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Moving communication campaigns into action |
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Be your website's #1 visitor 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. A few people lately have asked me to give them some feedback on their websites. I used to do this by writing a brief report for them. But now I suggest we arrange a phone call where we both have the website in front of us and together we work our way through it, exchanging comments as we go. In doing a few of these calls recently a few common issues have cropped up. Usually, the person I was talking to didn't need me to point out the issues. They instantly saw the problem and the solution. I'll share five of the most common issues with you: 1. Dead information. On just about every call, the person whose website we were looking at has at some point said 'that page is out of date'. We might find events advertised that happened a year ago, products listed that are no longer for sale and so on. 2. Hard-to-reach information. Often I will say something like "the site doesn't have information on warranties" or something similar. The person I am talking to will say: "Well, you need to click here, and here, and then this tab and there in paragraph six it's mentioned." Even information that visitors are very likely to require is buried deep in the site. 3. PDFs. Most sites present some information as PDFs that would be much better presented as a proper web page. PDFs are nearly always less user-friendly on screen than proper web pages. In most cases, the reason that information is available as a PDF is because it was originally produced for print and the organisation hasn't made the resources available to turn it into a web page. 4. Inconsistent layout and navigation. Often there will be a very easy-to-use navigation system on some of the site, but then you reach a bit that changes to a different set of buttons that are much less clear. There doesn't seem to be any user-focused reason why there isn't a consistent method on every page. 5. Writing that is, well, terrible. What I mean here is that when you actually read a page you encounter confusing phrases, repetition of text from page-to-page, writing that is all about the organisation and not about its customers, paragraphs that say exactly what every competitor say without describing what's unique or different about the organisation . . . and so on. It often seems as though most of the website is a collection of content from other sources that has been cut-and pasted, with no real thought to having a logical flow of information that is reader-focused. I'm not going to give any advice or tips on correcting any of the above as frankly it really is obvious, isn't it? All it takes is someone to look at your website afresh and list the things that are so obviously wrong you wonder why they haven't already been fixed. A lot has been written about 'writing for the web' and certainly there are some very important principles to understand. I even have a training course that covers them. But for many people, just fixing the obviously-wrong stuff would dramatically improve their website, and doesn't require any special knowledge. It just needs a bit of time and common sense. The starting point is for you or a colleague to volunteer to become your website's #1 visitor, the person that spends more time on the site than anyone. Better still, rotate this around your colleagues so that you are often getting a fresh perspective. The worst people to do this are webmasters as they know the site so well they will probably never spot the usability issues that 'real' visitors will have. Get used to visiting the website just as your customers and potential customers do, always on the look out for those annoying problems that are easy to fix, but that will make the user's experience of the site so much better. |