simply make things work better. Those often have revenue producing or cost-cutting effects, but they aren't as easy to measure in dollars.
Great business Web sites give visitors what they want. And they tell us what they want through their response to surveys and their actual behavior.
Visitors want lots of relevant information that's easy to find and easy to use. Let's look at those one at a time.
Relevant information is information that solves a problem or answers a question for a visitor to your site. Usability research is very clear that visitors do not come to most business Web sites to be entertained. They come to solve a problem or answer a question. To the extent that you help them do that, you will be more successful.
They want those answers and that information to be easy to find and use. That means that your site, if it's going to be effective, should have features such as search engines that help people find their way around and that help them achieve their objectives.
Some of this you don't need special research to figure out. You already know the questions that people ask, and the problems they want to solve when they contact you on the phone or by physical mail. That's the sort of thing that you build your site around. You also have a pretty good idea of how to create an effective information sharing environment.
Effective business websites use technology wisely.
To make things easy to find and use and to make the site experience pleasant, you need to use technology wisely. Start by figuring that every piece of technology and every feature that you put on your site should have a specific purpose that helps you achieve your business objectives and help your visitors achieve theirs. If it doesn't do that, it probably shouldn't be there, because it's taking up valuable bandwidth and having a negative effect on visitor experience.
The technology that you use should be as transparent as possible. Transparent technology is technology that doesn't require lots of explanation. People should be able to find their way around your site and use the features that are there without any special instruction, and certainly without a lot of person-to-person hand holding.
Finally, the technology that you put on your site should be usable by most of your visitors. Remember that most of your visitors aren't people with lots of technical genius, super computers, and first-rate connections. The vast majority of them are using a dial-up connection and figuring things out as they
go.
Websites are Like Conversations
Most of the material on designing Web sites would lead you to believe that Web sites are very much like brochures. They're not. Instead, most effective business Web sites are a lot like a conversation. Folks show up seeking one bit of information. That leads them to ask other questions and request other information. When they get that information, it leads them to more information. The Web site provides them with the kind of dialog that's more like the conversation you'd have with them on the phone than it is like what happens when they read a brochure.
If your site meets these criteria, it will be a great one. But so far we've been kind of general. I've given you the principles. Now we need to look at ten specific things that you should evaluate when you go back and look at your Web site.
You don't just want to know what makes a great Web site. You want to know how good your Web site is.
I've identified ten dimensions of your Web site that you can evaluate to determine just how good your site is. For each one, Iāll give you some idea of why it's important and how to judge it. Then Iāll give you a
relative point value.
The point values vary from five to twenty. Added together, they give a total possible score of one hundred points.
Here are the ten in the order I've presented them.
You can use the links above to jump to any one and do your evaluation, or you can go through them in sequence. If you're doing that, start by clicking here.
When you're done with the individual items, visit the Evaluation Page. You'll also find a page of Web Improvement Resources to help you improve your site.
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