Your Website Is You


by John Marchle - Date: 2007-04-19 - Word Count: 1601 Share This!

You've got a solid product. You've got a great backend handling all your orders and inventory. You've got analytics, pay-per-clicks, and a great PageRank. You've done everything right. So why are you still not moving product? Why are all your users clicking the back button and spending money at your competitor's website instead of yours? Isn't this why you paid for optimization and development in the first place?

If you use a funnel to fill a bucket, but the bucket is full of holes, you cant hold water. Optimization funnels people to your website, but good web design keeps them on the page.

The same can be said of well developed backends. If someone made an MP3 player with 300 buttons, no one would use it. It would simply be too difficult to use to be worth anyone's time.

You can lead droves of people to your site with optimization and do amazing things with well developed backends, but if your content isn't organized and presented in a way that is easy to understand, familiar and interesting, customers will move on. Period.

Custom Made Website Is You

If your website appears dated, poorly designed or confusing and user-unfriendly, this directly reflects on your company. Your company then appears dated, poor and unfriendly in turn. Your custom made websites is a direct extension of your entire company and to many customers may be the only way they may interact with you. You wouldn't wear sweatpants to an important sales meeting. People wouldn't take you seriously. Web users are exactly the same. If your website is not well designed and easy to use, your customers may not take you seriously, deciding that your entire company may be equally lackluster and incapable of meeting their level of expectations.

The Bounce

Web users make nearly instantaneous decisions when deciding on whether a website is worth their time to explore further or not. Users quickly scan an entire page in an attempt to find any content that is relevant to their search. If no recognizable elements related to their search are found within the first precious moments of a visit, users will "bounce" and click back to look at other options. Research suggests you have as little as four seconds once the user arrives to tell him why he should stay.

Q: What stops users from bouncing?

A: Good design.

Giving customers what they want is the #1 key to customer satisfaction and retaining users. Quickly providing customers with what they are looking for keeps customers at your website. Good design accomplishes this. Web Design is for Customers You've got a lot invested in your business. This is your website. Your paying a lot of money for all this, so shouldn't your website be exactly how you want it to be? Your favorite colors, your fonts, your layout? Not always. The design of your website must be made with the end users in mind, not what your favorite color is that day. Customers are the most important users of your website. If they are not taken into consideration, or if personal tastes trump commonly held conventions, users will bounce.

This isn't to say that you must always end up with a site you hate for the sake of customers. You are the expert in your industry. Graphic designers are experts in conveying the information of your industry to the rest of the world. Both client and designer must actively work together to achieve the desired goal of a beautiful site that works for everyone and sets the clients business apart from the competition. Neither client nor designer can accomplish this alone.

Where did that button go?

Interface design is the method of directing users to the information they are looking for. Good interface design directs users to the information they are looking for in the quickest possible manner. We've all seen menu bars, floating icons, and buttons galore. Nifty little flash navigation with moving strings of clickable links. How often have you visited a site with hundreds of links and buttons and were paralyzed by the number of options available? Or a site with moving flash links that, once the novelty wore off, very quickly became a pain in the ass to actually use? How difficult was it to find what you were looking for? Did you stay long enough to hunt through menus to find what you were searching for in the first place? Flashy does not mean usable. More often than not, it hinders the usability of a website and the ability of the user to find the content they are searching for quickly and efficiently.

As technology develops and websites and web applications become more and more robust and complex, the need for well designed interfaces grows proportionally for the success of a website. In order to attain the core goal of delivering information information quickly to flighty users who are searching for it, a number of avenues can be taken including sub-grouping menus and eliminating redundant content as well as providing constants such as login and search boxes in familiar, consistent places.

The consolidation of content onto individual pages is also very important for not only search engine optimization but also for the users' ability to quickly find related information. For example, having individual pages for items such as:

* About us

* Contact us

* Testimonials

* Employment Opportunities

Having all of this content on 4 separate pages means the user must click between 4 different menus in order to find each group of content. Many do not have the patience, and don't necessarily care about the other options.

Having the content from all four pages under a single "About Us" umbrella page makes much more sense because users will simultaneously be able to read about your company, what others have said about your company and employment opportunities all on the same page. Even if they don't read it directly, words like "Great!" and "Fantastic service" may jump out, lending credibility almost subconsciously.

It may seem counter-intuitive to not list things individually, but the broad term "About Us" logically implies anything about the company, such as contact information, history, and employment. Its much like the principle of having shoppers to walk to the back of the grocery store to buy milk. They automatically know they must go to the store to find milk but they will also pass many other things along the way and potentially find other things to buy or like about the store.

If you need evidence that good interface design and design in general really do pay off, you need only go so as far as the Apple iPod. There are many arguably better MP3 players on the market, but with its simple yet robust user interface and stylish design, it remains dominant in the marketplace. Websites are no different. Users want style, simplicity and robust usability. It is a designer's job to apply these concepts in a relevant way to any industry while achieving the goals of the client and the expectations of the users. Being Familiar Users require some amount of familiarity with the layout and design of a website they have never used before. Conventions become conventions because they work and users are used to working with them. This is especially true in cases in which e-commerce is a focal point. If something looks strange, out of place or markedly unconventional to a user during any part of the buying or checkout process, they may bounce in the middle of making a transaction.

If you went to a restaurant, and the server brought you out food before you were even seated, food you didn't order, gave your bill to another table and did everything out of order, then when asked why they responded "Because I like it that way," you would leave immediately and likely never return. The same is true of web and e-commerce design. Familiarity in design and function provides a sense of stability and security to online transactions and improves overall customer satisfaction. Being Different By the same token, if your website looks exactly like your competitor's or every other site on the web, users are not provided with a reason to stay with you over your neighbor's site, especially if they are not familiar with your customer service or products. Setting yourself apart from the rest of your industry in a design sense is the surest way to create a buzz and project yourself towards your target demographics. A balance between familiarity and differentiation must be achieved to both retain customers AND be more visible and interesting than your competitors.

Tips for working with Designers

1. Communicate with your designers regularly. Have them keep you up to date on design direction and revisions.
2. Have a detailed idea of your target audience(s)
3. Ask yourself, "What do users expect from me?"
4. Decide on a visual style such as "Sleek and Fast" or "Earthy and warm". Descriptive adjectives are great for conveying visual style.
5. Learn about your competition. How can you differentiate yourself?
6. Have an idea of the different individual pages you would like your site to have. This helps designers create an interface.
7. Give the designers copies of all relevant content related to both your specific business and the industry in general. This gives them a pool to draw from to learn about your industry and content with which to create the website.
8. Always keep in mind, design is a process. There are usually many iterations of a site design on the way to the finished product and often the finished product can be very different from the initial concepts. Very very seldom is something produced correctly on the first version.


Related Tags: web site design, professional web design, good web design, custom made websites, web design tutorial

John Marchle is a hellbent SEO Web Designer, fine artist and musician and often can be found plotting worldwide zombie invasions when he's not writing articles about design.

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