Usability
Increase conversion on your site (visitors who take the action you want: buy, sign-up, call) – Design, content, information architecture, etc.
Findability
Increase visitors to your site (traffic, page views) – Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Search Engine Marketing (SEM) like Google Adwords, Banner Advertising, etc.
You’re reading this because you want to see what you can do to make your website more effective and profitable. There are two main ways to increase effectiveness:
1. Increase the number of purchases or leads from the visitors who are ON your website (usability)
2. Increase the number of visitors TO your site (findability)
Previously we focused more on findability. So this next part we are going to focus our discussion on usability. Specifically we are going to talk all about the usability of web site design to increase revenue
We’ll Cover Usability:
• Your Website Goals
• Guidelines for Web Design
• Landing Page Basics
• Before & After Redesigns
How many of you are happy with your current website design and are just looking for a few nuggets to improve upon it?
How many of you are considering or underway with a complete site redesign right now?
You may find after this infomation that you want to make big changes to your existing site… or maybe you only need a few small changes and tweaks to boost what you’re already doing well.
We know there are a thousand different ways to design and organize your content. Today we are going to show you some best practices and real examples of how website owners have interpreted those practices and adapted them to best fit their site goals. As we go along you may want totake some notes on ideas that you can tweak and apply to your website.
Specifically, we will talk about your site goals, general guideline for web design, how to arrange your content intuitively for users, ways to increase enquiries, how landing pages can
increase revenue and lastly we’ll look at a company’s recent re-design for their website.
We’re going to focus on how you’re utilising ecommerce functions on your website (if indeed you are). You may find some ways to increase your revenue just by making some simple changes to your site.
Before we can look at website design and how to arrange content, we have to define the goals of a site and what makes it successful. This means we need to identify what our “Key Success Events”
(or conversions) are.
What key actions are you looking for visitors to take while on your website?
Tracking Those Goals
Measurements & Benchmarking
• Unique visitors
• Page views (which ones are popular)
• Referring domains (other sites) and search engines.
• Keywords that attracted visitors to your site
• Online purchases
How you measure those key actions will show what is successful on your site and where you should focus your efforts to improve your website.
Some key measurements to establish your baseline benchmarks for your site are:
Unique visitors: This will help you gauge an influx or decline of visitors and any correlation to marketing that you may have made
Page views: This is another way to see which pages on your website are being viewed the most. If the pages people are gravitating to are not the most important pages on your site, you will want to rethink our you link to those pages and explore ways to make them more visible on your site
Referring search engines: This is a great way to see which search engines refer the most traffic to you. It also can help you decide if you want to run a campaign on one of the search engines to drive more targeted traffic to your site.
Referring domains: This tells you which websites are sending you visitors. You may discover a site that linked to you and is sending considerable traffic to you. Maybe you want to contact them and create even more of a partnership with this synergy?
Keywords: You can see which keywords people were using to find your website. You will want to make sure these keywords are used visibily in your website content so that once visitors get to your page they can easily find what they were looking for. You may discover that important keywords that should drive people to your site, aren’t. In that
case you’ll want to review your content and make sure those keywords are everywhere (links, text, images, meta-data, etc)
Online Purchases: This is a very important one to measure that allows you to see how people use your site and convert revenue for your business.
You can track all of these things using Google Analytics. It’s free. You can create your own Google Account to get started if you don’t already have an analytics program.
Knowing what your goals are and what conversions we want to see, helps us cater to and target the best types of potential customers.
Does your content answer what they need to know? Are your calls to actions clear so they know what to do next?
Chances are our visitors will fall into three main categories: browser, comparer, purchaser.
Are there are certain groups of people that your business is more geared towards?
Is there a primary subset group of people your business caters to, such as
Other Businesses
Families
University students
Arranging Content
How can these people find what they need?
Information
Architecture
• Main Navigation (Categories)
• Strong Keywords
• Page / Section Sorting
If you’re building a new site or undergoing a substantial redesign, an excellent way to make your web design user friendly is to involve your customers to give suggestions on how they would expect content arranged or categorized. This flow of information is also referred to as Information Architecture. The best way to get input on categorizing your content is through page / section sorting / priortising
Page / Section sorting is done by taking little 3×5 index cards and writing down all the topics that you plan to put on your website. Put one topic per card. Be sure your topics include strong keywords most relevant to your business.
What’s helpful is to ask a few of your customers to help you with an experiment. Give them the cards then ask them to organize them in groups. Then ask them to give a label for each group. This helps you see how the users expect it to be categorized. Then you’ll be able to create a successful site map which is the key to designing a user-friendly site.