subject: Useful Website Design Tips [print this page] One of the main mistakes that businesses make when they set out to put up a company website is "over designing" the site. It's an easy mistake to make because you want to as professional and up to date as possible so there is a tendency to do what I call "over design," e.g. using a lot of flash and code. The basic problem with this is that your customer base may not be as sophisticated and in lots of instances may not be able to read your site. I've put together an example of a fictitious classic car parts company that wants to expand their market to the Internet to increase sales and maintain their position as a market leader.
The very first thing they do is right on the money. They research a web designer for the site build. (This would also be an appropriate example for a home based business as well.) After careful consideration and deliberation they decide to chose a web firm that specializes in flash animations and over-all state of the art technique. After many weeks of working with the designers a fully optimized site is built and put up on the Internet.
Several days pass and the site is indexed on the major search engines, Google, Yahoo and Bing. The site designer reminds them that it takes weeks even months to be ranked for a single keyword or keyword phrase, however a year has passed and they are not enjoying any appreciable increase in sales and consequently no payback for the cost of the site design and build.
Someone on the management team suggests that they do not invest any more into the site and write it off as an expensive test. As a consultant I would strongly advise them to not abandon this site.
What they really need is to understand where this went wrong and to take the time to analyze it further. It's not unusual for smaller or home based business to "cut and run" so they don't invest anymore precious cash. So here's a few things I would suggest:
Utilize free resources such as Google Analytics (r) and Google Webmaster Tools to gather site and customer information. Invest in pay per click programs such as Google AdWords (r) or Yahoo Marketing (r) to keep a steady flow of traffic to the site and help to pay back some of the sunken investment in the site. It's important to keep this open long enough to gather an appropriate amount of information.
They were able to find out that their potential customer base had older versions of operating systems, browsers, javascript and lower resolution monitors which prevented them from seeing their graphically rich flash animated site. So the important thing to take away from this is that they, in effect, alienated there potential customers from viewing their site and lost potential sales and revenue.
None of the management team or the web designers expected this to take place. This is obviously not what you want to happen.
If we attempt to analyze this further, the first question we need to answer is why did so many views abandon the site? We can assume that sense this is a relatively small niche, they wanted to buy but just couldn't get there.
A potential reason for this, could and most likely, was the site design. There was far too much state of the art functionality built into the site which rendered hard if not impossible to view for the customer base that was interested in the companies products. This by no means is an indication that the customer base, for this companies, product is backward. It means that they are not he first yo upgrade to the latest software. The important take away from this is there is a very short time frame to get someone's attention on the Internet and anything that prevents this is an obstacle to a good conversion rate.
Not only do you have to consider older software but you must also consider that many people may not have the latest hardware technology which makes some flash sites longer to load. You know that if you come across a site that takes a long time to load, you are gone in milliseconds. So what do you do?
Creating a simpler site is one very easy method of opening up your potential Internet audience.
Always set your site up with a simple cost effective way of analyzing your data. Google Analytics (r) is a great choice because not only is it free it's really good. The other plus is if you use AdWords to advertise you can set Analytics up to capture information right up until the sale is completed using the Goals function on Analytics.
Working smarter, not harder always pays off when you use tools to help analyze your website traffic. Site analytics isn't optional it's required to become successful.
