Here's an interesting usability lesson that we're learning at Webreality at the moment. We run the website of the Jersey branch of the Chartered Institute of Marketing. The site's been in existence for a couple of years at the URL www.cim.je and it's a content-rich resource for Jersey-resident CIM members.
Like all Webreality sites, cim.je was built with search engine visibility in mind, and it has performed well in Google. Here's the result of a search on "CIM" in google.co.uk on 12 Feb 2008:
http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=cim&btnG=Search&meta=
A great result on a pretty generic three letter acronym. The resultant traffic amounted to 2608 referrals on the search term "CIM" from Google to cim.je between 1 Oct 07 and 12 Feb 08. Trouble is, the high visibility of the site has started to cause local branch committee members an unforeseen problem: the site is attracting general membership enquiries from non-Jersey residents who should be enquiring through the main CIM site, www.cim.co.uk.
In a recent redesign, the site was given a high profile "JERSEY BRANCH" flag just below the CIM logo in a bid to alert those who bump into it in error. The international enquiries continued. So we made some pretty drastic content updates to the content page, with references to Jersey everywhere. The international enquiries are still coming, albeit less frequently.
What's the lesson for site designers and webmasters? I think you should never assume anything about how a typical reader of your site will see the content. It's our responsibility to ensure that the sites we build and manage deliver the information or process the site reader needs, and with minimum effort on their part. And that includes wasting as little time as possible for people who stumble into the site accidentally when they really need to be elsewhere.
If it's not obvious enough that the CIM Jersey site is only for Jersey members, we'll keep tuning it until it is!
Tuesday, 12 February 2008
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