1. Determine
Your Website's Chief Purpose
When you begin a website, you must have your main purpose
clearly in mind. I say this because it's easy to have conflicting
purposes.
 If
you're a website design firm, you may want to show off your high
tech goodies with your client's site as the showpiece.
If
you're an employee stuck with this task, you may want to look
good for your bosses and not do anything for which you can be
blamed -- you've got to protect your backside.
If
you're a volunteer, you may just want an excuse to tinker and
be praised for it.
If
you're a business owner, you probably care about the bottom line.
You're wondering, How much this will cost? and Will be worth
it in the long run?
Dear friends, recognize your own needs -- they're legitimate.
But to build an effective website, you've got to look at the
business or organization needs and make those primary. From the
organization's perspective, what must this website do in order
to be successful?
Let's look at some common website purposes. Put an X next to
all that apply.
Build
your brand. Create an online brochure that will help potential
clients, customers, and partners learn about your company and
look at it in a favorable light. You're trying to enhance your
brand or organization image. I've heard people disparage this
kind of website as "brochure-ware." But this is very legitimate
for some kinds of companies, especially local businesses or organizations
that aren't trying to conduct national or international commerce.
You want people to know who you are, what you do, where to find
you, and how to contact you.
Provide
product information to drive local sales of your products and
services at dealer locations. Auto sites are a good example.
Many manufacturers don't sell on their sites, but point people
to retailers who carry their products.
Sell
advertising. A few sites are designed to sell advertising --
Yahoo!, Google, and other portal sites are examples. But these
days, there's far too much advertising space and not nearly enough
money to fill it all. Internet advertising is in the doldrums.
You may be able to sell a little advertising if you're a portal
site for an industry, but even that's iffy. Look at advertising
sales as a hopeful bonus, not as a sure thing.
Sell
products or services directly over the Internet. You want to
conduct e-commerce and sell to a national or international market.
You'll have some kind of ordering system for one or more products,
or perhaps an extensive online catalog. You may offer an online
service that can be delivered over the Internet or that can be
initiated online.
Earn
affiliate commissions for sales and leads generated through links
on your website. Savvy marketers are building microsites designed
to generate search engine traffic for a particular hot product
or service. When a visitor clicks on one of their links, they
are referred to an e-commerce site, and, if a sale results, the
affiliate gets a commission. Perhaps a form on your site generates
leads or subscriptions for another company.
Provide
customer service and support. Websites are a great place for
troubleshooting guides, FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions), technical
information, etc. You can generate Return Merchandise Authorization
(RMA) labels. You can provide multiple ways for your customers
to contact you (see under Point #9 below).
Save
money by means of online efficiencies. Companies have used the
Internet to save billions of dollars. Taking orders online with
real-time credit card authorization saves paying call center
operators and cuts entry errors. Online catalogs save lots in
paper, printing, and distribution costs. Online FAQs and knowledge
bases cut the number of customer service personnel you need.
And I'm just scratching the surface here.
What's the design decision here? To be clear and focused about
your site's objectives and purposes.
Worksheet. Now go back and put the numeral "1" next to the most
important purpose, "2" for the next, and so on. Then in this
space explain exactly what you want your website to achieve,
in one or two sentences.
2. Decide Whether to Outsource or Do It Yourself
After clarifying your purposes, you need to decide whether to
outsource the design of your website or to do it yourself. Let
me tell you my bias. For nearly all businesses and larger non-profits
I recommend outsourcing initial website design, but be very sure
that you bring site maintenance back in-house.
Website design done right is complex and requires a number of
different skill sets that aren't commonly found in any one person,
especially someone that doesn't do this for a living. Some of
these skills include:
HTML
savvy. Good web design software can help. But the kind of HTML
code produced by many WYSIWYG ("what you see is what you get")
programs can be expensive and hard to learn. Fine-tuning your
design requires you to get into the raw HTML code.
Graphic
design, color experience and good artistic taste. No software
package bestows artistic taste on its user, but good taste is
indispensable for an attractive site. Of course, graphic software
expertise is required to produce attractive and clean photos
and site graphics, optimized to the smallest possible file size
for quick loading.
Website
navigation design and implementation. Helping visitors get where
they need to go quickly and efficiently is difficult, especially
on sites over 20 webpages or so. Good navigation design comes
from experience, not from good software.
CGI
and database programming. Even smaller sites use a "contact us" form
and often a site search program that require CGI program installation
and configuration. Larger sites may need to be integrated with
an online database, which is no job for the faint of heart.
JavaScript
and Flash programming. Functional websites are dramatically helped
by Flash and JavaScript features such as animation and small
windows that open to answer a hyperlinked question. Automatic
pop-up windows that encourage e-zine subscriptions can be effective,
but can be annoying if you don't make them to turn off after
one pop -- and these days are increasingly blocked by pop-up
blockers.
Marketing
and business experience. An outside company doesn't really understand
your business like you do. Make sure you communicate exactly
what you need to achieve. The best website design firms understand
how to build Web marketing into the site design to make it search
engine friendly, to make the sales pages really sell, etc.
What does outsourcing cost? For a simple five or six page website,
expect to pay $250 to $500. For a more complex site you may pay
$1,000 to $10,000 and up. For database-driven sites you'll need
custom programming. Of course, sites designed for high traffic
or for Internet-focused companies can cost much more.
If you have no money, it is possible to teach yourself website
design. YES. Arm yourself by reading some website design books
first and expect to make some mistakes. A great beginner's book
is Learning Web Design: A Beginner's Guide to HTML, Graphics,
and Beyond, by Jennifer Niederst (Second edition; O'Reilly, 2003,
ISBN 0596004842, paperback, 488 pages).
I find myself constantly referring to Web Design in a Nutshell:
A Desktop Quick Reference, by Jennifer Niederst (O'Reilly, 2001,
ISBN 0596001967, paperback, 618 pages). It's full of the nuts
and bolts of website construction for more experienced developers
who maintain and improve websites. You can also find lots of
online help at WebReference.com, WebMonkey.com, and Builder.com.
You'll need some good web design software such as Microsoft FrontPage
or Macromedia DreamWeaver. Don't just forge ahead, though. Read
and understand the design concepts first, then proceed step by
step.
Another approach is to hire a website
design firm to design the website templates, navigation system,
CGI and JavaScript programming, and perhaps do usability testing.
They would set up the basic structure and you could build it
out using their template and design. If you do outsource, be
sure to conduct a "due diligence" investigation of the design
firm by talking to previous clients, looking at their work,
etc. Make sure they spell out in writing exactly what they
agree to do for how much money, and provide a firm deadline
by which their work will be completed. Partial payments should
be made as specific milestones are reached and approved.
What's the design decision here? To decide whether to outsource
none, part, or all of your website project.
Worksheet. Decide whether you will outsource __ none __part __all
of your website project. What reasons motivate your decision?
Where you lack the necessary experience, what will you do?
3. Divide Your Website into Logical Sections
My first website had 100+ pages and I made the
mistake of dumping all the webpages into a single directory.
What a mess! I learned quickly that you need to organize your
site both logically and with multiple directories, one for each
section. Here's a typical small-site structure:
This site layout isn't meant to be prescriptive, but only suggestive.
Get a blank piece of paper and begin to lay out what your site
will look like, with similar functions grouped together.
Don't be afraid to create multiple subdirectories to keep your
site organized. When you're setting up newsletter archives, for
example, create a directory for each year of issues so a single
directory doesn't get too cluttered. Remember, you're not designing
for just the present moment, but for the growth your site may
undergo over the next two or three years.
I set up my file structure with a /syspix subdirectory that
contains the system graphics which appear on nearly every page
of the site. I also use an /images subdirectory under each major
section of the website to contain the graphics used in that particular
section. You may know where everything goes right now, but what
happens when you try to make sense of it a year or two from now?
Organize!
Your home page should provide a statement of exactly what your
company or organization does. Preparing a Unique Selling Proposition
(USP) for your company is a great way to begin. I'm amazed at
how many websites don't really tell me what they do. I have to
nose around trying to figure it out. That's stupid! State precisely
what you do, and then provide links to the rest of your site
so your visitor to learn more.
My site structure diagram includes product pages, landing pages,
and an ordering system. More on those in Point #10 below. The
focused content and reciprocal linking pages are designed to
boost your search engine ranking, and are described in Point
#8 below.
In your "About the Company" section be sure to tell your organization's
story. Big companies spend millions to build confidence through
brand name familiarity. Small businesses tell their story, often
illustrated with photos, to help visitors understand and trust
them. If you have a passion about what you do, tell your visitors
about it in this section! Here's where a local business or organization
will include a map and driving directions to help people find
them. I'll talk about the importance of the "Contact Us" form
in Point #9 below.
What's the design decision here? To structure your site and break
up your webpages into logical directories and subdirectories
to avoid confusion later.
Worksheet. What will be the names of the directories and subdirectories
in your site should? (Better yet, write this out on a full sheet
of paper.)
4. Develop a Site Navigation System
Now that you've laid out your website, you can see how important
a good navigation system is. One of the chief complaints that
visitors have is that they can't find the content they're looking
for. The larger your site, the more important redundant navigation
systems are -- more systems than you think you might need. Here
are some of the basic systems and a few you might not have thought
of:
Left-side
menu lists the various sections of your site, and perhaps some
of the subsections, too.
Tabs
near the top of the webpage help the visitor quickly see
the most important sections of your site. This facilitates
browsing.
Search
the site or the product database. Larger sites need a search
feature so visitors don't get lost.
10
most common gifts, etc.
View
today's specials or recent news releases.
Bottom
links provide hypertext links to all the sectional pages.
Site
map shows the structure and has links to every page (or sectional
page).
Except for the very smallest five- or six-page sites, I encourage
you to implement two or more of these systems. Over-kill, that's
the ticket. What may be obvious to you and your designer after
looking at the site for weeks may not be obvious at all to your
visitor. Each separate navigation system gives her another opportunity
to find what she's looking for.
If you're a do-it-yourselfer, consider using a free search engine
such as Atomz Express Search (www.atomz.com/applications/search/trial.htm)
or FreeFind (www.freefind.com) for your search function.
Some websites are "button happy." They have graphic buttons down
the left side of the page and across the top. They may look nice,
but there's a big cost in download time. There's a strong trend
on high traffic sites toward text menus made with HTML characters,
not GIF images. Look at a text menu you admire and study the
HTML by viewing the source. Text is good; buttons are bad --
especially when overdone. Got it?
Finally, I'd like to say a word about "frames," a kind of HTML
menu that lists page names in a window on the left side that
scrolls up and down independently of the content window on the
right. Website designers used to love them, until they discovered
that they cripple a website's marketing potential. Insist that
your site developer not use frames! More on this in Point #7
below. Instead of using frames, set up your navigation system
with Server Side Includes (SSIs), described in Point #6 below.
If you have a complex site, I recommend that you employ a professional
website designer to set up your navigation system -- even if
you do all the rest. Leverage professional experience to help
your customers find what they're looking for.
What's the design decision here? To make clear, redundant navigation
an priority -- for your customers' sake.
Worksheet. Put an X next to the types of navigation system you
plan to use from the list above. Why are you choosing these?
What is your rationale?
5. Give Your Website an Attractive 'Look and Feel'
Why should a website look good? Why
should it look professional? Because like the sign hanging
over a store in the strip mall, your website reflects on you
and your business. If the sign's lettering looks crude and
homemade, people won't say, "The thrifty
shopkeeper is trying to save money by making his own sign." They'll
say, "How tacky! If this is how the sign looks, then the products
and services can't be of very high quality either!"
You owe it to yourself to make your website look top-notch. To
succeed, you'll need some artistic flair, or perhaps you should
hire a graphic designer's talents for the basic design and site
graphics. You can just browse the internet and see thousands
of very well done websites. Another way to look at web design
is to look at websites that are Bad designs and not duplicate
the mistakes of others. Visit http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/
here you will find a vast knowledge base of design do's and
dont's.
Photographs
contribute to the classy, professional look. Photos can be very
effective on business websites.
Let me tell you a secret. Some graphic designers like to build
sites with lots of graphics. They have fast LAN or DSL connections
and have no idea how long their sites take to download on a 56K
modem. Try to keep your homepage to 60K maximum, counting the
file sizes of all the graphics and the HTML. (It's a hard, but
an important exercise.) Resist a designer's yen to show off his
skills. Quick loading -- that's important.
There's no way I can educate you on complementary colors, warm
and cold colors, heavy and light colors, etc. But bear in mind
that everything you do has some effect on your visitor's perceptions
of your company, her state of mind, and her emotional response.
One of your best website investments will be in a few excellent,
royalty-free stock photos. Well composed photos add a touch of
class to your webpages. They provide a visual center of interest
in an otherwise plain webpage. They add spice and color. You
don't want just dull pictures of business people in suits. To
create a sense of energy and maximum effort, you might use a
theme of photos from competitive sports, for example. Use your
imagination. For high quality photos you can license and use
on your website for $35 to $60 each, look at PhotoDisc (Getty
Images, www.photodisc.com). I subscribe to ClipArt.com and have
access to 40,000 photos (some great, many good). I can use anything
I can download in week for $12.95 for a week. Such a deal!
What's the design decision here? To develop a quality, professional
appearance for the website that represents your organization.
Worksheet. In three sentences, how do you plan to achieve the
professional look and feel that your website needs?
6. Build Basic Webpage Templates
Commercial websites are built from
templates. You or your designer will create a template that
constructs each part of a typical webpage, with a "hole" in
the center for the unique page content. This takes many hours
to build from scratch, but it's worth it. Now you can create
page after page from the template. For each webpage you'll
insert a page title, meta tag content (see Point #7 below),
a headline, and the text content, each in its appropriate spot.
Have fun!
Modern websites control the font sizes and colors using Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS). When you change the font size on a single
master CSS file, it changes the fonts and colors in all your
webpages. Cool! Make sure your website designer builds webpages
using a single CSS file, since it saves maintenance costs in
the long run.
The design decisions that you need to consider here are many,
since they involve every detail of the look and feel of your
basic template. Hopefully, you'll decide to employ Cascading
Style Sheets (CSS) that make your entire site are easy to modify
and maintain. Also consider features available with XHTML.
7. Construct Your Site to Be Search Engine Friendly
With a little practice, anyone can build a webpage. But a webpage
that search engines love to visit and index -- vital if you expect
your site to get traffic -- that's another story. So many, many
business websites don't have a clue how to do this. Let me mention
two important aspects of building a search engine friendly site:
A. Make Each Webpage a Search Engine Siren
In Greek mythology, as you know, partly-human female creatures
called Sirens lured mariners with their singing. Your webpages
ought to entice search engine spiders or robots to index your
site. Each webpage you construct needs to contain the following
elements. Note the careful placement of keywords, the search
words people would use to find this particular webpage.
Title
-- provocative and descriptive, containing the most important
keywords from that webpage, no more than 80 characters. This
is what shows up hyperlinked in search engine results, so make
people want to click on it.
Meta
tags -- The description meta tag should include one or two sentences
(up to about 250 characters) describing the contents of this
particular webpage. Work into the sentence the most important
keywords and keyphrases that occur on this page. Some search
engines will display your description. I still include a meta
keywords tag, though major search engines currently disregard
it for ranking purposes.
Headlines
-- H1, H2, H3 in HTML parlance. Your headline and subheadings
should include your important keyword at least once.
Body
text -- The first paragraph of the content of your webpage article
or text should contain the main keywords for that page.
Hyperlink
text and filenames -- Search engines believe that the words contained
in hyperlinks on your webpage (such as widget) are important,
and thus rank them higher. If the filenames contained in the
hyperlink URLs contain important keywords (such as widget.html
for the filename of your widget order page), so much the better.
Don't emphasize the same keywords on every page. Let the actual
content on that page dictate what keywords should stand out.
Your goal is not to trick the search engines in some kind of
bait-and-switch scam, but to help the search engines recognize
and index appropriately the actual content of your webpages.
Construct every webpage with search engines in mind and it'll
help your rankings. Of course, search engine rankings are heavily
influenced by incoming links to your site, but constructing your
webpages with an eye to search engines is very important, too.
B. Search Engine Savvy Navigation Systems
Navigation systems are built to help actual humans find their
way around your website. But these navigation systems had better
be designed carefully or the search engines will throw up their
hands in disgust, with the result that actual humans will never
get to your website. Search engines need a chain of hypertext
links -- starting at your homepage -- that will take them, page
by page, to every webpage in your entire site. But let me explain
three common navigation design problems that can disrupt search
engine indexing of your site:
1. Frames (mentioned in Point #4 above) produce a navigation
system where the menu on the left scrolls independently of the
page content on the right. Unfortunately, frames can wreak havoc
with search engines. (a) Unless you are careful to include <NOFRAMES> tags,
search engines may not be able to find the content pages. (b)
Even if search engines do find your content pages, these pages
can show up in response to a search engine query all by themselves,
without the navigation system and links necessary for a visitor
to find the rest of your website. Don't use frames. If your current
site has frames, make plans to rebuild the site without them.
A menu constructed from SSIs (mentioned in Point #6 above) is
just as easy to maintain -- even easier, once you learn how to
do it.
2. JavaScript and Flash are programming languages that can make
very classy, animated menu systems. For example, a menu item
might have a pop-out sub-menu that will wow your visitors (you
hope). Most Search engines cannot read the navigation menus such
as these. One solution: retain your fancy menus, but include
hypertext links at the bottom of the page to your sectional pages,
with links on your sectional pages to all the subpages in that
section. You can also submit a site map webpage to the search
engines that contains a link to every page on your site.
3. Dynamically generated webpages, created "on the fly" from
a database, are more difficult for search engines to index, since
these webpages don't exist in real time. They appear when a visitor
clicks on a link. Then the database whirrs and spits out a transient
webpage for that visitor and that visitor alone. Database-driven
content management systems are the only way to keep your sanity
if your site contains thousands of webpages, but they cause search
engine problems.
A question mark or a long session ID string can be like a red
flag to search engines. Many will stop and throw a hissy fit
-- or perhaps index more slowly and less comprehensively. A bunch
of over-sensitive search engine divas? Yes. But it can happen.
Don't use content or catalog management software that produces
long URLs if you can help it. You can get around this in three
ways: (1) URL rewriting at the server configuration level, (2)
building a set of focused content pages (see Point #8 below),
or (3) paid inclusion submission to search engines.
What are the design decisions regarding search engines? A commitment
to design (a) each webpage and (b) the site navigation system
with search engines in mind. This is a marketing, not a techie
priority, so you may have to insist that your website designers
work with search engines on their minds.
Worksheet. How will you change any design problems on your existing
website that make it difficult for search engines to spider the
site?
8. Write and Fine-tune Focused Content Pages.
If you've ever been in charge of building your company's website
from scratch, you've learned that one of the most time-consuming
tasks is to write the copy or words that appear on the website.
It's plain old hard work. It's easier to build the second or
third version of your website, since the writing is already done.
Or is it?
One of the keys to generating search engine traffic is to get
your site into the top 5 or 10 positions on the search engines
for the keywords and keyphrases that matter to your business.
It's often hard to get your home page to score high since it
is the more general entrance to your entire website content.
Your best strategy is to write a series of focused content pages,
each of which features a particular topic and keyword or keyphrase.
These pages aren't general, but very specific.
Once you've written your first draft, we test the webpage against
the General Optimization feature in our software Web CEO, an
excellent search engine optimization software tool. General Optimization's
detailed analysis will guide you through the process of tweaking
your webpage wording, title, meta tags, headlines, alt tags,
etc., so that the page has a better chance of ranking high on
the search engines.
For competitive words, you can't rank high on Google and other
search engines without lots of incoming links, so work on linking
strategies, too, such as reciprocal linking with complementary
sites. Nevertheless, these focused content pages should be an
integral part of your website strategy to boost rankings.
Note: The doorway or gateway pages recommended in years past
can be penalized by search engines as duplicate content. I recommend
that you dismantle them and play by the new rules of, "Nice search
engine. Good boy. Don't bite."
The design decisions? A functional website must generate traffic,
so you must intentionally include focused-content webpages
in your site to pull that traffic to you.
Worksheet: What keywords and keyphrases are worth writing focus-content
webpages around? Which words are key to driving the traffic we
need? List at least 6. When you have a list of keywords give
them to us and we will run our Web Ceo Keyword analysis program
to determine which of the keywords you chose will have the highest
(KEI) key effectiveness index. We can also make other suggestions
based on higher KEI and other alternative choices.
9. Incorporate Customer Communication Systems
Websites are two-way, interactive
communication systems. You communicate your company's marketing
message to potential customers and make it easy for them to reciprocate
by communicating with you. The better the communication, the
more trust increases, and customers
feel comfortable to do business with you.
Of course, on your contact page, include full contact information
-- name, address, phone number, etc. I'm amazed at the number
of sites that don't include any contact information, but still
expect people to do business with them. Full contact information
builds trust -- even if your customers never need to use it.
One key communication tool is the "Contact Us" response form.
Such a form includes fields that ask for your visitor's name,
contact information and question or comment. When the form is
submitted, it sends an immediate e-mail to you as well as an
e-mail assuring your customer that you'll be reading the message
and responding soon. And you need to keep your word. Respond
to your customers' e-mail promptly!
The poor man's response method is a mailto link (such as username@domain.com)
that allows the customer to use his own e-mail program to send
you an e-mail message. The problem with this approach is that
you often don't get vital contact information from the customer,
such as his phone number. With e-mail that comes from a form,
you can easily filter it via the subject line into the appropriate
folder for immediate viewing. E-mail that comes through a general
e-mail address, on the other hand, easily becomes confused with
spam and could be overlooked.
One of the most popular form-to-email programs, Matt Wright's
FormMail ver. 1.92 (www.scriptarchive.com/formmail.html), was
updated on April 19, 2002 to plug some serious security holes.
It is an excellent tool -- and free, also.
However, there are other ways you can make it easy for customers
to communicate with you. These include
Instant
text chat systems such as LivePerson (www.liveperson.com).
Voice
over Internet (VoIP) systems that allow you to talk to your customers
live in your own voice. Your customers can use text chat to ask
questions, and if she has a computer microphone, she can talk
to you, too.
Instant
Messaging (IM) systems are in widespread use by your customers.
Why not list all your usernames and numbers on your site for
quick response to customer questions?
One excellent way to save time for yourself and your customers
is to develop a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. It'll
cut down on your customers' need to contact you. Excellent customer
service is the basis of any successful business -- on or off
the Internet.
The design decision here is to incorporate multiple ways for
your customer to contact you.
Worksheet. What communication systems have you built into your
site? Which other ones would be valuable to your customers --
and help boost your sales?
10. Create and Test Effective Sales Pages
Every business site -- and many organization sites -- have what
Ken Evoy, in his landmark e-book Make Your Site Sell! (http://sales.sitesell.com/myss),
calls a Most Wanted Response (MWR). Your Most Wanted Response
is probably one of the chief purposes you listed under Point
#1 (above). For many business sites, the purpose is (1) to sell
a product, (2) to have the visitor go through an affiliate link
to buy a product on another site, or (3) to generate contact
information for a future lead or follow-up. For organizations,
success may be measured in memberships or subscriptions. Whatever
your MWR, you must work to optimize responses.
Good sales pages
result in a high ratio of visitors to sales -- called the "conversion rate." A typical site might have a
conversion rate of 3% to 5%, some higher and many lower. Over
the past few years, marketers have developed the art of increasing
the conversion rate. This is especially important when you are
purchasing Pay Per Click (PPC) ads to drive traffic to your site.
Your profit is closely related to (a) the cost of the click and
(b) the conversion rate of the "landing page," that is, the sales
page to which you direct interested shoppers.
To scientifically and systematically increase your conversion
rate to the maximum, you must carefully track sales percentages
for each product your sell. Then make incremental changes to
the landing page or the order system and see if the conversion
rate rises or falls. Over a period of careful study and change,
you'll maximize your sales. To learn just how to do this with
a review of testing tools.
.
What's the design decision here? To commit yourself to seriously
working to increase the response rate.
Worksheet: For which products or services should you work to
increase your conversion rate. Which pages of your website should
be constructed as landing pages?
11. Conduct Usability Trials and Incorporate Changes
We've almost finished our survey of 12 Design Decisions. But
before you quit, you need to test your site thoroughly. All newly
constructed websites contain unseen glitches -- especially those
created by inexperienced developers.
Here's how to conduct your first few usability trials. Ask to
meet with a friend who is an Internet novice. Seat him in front
of a computer, stand near him, and direct him to your site. Tell
him that you'd like him to talk out loud to you about what he
is thinking and the questions that occur to him as he pokes around
your site. Explain to him that you won't be able to answer any
questions at this time, but you want to hear them just the same.
Now watch and take copious notes. Observe what confuses him.
See where he gets hung up. Listen to his questions.
After 10 or 15 minutes of this humbling exercise, you'll detect
plenty of small changes to make. You'll also learn how effective
your navigation system is. If you have built your site with SSIs,
as recommend in Point #6 above, navigation system changes will
require you to modify only one or two of the boilerplate SSI
files. Upload the changes and the whole site will be easier to
navigate.
To discover 85% of the usability problems on your site, repeat
the usability exercise a total of five times, each time, of course,
with a different person who can look at your site through completely
new eyes. For more information on website usability, consult
Dr. Jakob Nielsen's UseIt.com site (www.useit.com) and subscribe
to his free AlertBox e-zine.
What's the design decision here? Submit your site to simple usability
testing with five subjects. Your site will be much better as
a result.
Worksheet. List your five recruits to be usability testers for
your site when you get near completion of your project.
12. Plan to Maintain Your Site for the Long Haul
Building a site for the first time is exciting. Maintaining
it for the next two or three years can be extremely frustrating
unless you've set it up with maintenance in mind. By maintenance
I mean:
Changing
the content of existing information, such as upcoming events,
new industry directions, new personnel, etc. Life isn't static.
Websites shouldn't be either.
Adding
new webpages, such as archiving copies of your newsletters,
adding new products and services.
Changing the content of your home page to make your site look
active and up-to-date.
I strongly recommend that someone in your own organization learn
how to make the everyday website changes that an active organization
requires. Community colleges and adult education curricula often
offer training in webpage design and HTML. A person in your business
can also learn a great deal by studying the books recommended
in Point #2 above.
Yes, you want to have a website designer available to back you
up on occasions when the change needed is beyond your person's
abilities. But webpage maintenance is something you definitely
want to keep in-house, like word-processing and desktop publishing.
Learn how! Otherwise, changes aren't likely to happen in a timely
manner and you may put off requesting changes that should take
place immediately.
What's the design decision? Make sure that you plan for site
maintenance rather than let it fall through the cracks.
Worksheet. How will you keep the website up-to-date? Who in your
organization knows or can learn HTML? How often should this person
be assigned to make necessary changes?
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