5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee (8 page)

Now that we have fully covered the importance of building a website correctly from the verbal perspective, let’s get into the action steps you can take to make a verbally effective website a reality for your business.

The following steps are really questions you will need to ask yourself.
So, take out a piece of paper (one sheet for each question), and write down the following questions.
Allow yourself to brainstorm, and then narrow down your answers until you are done.

        1.
What do I want?

        2.
What do I bring/offer?

        3.
Who are my audiences?
What would
they be
search
ing
for to find me?

        4.
What are some anecdotal stories I know of people who have experienced a particular challenge that my type of product/service has helped?

        5.
If I had to pick one asset of this business that serves the need of my audience, what is it?
What would be the second and third?

        6.
What is
my
call to action?
(Examples include calling you, emailing you, making an online purchase, referring someone to your site, etc.)

Often, success in accomplishing something lies in the questions themselves.
When you take the action step of answering these questions, you will have the bulk of the fodder you need for developing effective and great website content.

It may sound overly simple or blatantly obvious, but a website must be easy to use!
You’d be surprised how many websites are difficult—even impossible—to navigate.
If you want your site visitors to read what you have to say, engage with your brand, and take the actions you desire, your site absolutely must be simple to use.

When talking about ease of use, I frequently like to reference a fantastic book on web design by Seth Godin called
The Big Red Fez
.
In his book, Godin uses the phrase, “Where is the banana?” in reference to training monkeys.
What this means is that, when training monkeys, if you want them to find the banana, you must show them where the banana is!

And since a monkey trainer is using the banana to goad the monkey into taking certain actions, clearly those actions won’t be taken if the monkey can’t even find the banana.

The following is an example of a ‘banana’ that can’t be found.
The website you see below is selling chocolate fountains, and yet when you’re on this webpage, it is incredibly difficult to know where to go and what to do.
The left
-
side navigation bar has a large number of tabs, and the entire page is overwhelming to look at.

© 2010 Sephra Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Don’t make this mistake!
Your website must be functionally designed in a way that makes it clear what you want people to do, and naturally leads them there with ease.
Chocolate Fountain Sales has since updated their website
with a new
e-commerce design that is much easier to navigate.

In today’s electronic world, people are accessing the Internet from a wide variety of screen types and sizes—from iPods, tablets and Macs to PC laptops and desktops—and the layout of your website must be viewable from all of those which your target customers might be using.

Although
a website
should
be designed to look good on the majority of viewing devices, many website are designed to fit only one size and shape.
This issue tends to arise frequently with websites that were built many years ago; since the list of possible viewing devices has exponentially grown, many times an old site design can’t be viewed on modern devices.

Here’s an example: I was analyzing the website of a client recently, and it turned out her website was designed to fit a 640x480 pixel screen (a standard screen size 10 years ago), yet today the smallest screen size on a desktop PC or laptop is typically 1024x768; and in fact, a lot of websites are optimized for an even larger screen.

The result is that the website does not fill out the screen, which can cause a number of issues.
The small size makes the site look dated, for one.

Worse still is
the graphic designer with a huge monitor that designs the site to fill their own screen. Here is an example of a website that was designed for a monitor twice as large as the average user’s. In this case
, the user only sees bits and pieces of the message and the design.
The user experience is completely compromised; as you can see, we can only see a fraction of the homepage, and therefore we have no idea what the business does, or what service or product it offers customers.

A
user can become quickly irritated by having to scroll left and right, up and down
…
and when that happens, almost 100% of the time, that user leaves the site and goes to find a competing site whose layout makes it easily navigable.

To add insult to injury, this particular home page design consists of a multi-megabyte Flash presentation that fills the home page. Although the graphic designer could say that the large Flash file “played fine” on
his
own computer, when a user is viewing this site over the Internet, the home pag
e takes several minutes to load!

The moral of the story is that
as you embark on building your website
, it is
critical to consider
your target customers and what type of devices will be used to view your website
.

How a business’s website is organized is a direct reflection of how organized the business is. When people have a hard time finding what they’re looking for on the website, not only are they frustrated with the website, they are frustrated with the business.

A web page should be not just attractive and informative, but it must be directive, as well.
A user should have no problem understanding exactly what she is supposed to do, and given an easy way to do it.
And yet, many websites—no matter how pretty or well
-
worded—leave users wondering how to get where they need to go.
That’s a great way to lose your customers before they’re even customers!

In the case of Dell in the example below, it is made very clear what a customer should do.
A customer who wants to ‘celebrate the holidays with Dell’ knows exactly where to click
…
as does a customer buying products for the home; a small or medium business; a member of the public sector; or a large enterprise.
In addition, the ‘search’ box is clearly visible.

© 2013 Dell Inc. All Rights Reserved. Used by permission.

When visiting this website, it’s very easy to navigate, and it’s very clear what to do.
Its navigation is clean and simple, and it is easily found across the top and in the center of the page.
Additionally, access to key information and retail shopping is made simple and quick.

If you do want to get fancy
…
say, using a flash presentation to engage your users
…
you need to consider download speed to ensure ease of use for your prospective customers.
In many cases, flash presentations can take up to 30 seconds to download (there are a number of factors that can cause this, one of which is the quality of your web host).
The point is, be sure that any graphic or video enhancements are an asset, not a deterrent, to your website.

In conclusion to our discussion on hyperlinks and access, my main message is that sometimes less is more.
Keep it clean, display navigation bar tabs clearly, and make access to information and actions easy.

Hyperlinks are essential for ensuring your visitors can quickly and easily jump from page to page as needed.
It follows, then, that by clearly formatting hyperlinks, you make it easier for users to navigate your site—and that’s important.
Why?
Because if visitors don’t know how to navigate your site, they won’t.

One issue I often come across is that it is not always apparent to the user which elements are hyperlinks, and which are not.
In the case of many websites (especially ones that were built many years ago), some pages have bold or bold/underlined text that appears to be a hyperlink but is not.

Another danger is having images which are hyperlinked, but which don’t have text associated with them.
In other words, when a user hovers over an image but no text pops up, the user doesn’t necessarily know to click on it, since it’s not clearly distinguished as a hyperlink.

Another common concern I see with hyperlinking is when
hyperlinks
don’t work
.
I almost want to say, “enough said” here, but it’s such an epidemic that I must address it further.
If you go look through 10 websites in their entirety, I’ll be
t that
eight of them have broken link issues, or links that dead end or link to the wrong page.
From a functional standpoint, hyperlinks—
all of them
—must work flawlessly, without exception.