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Yahoo!, the figures indicate, is the most
popular site on the Internet. Why?
A reason could be that it was among the first to provide
a search engine, where many people start their exploration
of the World Wide Web. Another reason could be that it
has effectively marketed its name.
But the most obvious reason, suggests
Seth Godin, who heads direct marketing for Yahoo!,
is that it is simple
to use. "Do you know of anyone with a complex Web
site who is doing better than a company with a simple
one?" Godin asks.
When Web developers do not receive enough hits to their
site, they often respond by making it more complex or
larger. That is the wrong answer. Usually they need to
work at making it effortless to use, easy to read and
simple to understand.
What’s in
it for me?
How do you achieve this? You tell users in clear and
unambiguous messages immediately what your site will
do for them.
Says direct marketing guru Ray Considine
of New York, "Customers
want to know, What’s in it for me?"
He uses the example of staples.com which asks these
questions on its front page: Want to take a look around?
Kind of know what you want? Know exactly what you want?
Asks Considine, "Is that not
what the salesperson would say?"
Most initial visitors to your site
don’t want
to know when your company was founded, where it is situated
or how big it is. They don’t want to see a picture
of the president and CEO. They don’t want to know
what your mission statement is.
They do want to know what your Web site is going to
do for them. The answer: Make sure that it does. Say
on the front page what is in it for them. If you have
nothing to offer them, go back to the drawing board.
"Content still is key", says Eva
Chiu of InfoAdvantage Internet consultants. "What we have found from our
experience is that the more useful content a site provides,
the more likely it will be successful. The key is useful
content. Think about your target audience, what will
be most useful to help them meet their objectives?"
"They may be looking for a product,
finding the right bed-and-breakfast, identifying the
right keynote
speaker for a conference, or researching the best solutions
for their home mortgage. Help them evaluate what you
offer, provide the information for them to appreciate
the superiority and quality of your products and services,
and give them the tools to be educated customers. Think
from the perspective of your customer."
Designers should be creating pages "outside in" suggests
Considine. "The concept implies that you are looking
from the outside, considering what your customers want,
and then designing your pages according to their needs
and wants."
He uses the example of eToys, which he says is effective
in following that concept by offering customers the opportunity
to find quickly and easily what they want.
Others, he says, design sites "inside in." That
is the wrong way to do it. "It says this is the
way we organize our store, not this is the way our customers
would like to see things," observes Considine.
"We should not be designing
pages for the convenience of our company, for our accountants
or our mail room
staff. We are trying to make it easy to do business with
us. You should seek to reduce all the barriers that keep
people from ordering."
"Let’s not try to impress somebody, let’s
make it successful."
Make yourself a customer
Turn yourself into a customer, suggests Daniel deMoulin,
new media director at Rosen/Brown Direct of Portland,
Ore. Instead of looking at your site as its creator
or its manager, look at it from the viewpoint of someone
who will use it.
Ask yourself three questions that your
customers will ask about your site, deMoulin suggests.
- What does it do?
- What does it mean to me?
- What am I going to do about it?
DeMoulin advises, too, that you try to find out as much
about your customers as you can. You can do this through
surveys or an understanding you already have of existing
customers.
Here are several guidelines to help structure your thinking
as you set about designing a site.
Effective sites are easy to navigate
People are busy. Time is a premium for almost everyone
these days. So if you can save people time by making
your site easy to get through you will attract more
visitors. For most users, the Internet is still excruciatingly
slow. Anything you can do to speed up their experience
while visiting your site will be appreciated.
"Why is America Online so successful?" asks
Tim Knowlton of Wells Fargo Bank. "It is really
easy to use. You just put in a CD and next thing you
are shopping."
Many sites that began as bright and flashy look-at-me-and-how-clever-I-am
places have now been toned down. Plain vanilla has become
almost a standard on the Internet. Look at popular sites
such as Yahoo!, Netscape, Go2net and Infoseek and soon
you will notice a surprising similarity. They are all
basic in design, short on graphics and filled with points
on which to click. It is no coincidence that they all
look so alike. Their designers are finding what works.
Effective sites contain text that is easy to read
A crucial aspect of designing a site that is simple means
creating one that is easy to understand and easy to
read.
Editors in other fields discovered many years ago that
simpler writing is better writing. Those who work on
the Internet should follow their lead and not try to
reinvent the wheel. For example, newspaper editors have
found that the simpler the headlines are to understand
the more effective they are. The same is true of the
writing in the newspaper. The easier it is to understand
the more people will read it.
Television editors try to attract your attention with
short statements. They screen only the best of the hundreds
of feet of video they have filmed. They do not screen
several minutes of video simply because they have taken
it. They choose the best and most effective.
Considine suggests you write copy
destined for use on the Internet in the way that you
talk. Simple, straightforward,
lucid copy that anyone can read and understand. "I
have a real problem with pages that are written by only
technical people," Considine says. "So many
descriptions on the Internet are technical descriptions.
For tech people that’s great, but for everyone
else the copy has to be real headline copy."
Tests have found that people scan rather than read text
on a computer screen. Short, pithy statements and bulleted
items work better than gray blocks of text. Divide up
your text with short paragraphs.
Effective sites load fast
Build your site not just to be simple to use and easy
to read but also to load quickly on to the user’s
screen. That means keeping any graphics you use as
slim as possible.
"You can put as many pretty graphics on it as you
like, but that does not mean they are going to wait to
get the message," says Khody Golshan, e-commerce
manager of Atrieva. Quick loading is particularly important
when you are trying to make a sale on the Internet. When
people buy on the Internet they generally want to do
so quickly and easily. After all, that is why they are
using the Internet; otherwise they might find it easier
and quicker to go to the store or to order on the telephone.
Adds Golshan, "Make sure it
gets to them fast. Direct them where you want them
to go. Remember that
you are completing the whole sales process online, from
pre-sale to sales."
Fast loading is important not just
in making sales but in conveying information, too.
When the people at fine.com
built a site for Nasdaq, the over-the-counter stock market,
they built it to load as fast as possible. "We have
tracked it from around the world to make sure it is loading
quickly," says company founder Dan Fine. "For
every icon, every page load, every piece of HTML, rapid
response is the important aspect.
"We have the site tracked against the competition
to make sure it is loading faster than anybody else’s
site."
You probably do need to use graphics,
otherwise your page will be too dull, but make sure
they are efficient
and slim so they load quickly. Some software programs,
such as Macromedia’s Fireworks and Adobe’s
ImageReady, allow you to "optimize" your graphics
so they are as small as possible while remaining crisp
and clear on the screen.
Effective sites are reliable
In addition to loading quickly, the site must be reliable.
You cannot afford to have the page become inaccessible
when too many people are trying to log on to it. So
make sure your host server can handle the number of
hits you anticipate.
"Once they start becoming successful, many companies
are not ready to handle the resulting load," explains
Fine. "The systems melt down because they don’t
have the proper architecture to handle it. Even the smaller
sites melt down. The reason is they have so much traffic
all at once. If you have a meltdown too many times the
user will become trained in an almost Pavlovian way and
not visit that site any longer because they become frustrated.
"We want to be reliable as well
as responsive. It has to be fast and it has to be reliable."
Effective sites have content that customers want to
read
This point sounds obvious. Surely you want content that
customers want to read, otherwise why would you put it
there? But do you know what your customers want? If so,
how do you know? Are you just guessing?
When designing the Nasdaq site, fine.com set up a series
of user tests to find out what individual investors wanted
on the site and how they wanted to see it.
They showed the investors — from novices to advanced
investors — a set of designs. The investors picked
the one they liked the best. The staff at fine.com went
back to the drawing boards and made sure the designs
were in line with what the investors had chosen. Then
they showed the changes to another group of investors.
Based on the reaction of the second group, fine.com made
changes. They then showed the changes to a third group.
They continued until they got it right.
After the redesign, the Nasdaq site went from 3.5 million
hits a day to 20 million hits a day today, Fine says.
Effective sites keep up with changing trends
In principle, it should not matter what the latest trend
is. Surely a Web site that is well designed, that gives
users what they want, that is easy to use, and that
loads quickly does not need to be changed just because
Web fashion trends are changing. Well, yes it does.
Fashion is fickle. Fashion is foolish. And fashion is
frivolous. But it also is fundamental to success. Web
designers need to be slaves to fashion, whether they
believe it is stupid or not.
Look at it this way. It makes no sense that at one time
wide ties are in or mini skirts are out. Each of those
fashions follows its own cycles. Wide ties were in decades
ago; ties became narrow and then they went back to being
wide again. Wide ties are no more practical than narrow
ties. It has nothing to do with anything except fashion.
But wear a wide tie when they are out and you risk looking
old-fashioned, out of touch and ignorant. The same is
true of mini skirts and long skirts.
So keep last year’s Web design and you are sunk.
It’s not that the site will be any less effective,
it’s simply that it will look out of date. And
in technology that is even more important than in the
world of clothing.
Effective sites are fully tested before they are launched
"
We test, test, test…" says Fine. "We
test whether it works with this browser or that browser.
We test its performance, its speed of loading. We ensure
it passes all these tests before we launch it. We don’t
want to put up something that will tarnish the image
of the company. If it is wrong, it will hurt our clients
and cost them money."
"How to turn dotCom into
dotCash™" is
a downloadable electronic book. Copyright Graham
Fysh, 1999.
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