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.