 |
Call us on 01733 891 860 (UK) or use this contact form |
 |
|
|
|||
|
 |
Moving communication campaigns into action |
|
|||
|
|
|
What does your web site say about you? Here is a back issue of Marketing Booster, the email newsletter that Richard Groom writes and sends free every fortnight to subscribers. You can subscribe here or read over 60 back issues using the back issues index page. When I was chatting to a client the other day, we talked about what happens when people visit a company's web site. In particular, we came to this conclusion: * If the web site is a mess, visitors probably won't think: 'This is a mess but the company might be OK.' They will automatically assume that the company is a mess too. I think that most of us are still coming to terms with the implications of that. It's tough, because once we create our web site we tend to forget about it. We have better things to do. So the site sits there, sometimes for years, and if it's not right then it will lose us customers for years too. Let me give you an example of what I mean. Once again, it's about guitars - a subject that regular readers will know is something I tend to obsess about rather too much. I'm thinking of buying another guitar, and this time I want to get something a bit different and maybe rather expensive too. So I decided to do lots of research into UK guitar builders and distributors. I bought a copy of 'What Guitar' magazine and settled down for an evening visiting web sites listed in the magazine. I visited 20 web sites. ALL of them had serious problems. ALL of them lost my business even before they had it. What types of problems did they have? * One distributor of Korean guitars (many guitars are made in Korea these days, and they are pretty good in most cases) had an icon to choose their UK site. I clicked on it and was told I needed to download software to translate Korean into English. It would take 20 minutes to download the software. I didn't bother. * Nearly all the web sites listed guitars by model name in their menus, sometimes with 30 or more to choose from. So there was a long list of names like 'XDS3000'. As I didn't have a clue what model I was looking for I was in for a long search. It would have been much better to have had small thumb nail picture icons instead, so I could see the guitars and choose the ones that looked right for me. Or they could have broken their range down into categories, such as 'traditional designs'. * Five of the web site addresses listed in the magazine weren't even valid. I don't think the magazine got it wrong. I think the companies had problems keeping their sites up and running. * Most of the sites, once I reached the page of a guitar that looked like the sort of thing I'd be interested in, failed to give anything other than basic information. Why hadn't they spent just a little time listing all the features and describing the guitars in more detail? * Many of the sites didn't give prices for the guitars, making it impossible for me to know whether I could even afford them. * Overall, download times were slow, with too many pictures on the home pages delaying the creation of what I really needed: the menu to get me to the right pages. (Here in my village location I don't have access to broadband - like millions of other internet users.) So the search is still on. And 20 companies are now crossed off my list. They could have very good guitars, but because their web sites were a let down I'm not going to explore further. 'What Guitar' magazine sells thousands of copies every month. How many other people have tried visiting the web sites they list and been just as frustrated as me? I think my 'call to action' for this issue is pretty obvious. You, or someone in your organisation, should visit your web site frequently to make sure it's all working OK. You need to ask people from outside your organisation to visit the site and tell you whether it's easy to use, and whether they could find what they were looking for. And that's just a start: you really need to come up with a strategy for monitoring and improving the content and functionality of your site. Because if your site doesn't work, or if people can't find what they are looking for, they will go elsewhere - which begs the question, why have a site at all? Copyright 2004 Richard Groom |