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Avoid
Common Site Design Mistakes
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With millions of Web sites just a click away, online visitors have little tolerance for mistakes in site design, content and ease of use, such as slowly-loading pages, error messages and hard-to-find help buttons. Yet, a small handful of mistakes are still common, even among veteran Web designers. It's one thing to put up a Web page, but building a functional, user-friendly site that meets your customers' needs and achieves business goals is quite another. There's only a smattering of Web sites that simultaneously attract visitors, keep them interested on site, and build relationships that pull visitors back time and again. Web design master Jim Daniels of JDD Publishing (http://bizweb2000.com), whose company views thousands of sites each month, says that even the most interesting and informational sites are hindered by poor construction. "We've found that while the content of many sites is excellent, their design often makes them difficult to use," Daniels notes. One good general rule is to keep it simple. "If you want your site to produce an income, there are many things you can do to help make it profitable. But, often it's the things you don't do that have even more impact," says Denver-based Web designer Anne Goodwin of Anne Goodwin Design (http://www.webdogged.com). The key to creating a smart site is mapping out a strategy well before creating a design. Ask yourself what the site's purpose is. Once that's been decided, it's on to good design, content, maintenance and smooth navigation. "Developing, growing and maintaining a site involves a great deal of effort," explains Kenneth G. Jarvis, a CPA in Sarasota, FL who operates his own site, called cpadvantage.com. "However, by avoiding site design mistakes, the amount of effort expended will be significantly less." Design mistakes Some design mistakes fall into the category of basic page layout problems, such as unreadable type, not enough white space, too much glitz (animated spinning images, midi files, drop shadows), lack of proofreading (misspellings, typos, bad grammar), poor use of color, and busy backgrounds. Easy site navigation is crucial to success. If visitors are easily "lost" while browsing a site, they'll quickly click away and very often not return. "If it's an ordeal to visit your page, people won't!" Goodwin says. "Don't assume that users know as much about your site as you do. They need support in the form of a strong sense of structure and place." She recommends providing a site map, as well as a good search feature. Other design mistakes are specific to the technology behind the Web. One common problem comes when site designers don't take browser compatibility issues into account. "What you see is not always what you get," Jarvis says. "All browsers are not created equal...and, because of the vast array of systems and browsers used, there's a likelihood that what one visitor sees on their screen will not be the same on another user's screen." Another standard technical problem is poor use of frames. "Frames confuse and frustrate visitors and take longer to load…never mind that frame based sites are difficult to design and manage, and some older browsers don't support them," notes Jake Richter, author of the e-magazine Richter Scale Take care that your graphics files aren't too large. "It doesn't matter how wonderful the 85K graphic you created looks when a visitor, bored while waiting for it to load, clicks away and moves on," says Webmaster Scott Evans, a partner in the Orland Park, IL web design and hosting firm Backslash.com (www.bslash.com). Don't use "Under Construction" signs, a sure sign of an amateurishly-run Web business. Web sites are perpetually under construction. If the page is not ready, do not post it to the Web server. Putting up this type of sign is annoying to visitors. And don't pounce on visitors with loud music. A sudden audio burst can be unsettling for a visitor. "If it is appropriate to provide music, then give your visitor the choice of whether or not they want to hear the music with a control that is clearly visible," Jarvis recommends. Content and maintenance Poor design isn't the only potential pitfall inexperienced site managers face, of course. Another surefire way to failure is to put up a site with little or no good content. "If it has no content, it has no value," says Goodwin. "Creating good content is one thing, but the great challenge lies in continually updating and maintaining content, design and technology." For one thing, be sure and provide contact information. It's amazing how often sites don't take this basic step. "You would think that providing information such as an email address or phone number would be a given," Goodwin says. "At a minimum, give users a way of retrieving contact information on every single Web page." Also, make sure the content you provide is credible. "A Web site should be more than another unsubstantiated source of information. Designers should include their names and credentials on their site, and provide the source materials and raw data to justify any conclusions they may make," Jarvis says. To keep it worth visiting, meanwhile, your site must always keep its links and infrastructure up to date. Keeping links current, removing outdated information and making sure the site is functioning properly are all critical to success, says Daniels. Many fledgling e-businesses post a bunch of material to their site and leave it there indefinitely, forgetting that links go stale and customer interests change. "Maintaining your site is an on-going process," Daniels says. "Not only should you continually update your listing with search engines but you should also make the appropriate revisions to your site which include design updates," he advises. As you maintain your site, meanwhile, bear in mind that you may need to re-do it. Solicit customer feedback in your site's text, and make a firm resolve to respond to that feedback. Responding to feedback helps build strong customer relationships and boosts sales, experts note. Even when your site is 'done' and you're confident it's working well, it's not time to rest. There are always new designs and technologies to try, and new tools and browsers for the beginner to use effectively. Avoiding mistakes is a matter of continually leaning, updating and improving your Web site. ABOUT THE AUTHOR
What Do Web Site Visitors Really Want Most?
What do your Web site visitors really want most? If you've been operating your site for any length of time, you know that the majority of visitors want certain basics. These include:
Now a survey from the Boston Consulting Group, published in American Demographics (August 2000, p. 46), offers quantitative data on what site visitors want and what ticks them off. Here are some of the survey findings:
The Need for Speed In the old days, we cooked dinner in the oven and a baked potato took 45 minutes. Now we put a Lean Cuisine® dinner in the microwave and tap our foot impatiently during the 60 seconds it takes to get the meal ready. In today's nanosecond society, people have no patience to wait for anything, and that includes downloading web pages. If your site is slow, visitors will quickly abandon them for faster sites. So, don't overdesign your Web site. The more graphics you put into it, the slower the pages download to the viewer. Be selective as to what additional graphics or animations you include -- for example, you wouldn't want to lose visitors to a highly detailed but marginally impactful photograph on your home page. According to Zona Research, Web pages take anywhere from 3 to 11 seconds to download, depending on the users modem and Internet connection. The average viewer will "bail out" -- click off the site onto another -- if a page takes more than 8 seconds to download. Zona estimates these bail-outs cost e-businesses $4.35 billion annually in revenue lost from people who would have otherwise made purchases. Speed makes the difference; one site decreased bail-out rate from 30 percent to 8 percent just by reducing its download time by 1 second per page. One study found that 84 percent of Web sites examined downloaded too slowly. Freebie Frenzy Despite the rise in e-commerce, the culture of the Internet is rooted in free and open exchange of ideas and information without payment. This continues today as Internet users expect and demand free stuff -- and lots of it -- on the sites they visit. My kids love Cartoon Network and Nickelodeon. They frequently visit both sites, where they can play -- to their hearts content -- cool free computer games that rival the cartridges they pay to rent or buy. These sites also sponsor frequent contests with big attractive prizes. A new report from the Annenberg Public Policy Center shows that approximately one out of five kids age 10 to 17 would happily provide free personal information -- including their name and address -- to their favorite Web sites in exchange for a free gift of an undisclosed amount. If you offer a gift valued at $100, nearly half the kids will share private data with you. The biggest giveaway on the Internet, even more so than prizes and cash, is content -- free information on topics ranging from aromatherapy to zoology. Marketers are wrestling with the challenge of how to make money giving away information, so that people who come to the site for the freebies stay to make a purchase. Best-selling horror writer Stephen King, who has sold two works of fiction on the Internet (Riding the Bullet and The Plant) recently commented, "Internet users see the Internet as a great big candy store, and they have to be made to realize that not all the candy is free." IBM CEO Lou Gerstner Jr. says, "The Internet is about business, not browsing; and about conducting real commerce, not merely accessing a bottomless reservoir of content." Don't Just Tell 'Em -- Sell 'Em Whatever you offer your visitors, present it in a Web site that's easy on the eye and enticing to read. Everything -- pictures, words, buttons, functions -- should be designed to give customers what they need and want. "Go back to the roots of the product or service being offered," says Web copywriter Scott T. Smith. "Why does it exist in today's world, and why does your company sell it?" A good Web site communicates this proposition and the product benefits to the visitors. Ivan Levison, another first-rate Web copywriter, says many sites commit the deadly sin of being flat, sober, and boring, because they think Internet users are adverse to being sold. He advises his clients to make their Web sites lively and exciting. "The Web today is a text-based medium and you've got to quickly capture the readers interest and attention," says Levison. "You have to establish a relationship with the reader and therefore write with energy, enthusiasm and personality." One way to do this, says Smith, is to stress benefits instead of features in product descriptions. The benefits should be linked to the features that enable the product to deliver the benefit to the user. "A benefit is anything that will make a customer's life better by using your product or service," explains Smith. Smith also recommends giving Web site visitors an incentive to order now, from the Web site. This could be a limited-time offer, free shipping and handling, a special bonus gift, or an extended warranty. Discounts also work. Tell online shoppers that you offer them lower prices than you do through offline channels of distribution. Explain the rationale: Doing business online reduces your costs, and you pass on some of the savings to the customer as lower prices. Its a win-win situation. ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
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