Botox for your Web site Make these changes now to improve online results

by Jason Baer
President, Mighty Interactive

Chances are, your organization’s Web site isn’t all it could be, and you most likely know it and will even admit it to people who are not capable of firing you.

You’re not alone.

Thousands of Web sites built circa 2000-2002 are showing signs of wear and fatigue like a dot com Larry King. Today’s trend is away from flashy, narcissistic pandemics about why YOUR bolt and fastener company is the BEST, and toward obvious, easy-to-use, functional Web sites that respect the time and intelligence of their users.

You may not have the budget (or the moxie) to take your current site out back, pull an Old Yeller, and start fresh. Hence, this set of important changes you can make to eliminate small Web site lines and wrinkles, and return a fresh, healthy glow.

Focus on the User

Nobody comes to a Web site on accident. Each visitor needs something from you. The key to online success is figuring out what those needs are, and answering them as quickly as possible. Think of your site as an extension of your customer service department rather than your marketing department, and you’re on the right track.

How do you know what the needs of your audience are? Ask them. Put together an easy online survey using www.zoomerang.com or a similar tool, and invite visitors to participate. Include a question that requires survey takers to describe (or select from options) precisely why they came to the site. Use that information to reconfigure your site’s organization and content.

Once you have an understanding of what people want from you, determine how best to provide it. Create a chart of all the pages on your Web site. Does this page answer one of the primary five to seven visitor questions? If not, does this page clearly direct the visitor to another page that answers a question? If not, delete the page from your site. Your top seven visitor questions should be answerable in two clicks from the home page. When naming your sections think like the user: “I need to …” About Us may not be sexy, but it’s more useful than Mission and Vision.

Have a Clear Home Page

The home page of your site has two purposes. Briefly describe who you are and where you are so visitors know they are in the appropriate place, and direct users to an inside page most likely to answer their question.

Do not use your home page to try to tell your whole story, and unless you are managing a Web site for a rock band, porn star, or art gallery do not put a flash introduction on your site. 93% of Internet users click that convenient “skip intro” button, so having your logo burst into flames accompanied by the opening seven bars of “We Are the Champions” isn’t exactly money well spent.

To avoid confusing visitors the moment they arrive, give them a reasonable number of next click options from your home page. Remember that many of these people will be seeing your site for the very first time, and thus need to scan and evaluate each link and button on your home page before determining their next action.You’re only going to get a few clicks from visitors, so spend them wisely. Ideally, provide 15 or fewer next click options. See www.viack.com for a good example.

Write Copy for the Web

People don’t read online, they skim. It’s a physiology thing, I’m told. Something about the imperceptible flicker of the computer monitor making it difficult to keep the eye tracking across a lot of text. Whatever the cause, eyeballs jump around a Web page like Tom Cruise on Oprah.

So, don’t just repurpose your existing brochures and marketing materials. Instead, determine before you write anything what the goal of that page will be, and then write the page in an inverted, journalistic style. The conclusion is ideally in the first sentence, and definitely in the first paragraph. As the page progresses, provide more detail and supporting points.

Wherever possible, use a lot of subheads and bullet points to give the visitor’s eyes a roadmap to what’s important on the page. Keep sentences short and punchy without a lot of conjunctions (“and” “but” “or” for anyone that didn’t grow up on Schoolhouse Rock).

Guide the user toward a logical next click by providing links to other relevant pages at the bottom of each page. (See our www.mightyinteractive.com site for an example of this technique). This way, visitors won’t always have to scroll back up to the top of the page and reassess the site’s navigation hierarchy to determine their next click.

Keep Score

The Internet is the most measurable medium yet devised, and features actual, honest-to-goodness counting of each person that comes to your site. None of that “representative data pool” statistical alchemy a la Nielsen ratings (450 households rating TV for all of metro Phoenix) – we’re talking numerical truth, baby.

It’s imperative that you use this data to consistently measure the effectiveness of your site, and make changes based on your findings.

Decide what behavior you want your Web site visitors to engage in on your site. Filling out your lead form? Calling your toll-free number? Downloading your white paper? Purchasing your product?

Whichever it is, use a Web analytics program (we recommend Clicktracks and Urchin on Demand (recently bought by Google)) to determine at least monthly how many of your visitors did in fact do what you want them to do on your site, and more importantly, your conversion rate.

To determine your conversion rate, divide the number of desired actions by the number of people who visited your site. If 100,000 people visited your site last month, and 1,000 of them filled out your lead form, your conversion rate is 1%.

Conversion rate is the magic number online because it tells you how effective your site is at aligning what you want people to do with what they want from you.

If you want your site to generate a larger number of desired actions there are only two ways to do so. You can ignore the shortcomings of your site and get more people to visit – which can be an expensive proposition and detrimental to the brand. Or, you can inject a little botox into your site, make it customer-friendly, and get more results from the people already there.

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