Almost weekly, I am asked what the single most important factor in a website is.
I’ve often cited traffic (see search engine optimisation and search engine marketing) because without traffic, users and customers, what’s the point? You can have the best website, though if nobody is using it…
Other times, I cite the business plan behind the website being the most important factor; if a website is not designed to do something, it won’t do anything. It is critical that a strategic, sensible business plan delivering business benefit exists before the website is shaped. Otherwise, what’s the point of spending a dollar?
My answers however are only right in circumstances, and really, there are a number of very different answers when a website already understands and achieves the elements of success. In those circumstances, it is not so much what makes a website work, but what can make a website better.
Recently, we’ve taken on several very substantial redevelopment projects with the common characteristic that the websites we’re redeveloping are already very successful. They generate revenue, they have significant traffic, and they’re leaders in their field.
Website Usability
We’ve spent hundreds of hours exploring competitors, interviewing customers and understanding the aspirations of the client and really, the factor they’re all looking to achieve falls under the header, usability.
The success of a website is defined by its usability, and usability is defined by the ability of a user to achieve (get) from the website what they intended.
Great usability is directly attributable to a great user experience, and it is off the back of a great user experience that websites can present and sell secondary products and services (upselling) the user might not have been looking for or expected… they’re just in that frame of mind.
These successful clients of ours all have one complaint; they’re convinced that customers are not always able to find what they’re looking for and so do not become customers. Subsequently, the benefits that arrive from being able to sell more to the client are entirely mitigated.
All that investment in traffic and design and the client walks.
One of the problems that arrives from tackling a website development project from a creative perspective (as is often the way) is that the information architecture typically ends up reflecting how the client might purchase their own products and services as opposed to how the customer might.
You end up with a great looking website, but it’s really only a redesign of the same website as before; try as you might, you’re drawn to how it has been achieved previously and that becomes the benchmark.
The redesign of a website should start – and end – with information architecture; defining user journeys, what they’re likely to be looking for at each stage of the buying process and putting it all within reach.
Website Design - 360 Navigation
There are a lot of methodologies for determining exactly how and what users are looking for, though I often advise clients to focus on the 360 degree navigation approach which assumes – rightly in my opinion – that the client knows nothing about your products, your services or who you are.
Let’s use the example of a property business that provides property leasing and sales, as well as property services such as property management and property marketing.
The 360 navigational structure, focuses around the four core areas of information a customer might search for, or search by:
· Everything is delivered by people
· Everything we do is a service
· Everything is about location
· Everything is about property
In respect to the navigation, there are three concepts:
1. Users are never compartmentalised or nor require backtracking through the website; content is logically connected based on likely user journeys; for instance, I want to learn more about a service, then the locations the services are available, then the people that provide the services and so forth.
The use of secondary content to support the primary website content– such as case studies, industry reports and featured properties – adds very real credibility to the primary website content, while providing an excellent and very beneficial user experience.
2. Users to not need to guess where they might find website content within the website; they can find services by locations, locations by services, people by services or properties by people.
This is particularly important given that the first page of the website visited by 95% of visitors arriving through search engines (Google) will not be the homepage; not only do we want users to feel compelled to continue through the website, we want them to be able to do so from whatever page they first arrived on without having to revert to home.
Content repurposing will assist with this, where we will determine the location of the client and dynamically provide relevant, location-based secondary content in support of the primary website content.
3. Content is layered by detail and relevance; a user requiring only light detail and information is never presented with heavy detail, while a user requiring detail can easily identify and access it.
The user of internal website bookmarking will further assist users looking to identify and reference disparate information, possibly attempting to compare information within the website or with competitor websites.