What are you selling - a great website or a Great Product?

by Frann Leach

“Clear content, simple navigation, and answers to customer questions have the biggest impact on business value. Advanced technology matters much less.” Jakob Nielsen, UseIt.com

Making a visitor-friendly site

When it gets right down to it, you want your website to be a place that makes a visitor feel welcome and gives them what they want.

To a visitor, finding out what he or she wants easily and quickly is the number one priority. Nice layout, pretty graphics and the rest are all very well, but if it makes your site load too slowly, it will drive people away. And if your navigation is hard to... er... navigate, many of your potential paying customers will give up and try somewhere else.

I spend a lot of time researching different products and services online, and one thing that really annoys me is a site that makes me jump through hoops to get the information I'm looking for. If I have to wait for an “introductory video” to tick to its conclusion - or click from one page to another, and then another, and then another... I've lost interest. It has to be really vital for me to bother looking any further on that particular site.

Remember, there's always another site offering what you are trying to sell. If you make it hard for your visitor, they will go somewhere else.

What to put into your website - and what to leave out

Business components:

Company details

Your company name, address, phone number and other contact details should be on the site somewhere.

If you are in business as a tradesman, the phone number should be prominently displayed on virtually every page. Other types of business may prefer to have them on a special Contact Us page.

Allowing your customers to contact you when they don't have access to a computer or don't want to use one for some reason is helpful, particularly for those customers who find computers difficult to deal with. It's also reassuring for potential customers to see a physical address, helping to convey the impression you want: of a reliable and trustworthy operation, not one that is likely to disappear overnight.

Background

It's useful to give a brief summary of how long the company has been in business, its experience, and so on. A picture of the proprietor wearing a smile or the team who normally carry out the work is a useful addition, as it helps to make the customer feel that he “knows” and can trust you.

Product/Service information

If you're selling physical or electronically-delivered products, you need to give full details of each product, a small picture, a description of what it does, and everything that is relevant when someone is considering whether or not to buy.

This includes the price, of course. You might think this goes without saying, but you would be surprised how often I have come across websites that tell me everything else - and forget to tell me how much I would have to pay. I'm one of those people who doesn't buy things without a price tag. Am I unique? I don't think so.

Other information

This covers things like availability (for a hotel site, for example), how to book an appointment for an estimate (for contractors), how to get a tradesman to call (for plumbers and similar trades), delivery costs and timescales, and so on. You might also want to include some articles about topics relevant to your business, which will help to attract the search engines to your site.

Design components:

A clean design with a layout that is easy to grasp

Sometimes I come across a site that hits me right between the eyes. The designer has obviously gone to a lot of trouble to make it attractive, but to me it looks a mess.

I can't find what I'm looking for. The navigation has been tucked down at the bottom of the page so that it doesn't spoil the “look”. Utility has been sacrificed for beauty. And as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, quite often I don't even find it that good to look at, either.

A business site needs to focus tightly on delivering the information the customer wants in a way that is easy to follow. Your visitor isn't there to be entertained by your designer's artistic talent, but to get details of that new greenhouse, mobile phone, or office chair they are looking for.

This means navigation should be in the place they expect to find it: at the top of the screen or on the left hand side. There needs to be plenty of “white space” so that they don't get a feeling of “Information Overload”, and colours chosen should be tasteful, without obscuring the data you are trying to convey.

A typeface chosen for readability rather than beauty

That's not to say you have to choose an ugly typeface! There are plenty of fonts that are attractive at the same time as being easy to read.

However, for the time being, the choice of fonts available for use online is quite limited, effectively being restricted to the ones installed as standard on home computers. This is because HTML does not carry details of font construction along with it, but uses the fonts it finds on the equipment it is being displayed on at the time.

This means that your website will not look exactly the same on a PC, a Mac and a mobile phone, because the fonts installed on each device are different. A good designer will create a design that will not be damaged beyond use by such differences.

Graphics - only if relevant

Do you really need that picture of an actor pretending to be a successful businessman or happy family man?

If so, fine. But make sure the picture has been optimised for speed of loading (not everyone has broadband) and that it isn't so big that it overpowers what you are trying to say.

If not, leave it out. Successful sales pages are often the ones with the least graphical content - remember, it's the words that do the selling, not the pictures.

Of course, if you're selling a physical product, it's a good idea to have a picture of that product on the screen. It can be just a thumbnail, with the option to click for a larger image to open up. This keeps to a minimum the graphics overhead that can slow load times to a crawl.

Accessibility

In many countries, including the UK, this is a legal requirement. But even if it wasn't - do you really want to pass up on the opportunity to do business with someone, just because they have a disability that makes accessibility difficult for them?

Accessibility covers things like: making sure that all your pictures have descriptions attached so that blind people can use them, using tables only in places where the contents don't make sense any other way (eg. a list of different capacities with different prices), and so on. Amateur designers often use tables as a layout tool. This is not the way to build an accessible website.

Summary

When designing a business website, what you leave out is almost as important as what you include. Don't fill your page with slow-loading useless stuff that does nothing to add to the information your customer is looking for. Do make sure that what he or she wants to find out is easy to reach, regardless of their abilities, without going through a maze to get there.

Frann ("Tiggsy") Leach is the webmistress and owner of GardenZone and TheWebsiteDesign.Co.UK. She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland.

©2007 Frann Leach. All rights reserved