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Consider this a Three-step Guide to Planning a Useful Website. A
website is like an information flow, with you as the provider and your
site visitors as the receivers of the information. If you don't plan
your website with this in mind right from the start, you could find
yourself with a brand new website that solves all your immediate
needs... but not those of your site visitors. Clicking away from your
website has never been easier for Internet users. There are about 35
million websites competing with yours on the Internet (source:
Zooknic). Search engine results are becoming better and better and
Internet connection speeds faster and faster - finding one of your
competitors' websites is now very quick and very easy.
Work out your site visitors' immediate needs.
Your website has to provide information that fulfils the immediate
needs of your site visitors. This is the fundamental principle behind
usable website design, so let's repeat it one more time: Your website
has to provide information that fulfils the immediate needs of your
site visitors.
OK, now we've got that straight, we come up against a problem: Your
goals for the website are probably different to the immediate needs of
your site visitors. Oh Great!!!!! Let's illustrate this problem, and
its solution, with the example of a web design company's website. Their
immediate goal is to get visitors to contact them and ultimately
commission them to do some web development work. Their site visitors
are probably interested in getting web development work done (if not,
why are they on this website?), but it's unlikely that this is their
immediate need when they arrive at the website.
The immediate needs of the site visitors' are probably to answer questions like:
• Can I trust them?
• Are they any good at what they do?
• Will they get the job done?
Before the website begins to sell to its site visitors, it has to
answer their questions and put their fears to rest. We want to be
monster killers. You kill the potentials clients monsters and they’ll
be with you for ever. This is fundamentally important, so one more
time: Before the website begins to sell to its site visitors, it has to
answer their questions and put their fears to rest. In the case of this
web design company, they could provide a portfolio, client testimonials
etc.
Create an information flow
Now we've worked out what our site visitors' immediate needs are, we
need to create an information flow, a path (or paths) that your site
visitors will traverse whilst on your website. The path(s) will
initially address their concerns and needs and will carefully take them
towards completing your goal for them.
To create this plan we'll need to:
• Identify the different groups of people who'll use your website
• Work out what you want each of these groups to achieve on your website
• Identify the information you'll need to provide for them to achieve this (and in what order)
• Work out what might put them off achieving this
• Identify the information you'll need to provide to prevent them being put off.
From this, you'll be able to create a list of website pages and a rough
idea of how they might flow together. You'll then be able to work out
exactly what pages to include on the website and how to group these
pages together. Bear in mind though, some users will need more
information than others, so you'll always need to provide them with a
choice of continuing on the information flow or jumping off so that
they can achieve the goal you've set for them.
Going back to the website of the web design company, an information
flow that their site visitors might go on could look something like
this:
Homepage, then
Portfolio, then
Client testimonials, then
Company background, then
Staff bios, then
Web design tips, then
Terms and Conditions, then
Contact us
The web design company's ultimate goal is for site visitors to contact
them and request their services. Wherever users are in this flow, they
must be able to easily and immediately jump straight to the contact
page at any point. You've probably already seen this in action on
websites. You arrive at the homepage and there are two or three
prominent links (often in the form of boxes) telling you some basic
information and requesting that you click on them to take you into some
other part of the website. You go to that page on the website, read the
information and then choose where to go next. And this keeps going on,
until you either quit or complete the desired goal of the website.
Usability testing
Once the website plan has been created, it's time to test it. This is
the most important usability test that needs to be done and the one
that will save you the most time and money in the long run. According
to IBM, every $1 invested in making your website easy-to-use returns
$10-$100. If you don't do any usability testing you may discover that
the structure of the website doesn't make sense once the website's up
and running. This can and has happened and it leaves you with two
choices: redesign the website or make a new website - neither are
attractive options.
The most common objections to doing usability testing are:
• It's too expensive!
• It'll take too much time!
• I don't know how to do it!
Wrong!!!!!! Usability testing, especially at this early stage is incredibly cheap, quick, informal and easy to do.
You just need to show five people the plan/site map of the website and ask them:
• What's the point of this website?
• If you were on this homepage, where you would click? And where after that?
• Is it what you need?
That's it! As long as these five people roughly fit into your user
profile everything should be fine. It's been shown that using five
people for a usability test will uncover 85% of the usability issues of
the website.
Please contact us for further details.
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