How to make your website really work for you

by Charisse Gray / NSW Business Chamber

Would you consider your website a good one? Does it work for you? Do you really know? Charisse Gray, Senior Business Writer, NSW Business Chamber provides this comprehensive checklist to help all businesses determine whether their website is working for them.

Answer the following 11 questions. If you are able to respond positively to them you should have a highly effective website. A negative response should highlight an area that requires attention.

1. Was your website built with the features listed in place, all essential to an effective website:

sound programming?
well-planned framework?
goal-driven design?
ability to be easily maintained?
ease of navigation?
quality assurance?
sound web marketing strategy?
customer value features?
search engine optimisation?
excellent ISP services?

2. Is your website fully integrated with your business online strategy?
This would have been achieved if its design was the result of a collaborative effort. Your staff in marketing, PR, information management, information technology and operations should have made a valuable contribution.

3. Do you have a strategic view for your website with measurable goals?

4. Does the site fit into the sales and marketing process?
If this is its function is it generating the anticipated revenue from sponsorship and advertising, operational savings or attracting new customers? Does it work well as a sales support to tool?

5. Do you have a usage indicator which identifies the site demographics i.e. who is and isn't visiting your site, which pages are they accessing and where are they coming from?

6. How well does your strategy integrate and influence how your business operates?

7. What perception do internal staff have of your site?

8. Is your site easily accessible by online clients and can they get a timely response to their enquiries?

9. Have you registered your site in the relevant search engines and directories, to ensure your website is easily located?

10. Do you check that the links to and from your site are maintained and verified periodically in directory lists?

11. Do you systematically and regularly review its performance?

What makes a good website - from a visitor's point of view?

Users don't read web pages - they scan them.

If your:

pages don't load quickly, your customers won't wait.
customers can't find what they want, they won't persevere and you've lost a sale, membership or a lead.
pages are confusing or hard to read, customers will look elsewhere.

Content is king

Content is probably singularly the most important element of your site.

For your site to be professional and work for you the content should be:

customised and targeted to your users
credible
original
valuable
timely
regularly updated
well-edited

Design your pages so that the important content is "above the fold" where possible. Don’t carry this to the extreme and cram everything into the space. Try to make your important content fit into the typical user's screen (465 pixels wide by 340 pixels high for a 15 inch monitor).

Rules 1 and 2

Don't assume that:

all your visitors will enter your site via your homepage.
visitors have followed a drill-down path - they may not have seen information that was contained on higher-level pages.

A website can have numerous entry points. The front door, or home page, is simply one way to get in. A good website will accommodate visitors who choose alternate routes. It should be easy for a visitor to travel around your site and each individual page and find what they want easily.

Guidelines for visitors who have entered your site via an interior page

Tell users their arrival point, and how they can proceed to other parts of the site by including these three design elements on every single page:

Company name or logo in upper left corner
Direct, one-click link to the homepage
Search icon (preferably in the upper right corner

A breadcrumb trail is usually the best way to acquaint a visitor to information that has a hierarchical type of architecture. Include only links to other resources that are directly relevant to the current location.

Your homepage
This is the first page which most people see when they come to your website.

Keep it simple, clean and uncluttered.
Refresh it often (daily when possible).
Use a short descriptive heading which describes in less then 10 words the main focus of the site.
Repeat this heading in the title tag so it appears in the title bar.
Put your company logo, or another small graphic related to your website's subject matter close to your heading.
Have a short paragraph or two explaining the purpose of the site.
Have simple coloured lines to break up and define the different areas of the page.
Add a few other small graphics to create interest. Use simple ones not animated ones that take too much time to load.
Provide your company name and contact at the base of the page, information (People don't care about logos and slogans. They care about customer service.)
Add the links to the rest of your site.
If more than three clicks are required to find a piece of information you will probably lose a user permanently.

Interactivity

Good interactivity engages the user and makes your site memorable.

Navigation

Have an easy to use navigation bar with links to all areas of the website.
The navigation bar should be in the same place on every page, or else in a frame so that it is on the screen at all times.
The links should have descriptive labels. They shouldn’t be wordy, but neither should they leave the visitor guessing.
Good linear navigation is one that will have links that say “Next”, & “Previous” or “Forward” and “Back". This tool should be something that works in all browsers.
Ensure that: your links are not broken and your outside links load inside frames.
If for any reason you have incomplete content, then label that page as “under construction.”
Carry out regular usability testing for user feedback and address the findings.

Uniformity and consistency

Maintain uniformity, simplicity and consistency of design throughout the site. This applies to all the design elements of the site: the background graphics or colour, text colours, logos, accent graphics such as bullets and lines, etc. Keep pages short.
Split information into readable chunks dispersed amongst several pages rather than having copious copy all on one page. It's best to use light colours for the background and black or another dark colour for the text so the information is printable.

Appropriate use of graphics

There is never an assurance that:

what appears on a viewer’s screen is what was originally designed.
the graphics will load at all (graphics should be kept to a minimum).

Appropriate usage of enhancements

Enhancements like Flash, RealAudio, Javascripts etc. should only be used to add value to the content's meaning, not as the primary content. They are often slow to open.

Searchability

To enable your website to be more readily found by the search engines you need to use META tags on your pages and submit your URL directly to the search engines.

Sources
NSW Business Chamber 13 26 96
Jacob Nielsen’s - www.useit.com
"VMUG On-Line - MACtalk" (Vicky's Macintosh online column)
Web reference.com
Small business websites that work
What makes a good website - by Vicky Vickers
http://www.rlrouse.com/successful-website.html
What makes a good website - by APIS Design

Charisse Gray (NSW Business Chamber)

Charisse Gray is the Senior Business Writer for NSW Business Chamber and is a highly respected and much published business writer, for print and online, across a wide breadth of topical business issues.