New charity sites from Webreality

This week has been an auspicious one for Webreality with new sites for two Jersey charities going live.

First live was www.acet.je, for Jersey's branch of the international AIDS/HIV charity, and I'm writing about it on World Aids Day. The site was designed by our friends at Advertising International and launched Thursday 27 November with a presentation by Executive Director Rosemary Ruddy at the St Pauls Centre in St Helier. We were very pleased to be involved with this project which should help protect Jersey people from the continuing threat of HIV spread. It's easy to forget about long-standing global issues like HIV/AIDS at a time when so many other challenges are on our minds.

Also going live today is www.jerseyhospicecare.com. This has been a charitable donation by Webreality because we've regarded Hospice as our first choice charity for some years. We've been running the Hospice site at no charge for a long time, and the new site moves them forward a long way with the ability to accept direct donations online and sell goods and services on the website. It will also allow people to sign up directly for Hospice's fund-raising events and sponsor participants. It's been a privilege and pleasure to work with the fantastic Hospice team on this project and we wish them well with the new site in the hope that it makes a substantial contribution to their continuous fund-raising efforts.

Recession wisdom

“Consumers don’t stop spending when economies go through down cycles. They look harder for value.”

Kevin Roberts, Saatchi and Saatchi

Down to businesses to find ways of delivering more value!

At Webreality we're looking hard at ways to deliver added value, especially to our existing loyal clients who've supported us in recent years. We have some great new ideas and we'll do everything we can to help our clients get maximum value from their web strategies as times get tougher. Please get in touch if you want to know more about our emerging plans - 01534 488888.

Make your website work harder in tougher times

You don’t need me to tell you that the next 12 months (and maybe beyond) are looking challenging. I’m no economist, but I am a business owner and I know the pressures that many are facing, especially in the small business sector.

So what advice can I offer? If you have a website you probably have a sunk investment in it and some ongoing costs. Now’s the time to make your website work harder for you.

Many businesses own websites that, in happier times, were built and maintained for the wrong reasons.

“We’ve paid for a brochure. We should turn it into a website.”
“All our competitors have them.”
“The boss said we have to have one.”
“It’s 2007, for heaven’s sake! We’ve got to have a website!”
“It would have felt wrong not to have one.”

I’ve heard all of these in the past, and my normal approach is to try to stop the client spending any money unless I can uncover a more valid need to invest.

People generally use the web to do something, not as a way of passing the time. It’s a shock to some businesses when their website usage statistics show that people aren’t hanging out at their website to browse their image galleries or press release archives over a sandwich and latte at lunchtime.

Whatever the nature of your website, it needs to let people do things, complete tasks, however simple they are, or it’s not really fit for much.

And web users are impatient. That’s just the way we are when we want to check our bank balance or buy a DVD or even just get a phone number. We’re often doing it between other jobs. We expect things to work well and quickly and we get annoyed if they don’t. And if we want to spend money and the website frustrates us, the back button’s only a mouse swoop away.

So what to do if you have a website that needs to deliver more to your business? The answer is to review and test your site’s usability.

By focusing on the tasks your target web users are most likely to want to complete at your site, and continuously improving the way they work, you’re making an investment on which you should get a real return.

The place to start is to identify the right tasks. I would go so far as to say that your business website should not exist unless it facilitates the completion of tasks that ultimately lead to the retention of customers, the creation of new ones or the generation of new sales from existing ones.

Of course, the right tasks will vary from business to business, and they could range from full completion of sales online through to simply finding out your phone number or address. (You’d be surprised how many websites fall down in this most simple of tasks.) Some of the answers will come from inside your business, others are best found in the minds of your customers and other website users.

Once you have identified the top tasks for your site, test the ones that are already available on the site. This means writing a test plan and getting people who represent your target audience to complete the tasks for you in a controlled situation under observation and - ideally - with the use of recording technology so you can review and learn from their behaviour and feedback.

You don’t need lots of testers. In fact, one is a disproportionately valuable start. And two testers are 100% better than one!

I guarantee they’ll spring some surprises on you. You know and probably love your website. You know exactly where to find things and how it all works. Someone who’s new to the site will come with no love for it and an open mind as to its effectiveness. They will see it in a completely different light.

The sort of things that they will point out will be inconsistent navigation, poor text copy, bad layout, confusing processes, unwelcome jargon, over-long click paths... and much more. They will miss things that are obvious to you and point out things you’ve never noticed.

“Oh, I didn’t notice that link.” “That button wasn’t there on the home page.” “What does “[insert technical word] mean?” “Why can’t I do that on the home page?”

So once you have the feedback, you act on it, as long as it’s credible. This means that it’s come from enough testers and they are sufficiently representative of your target user group. Brief your web developer to make the changes, and if you’ve got it right your return from your website should improve dramatically.

If there are new tasks to be added, the major development work should be done before you engage your testers and the testers should be asked to test the tasks on a development version of the site so that you are in a position to make final changes before going live.

After that? Nothing stands still for long on the web, so plan to repeat the process when your top tasks change, your target user group changes, or at the very least once a year to take account of web user expectations which evolve continuously driven by the technology they experience on big budget cutting edge sites.

You don’t need to buy a new website - you need a better website, and the one you already have is the best place to start.

Chrome shines in early weeks

Chrome is Google's new web browser. But you knew that, right?!

It's been publicly available for just a few weeks, and at Webreality we found these stats recently at the excellent and free W3Schools.com site.

3.1% adoption in the first month! Now, even taken with a small pinch of salt for the fact that these stats are derived primarily from W3's user base which will be early-adopter heavy, that's an incredible achievement for Chrome. Especially since it's currently only available for Windows.

A voice from the past

I like George Orwell. Always have. Maybe it's to do with the fact that my father was apparently reading Lord of the Flies as he paced around outside the delivery room on the day in 196? when I was delivered into the world.

Anyway, there's an extract from Orwell's 1946 essay, "Politics and the English Language" that I particularly value. I think it's a good set of basic rules for anyone who writes English for a living - and, let's face it, that's a lot of us.

Can't say I always stick faithfully to these rules when I write. But my reason for reproducing theme here is that I think they offer a (largely) useful set of guidelines for writing for the web.

1. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never us a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

Usability in content comes from being concise, user-focused, to the point and action orientated. Orwell's rules steer us in the right direction, especially 2, 3 and 5. Although I agree broadly with 4 for the web, I hesitate a little because there can be good reasons to use the passive, notably in headings (see Jakob Nielsen on the subject here). 1 has suffered a little with time, but the principle holds. And you can't argue with 6!

Fifty years on, and still relevant. Not bad!