| No. 08, September 2008 |
|
A Frontal Assault on Web Sites
I hope that we are all in accord that your Web sites are very important front-end marketing and sales tools. A Web site should serve as an effective way to deliver fundamental messages about what your company is selling. In 90% of the cases, people access Web sites in search of information. Initially, they do not read the content. They glance over the text of the Home page looking for material that is important for them. The main issue – from your perspective – is that they find the information they are looking for, and find it fast. Unfortunately, this is too often not the case. WEB SITE USABILITY There are four basic elements relevant to Web site usability.
Current Web writing and Web design, very often, do not support users in achieving their main goal – finding useful information as quickly as possible. Keeping this essential fact in mind, I will discuss bad practices in Web site development and provide a few sound ideas about how to improve usability. MULTIMEDIA GARBAGE Let’s start with those dreadfully time-consuming, brutally annoying, Flash introductions. I bet you all enjoy watching Flash count away the seconds as the totally irrelevant multimedia masterpiece loads. Adobe makes the bold statement that Flash “enables organizations and individuals to build and deliver great digital experiences to their end users”. That is certainly the case when the application is used for the purposes it was originally intended. There is a time and a place for everything and Flash can be a really exceptional tool if used properly. But when a guy is trying to access your Web site to locate the stuff he/she needs, a 40 or 50-second wait – for absolutely nothing – will rarely engender customer good will. If you want to see a really simple and effective use of Flash, go to www.designtop.com. This is Tamar Petler’s site and, not at all by chance, Tamar designed my Web site. So here is Rule number 1: the content of a Web site is much more important than pyrotechnics, accompanying dance music, fancy navigation tools, and other snazzy user interface devices. Make it simple. ROTTEN HOME PAGES The Most Fundamental Issue If visitors to your site do not glean the primary purpose of the site within the first 20 seconds of the visit – and if the site does not seem credible – they will exit before you can take a second deep breath. The quality of the content on a home page directly influences the users' evaluation of your dependability. Good content sets a positive tone that is carried through the whole site. Rule number 2: Your home page should be serious and to-the-point. Traffic Jams Remember our guy who is struggling to find that relevant information? An awful lot of folks seem to have ignored him when they designed their Web sites. Too many Home pages look like rush-hour traffic jams. They have bits and pieces of information scattered everywhere and are terribly crowded and terribly busy. Text scrolls up and down and across the page and the readers’ eyes spin like yoyos. Can you really figure out what amazing information that company is offering as the text wanders by? I am fully aware that Web developers will be taken aback by such statements, but these devices annoy the average visitor rather than draw them into the content. Rule number 3: Avoid fancy window dressing. Useless Pictures Pictures totally unrelated to content are another sore point. How many times have you seen images of a half-dozen smartly dressed people gawking at a 19-inch monitor? I bet you have never really given too much thought about what they are staring at. For reasons of puritanical modesty I will refrain from expanding on this point. Rule number 4: Use illustrations, but use them wisely. Simple is Beautiful Make sure your home page is clean and simple. Give a lucid introduction about what you are selling, or providing. Don’t be wordy. You cannot possibly push all the information into the Home page. Present your key messages so that the visitor knows what you are offering. Make very sure that users will not waste time struggling with a confusing and crowded layout. There are a slew of ways to enhance the readability of your Home page:
Rule number 5: Make very sure your designer knows what he/she is doing. Don’t trust them for a moment. NEVER-ENDING SCROLLING Users do not like long pages involving endless scrolling. They get lost in the middle. People like topically structured chunks of text, with hyperlinks leading to parallel sections (PREVIOUS and NEXT hyperlink buttons), or subordinate information (accessed via appropriately-named hyperlinks). Drilling down to more detailed text, via hyperlinks, is appreciated as the reader can decide if he/she wants to read on or not, after having taken in a particular topic. If possible, limit a page to a single screen. In other words, avoid scrolling altogether. This is a hefty task to fulfill but readers find it to be the most satisfactory reading experience. Rule number 6: Think incrementally when you are planning the structure of your site. THE LANGAGE TO USE Readers detest marketing fluff or overly hyped language. They want to read facts, not platitudes. I have a very low opinion of writers who talk about “web language” and “web grammar”. Good writing is absolute. It is equally effective on paper and on the Web. Proper organization of the information is an essential element of good writing. Use language that makes sense to the audience. Use straightforward sentences, each dealing with a single topic. Limit each paragraph to one main idea, and provide only the really pertinent information in each topical entry. Rule number 7: Read everything I have written in previous newsletters about good marketing and customer-directed writing. |