August 1, 2002 - - Volume 1, Number 2

Four Ways To Make Your Web Site More Effective

The Internet is a powerful new way to reach customers and prospects at a very small incremental cost.
But attracting new customers won’t happen magically just because you have established a Web site. You still must compete with other businesses that have Web sites of their own. It’s important that you make your site visible, attractive, memorable, and worth visiting. Fortunately for you, many Web sites are not well conceived, designed, or implemented, so it shouldn’t be too hard for you make your site shine. Here are four things that you can do to make your site stand out from the rest.

Clean Design
Your site should have a clean and simple design. It’s a simple enough rule, and it seems that everyone nods in approval whenever the rule is mentioned. But have you ever surfed the Web? So much bad taste! Frequently I see computer software in which the programmers have built something “cool”, using the latest technology available, because it was interesting and exciting and what they really wanted to do; the only problem is that the software doesn’t really solve the problem that it was supposed to solve. This happens because the programmers aren’t businesspeople and don’t understand business issues very well; and the business owner was a bit timid in dealing with programmers and let them get their own way. The same sort of thing seems to happen with graphics designers when they build Web sites. They like to use the latest animation techniques and streaming videos and annoying sound effects and such, whether or not they make for an effective Web site. As the business owner and the person who’s paying the bills, it is up to you to see that the designer refrains from wretched excess and produces a site that is clean, appealing, easy to work with, and attractive to your customers.

Clear Navigation
One of the great features of the Internet is the existence of hyperlinks, the ability to jump directly from one place to some other place, any other place, that is not in sequence. This capability lets the visitor move about as it makes sense to do so, rather than in a predetermined sequential fashion, as in turning the pages of a book. The visitor can dig deeper in an area where he wants particular knowledge while skipping over areas in which he has no interest or already has sufficient knowledge. This is a most powerful feature that can be implemented only with modern computer technology. But the Web designer must use hyperlinks judiciously because Web sites do not have a natural sequence or organization of any kind. There is no First, or Next, or Last page. The “pages” are really just an unordered collection of computer files that reside on a disk drive somewhere. Whatever sense of sequence and order exists for a given site must be carefully and thoughtfully designed and then implemented on the site as part of its navigation scheme.

You want your visitors to be comfortable on your site, to feel at home, and, above all, not to be lost and confused. The best way to do this is to help them build a mental map of the site so that they understand where they are, where they’ve been, and where they might be able to go. We have found that there are three powerful techniques that help in this process: a consistent set of navigation links that are implemented identically on all pages (e.g. Home, Our Products, About Us, Resources, Site Map, and always placed at the top, or perhaps the left side, or maybe the bottom, but always in the same place on all pages); the existence of a Site Map page that lays out, all in one place, the logical structure of the entire site so that people can envision where they want to go and how they will get there; and the existence of “breadcrumb” or reminder navigation links that show, for every page, the path to that page from the Home page (e.g .the Helical Widgets page would show these breadcrumbs: “Home > Our Products > Fasteners > Helical Widgets”). Once visitors have built their mental map of your site, they will be able to get around quickly and confidently. You reinforce their confidence through the clear, concise, and consistent use of navigation links.

High Visibility
Having a well-designed and comprehensible Web site is good, but there are literally millions of Web sites in the world, all of them equally available to Web surfers. No matter how attractive your site is, it won’t do you much good if it is not visited by the people whom you want to visit. Your prospects must be able to find you, and yet your site is virtually invisible, just one small tree in the middle of a very large forest. How do you make it stand out? Web site visibility management is the answer, and it involves several distinct issues. The first of these issues is the selection of key words and phrases that interested visitors are likely to use with one of the many search engines – Google, Alta Vista, Yahoo!, etc. - that are available on the Web. Selecting keywords can be an elaborate process, and for sites that are large, expensive, and in a hotly competitive environment, it can also be both expensive and critical to survival. But for smaller businesses, it is mostly a matter of common sense: if people are looking for something that you offer, how will they ask for it? Answer that question intelligently and you have pretty much dealt with the issue.

The second visibility issue is what to do with your keywords once you have decided on them. There are several things you should do. First you should ensure that they are included in the Keywords metatag in your page headers . . . Excuse me! The WHAT?!! Well, don’t worry. Your Web designer will know what that means. Your job is to create the list of relevant keywords. Your designer’s job is to make sure they become part of the site so that search engines can find you when they come looking. While the keywords comprise an (invisible) list in the Keywords tag, they also should be included in several other places within each page: in the Description metatag, in page titles – both visible to search engines but not directly visible to the visitor – and also within the visible text of the pages. For example, if one of the products you sell is helical widgets, and if you have a page that talks about your helical widgets, then the key phrase Helical Widgets should appear in the keyword list, in the Description metatag of the Home and Product pages (“Jaundice Fascination Industries, designers and fabricators of quality fasteners and looseners, including titanium helical widgets . . .”), as well as the copy that appears on the Helical Widgets page.

There are a number of other ways to manage your site’s visibility on the World Wide Web, and there are a number of consulting firms that provide help. Prices can range from several hundred dollars for a small and quick but quite possibly sufficient project all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars for larger, more elaborate Web sites. Many large retail sites have continuing relationships with visibility consultants, who constantly review and revise the entire site design. For most small and medium-sized businesses, however, it’s probably not necessary to spend a lot of money for a major project, and it even might be possible to do all of the visibility work yourself, spending nothing. But it is important to ensure that your site is visible to those whom you want to see it.

Tuning and Adjusting
You should view your Web site as a perpetual work in progress. You won’t get it all right the first time. You’ll probably change your mind about what you want to say and how you want to say it. And both the Web and your business are dynamic, always in flux. Updating, tuning, and adjusting your site is a constant, unending activity.
What changes should you make, and when should you make them? That’s an important question, of course, and it’s one you can answer more easily if you have some real data about who is visiting your site and what they are doing when they are there. Most Internet service providers offer a low-cost data gathering service, available for as little as $10 per month, that will provide a wealth of information about the number of visitors to your site, the average length of their stay, the sites or search engines that referred them to you, the keywords that were used to search for you, and so on. These statistics will give you insight into how people are reacting to your site and what you might do to entice them to visit more often, stay longer, and ultimately make your site more effective.

© 2002 Altenbernd Consulting, LLC. All Rights Reserved.