I got a note from a prospect the other day saying, roughly, “We don’t think we need a site architect. Our IT department is going to work with our designer.” Yikes. That short exchange raises so many concerns. I’ll start with the last one first.

1. Your IT department won’t work with your designer. They will abuse them. Trust me. Unless you have someone from marketing involved, your website will turn out like that car that Homer Simpson’s automotive exec brother let him design – with disastrous results. The smart people in IT are technology focused, and technology is only a tiny part of an effective website. By analogy, an electronics guy is ideal for fixing your television, but you wouldn’t hire him to produce a TV commercial for you. Your website is a communication tool that uses technology to deliver the message.
2. An IT department and a designer, even if they manage to achieve some sort of workable detente, are not enough. Your process should be led by someone who possesses a broad understanding of websites as communication tools. In addition to that project leader, you’ll need people on your website team who are skilled in
   • marketing
   • website usability
   • content development
   • search optimization
   • project management
   • visual communication of information
   • website development (which is specialized and different from most of what your IT department does all day)

   Some people can do more than one of these things well, but nobody can do all of them.

I just finished reading Steve Krug’s latest book, Rocket Surgery Made Easy, and was particularly struck by his suggestion that you tweak your website rather than redesigning it. In fact, one of his usability testing maxims is "When fixing problems, always do the least you can do."

"Do the least you can do" isn’t a phrase you hear often in business. Of course, you see it in practice every time you turn around, but nobody admits that minimal effort is their work philosophy. But for fixing usability problems on a website, it makes a lot of sense:

• Website users (aka humans) are notoriously resistant to change, even if the change is an improvement. So keeping the change minimal is good.
• You can make small changes – tweaks – quickly, so you can see an improvement quickly.
• Tweaks usually don’t cost much in development or design time or dollars.
• Tweaks don’t upset the apple carts of stakeholders the way a redesign does. There’s much less resistance to a tweak.
• Rather than the drop in sales or conversions that inevitably follows a redesign, a tweak might actually increase sales.

Steve Krug mentions the case of a company CEO whose site was used in a usability test demo at a workshop. The demo test turned up a usability problem with the process of signing up for online billing. The company implemented a quick tweak, and based on the first couple of months’ results, they estimated that this single tweak would save them $100,000 a year (presumably in postage and printing, though the book doesn’t elaborate).

So how do you know what to tweak? Do some usability testing. I’ve been using Krug’s approach to discount usability testing for years, since I read his first book, Don’t Make Me Think. When they’ve watched actual users trying to do something on their site, my customers have always found something they could do to make their site work better.

Why do we call the gift that keeps on re-gifting a “white elephant”? The answer may surprise you, and along the way it offers a valuable lesson about productivity for your website.

It’s Good to Be the King (or His Pet)

In the lands where such beasts could be found — India, Sri Lanka, Siam, Burma — a rare white elephant was once a venerated animal, prized for its pale complexion, housed in regal comfort, attended by a corps of handlers, fed the finest foods. To own a white elephant was a sign of high social status, and kings and princes and poobahs showed off their white elephants to impress their awestricken guests.

Problem was, these elephants ate a lot. And took up a lot of room in the Taj Mahal. And made prodigious piles of elephant poop. And didn’t do a lick of work (unlike their ordinary gray cousins, who were busting their elephant butts). So when they were in ornery moods, Asian kings of old would make a grand and showy gift of a white elephant to the king of some distant land. The rival king couldn’t refuse — the white elephant was too “valuable.” But he knew it was going to eat him out of house and palace. The gift of a white elephant could ruin you.

Sound Like Anybody You Know?

Or anything you know? I’m thinking specifically of your website. Like the venerated white elephant, many websites chew up resources, demand constant attention, and don’t pull their weight in the kingdom. Think about it: If you have a website, your ongoing costs likely include domain name registration, site hosting, content creation, site updates and maintenance, problem resolution. Not to mention the investment you’ve already sunk into the design and development. A website takes cash, and it takes resources. Shouldn’t it be giving something back?

Let’s Do Some Heavy Lifting

Your website shouldn’t just stand there, it should do something. It can save you money — reduce the number of information requests that have to be answered by a person, for example, or deliver documents in PDF format to save printing costs (and trees). It can make you money — through traditional e-commerce, lead generation, or simply by serving as an integral part of your marketing tool chest. In the best case, your website will both save you money and make you money. Do you know how hard your site is working? If not, it’s time to find out. Eight Trails’ website assessment is a good place to start.

“The audience is everything.”

A website should be designed to meet the needs of the site user, not the site owner. Too many companies forget to think like their customers when they design, organize, and develop content for their websites. They create a site designed by committee, organized by company structure, written like an annual report. (If you suspect your site might be one of those, use the checklist in my post 10 Danger Signs of an Underperforming Website to find out.)

There are a number of tools available to you to get to know your site users — web analytics, online surveys, focus groups, user interviews, live user tests, competitive site reviews, clickstream analysis — and the ones you should use depend on the type of information you’re seeking. But doing any of them is better than guessing.

Test Early and Often

If you have an existing site, find out how well it’s meeting your users’ needs. Nothing makes your site’s problems — and often the solutions to those problems — clearer than watching a real live user struggle to find something or make sense out of your clever name for a feature or a website section. You can learn a lot from simple testing in your office, or Eight Trails can do testing for you: We recruit subjects, design a test, moderate the test, and write up the results and recommendations. You’ll end up with a list of immediately actionable items that will improve your site for your users and make it work harder for you.

If you’re redesigning a site, there are opportunities to test before you begin — to gather perceptions and expectations — as well as throughout the design process. Test the designs on paper, test the prototype, test the beta site, test, test, test. It’s simple, cheap, and will yield immediate return.

“If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”

Peter Drucker, who I’ve quoted in that subhead, must love the Internet. It’s the most measurable medium in our marketing tool chest. What do you want your site to do for you? Are you trying to increase qualified sales leads or decrease telephone information requests? Sell products online or drive traffic to your physical location? Define your goals for your website, then measure the results: Regularly review and compare statistics, clickstreams, and offline results like phone calls and store traffic.

Put Your Elephant to Work

Don’t end up in the history books as the king who was driven to ruin by a white elephant. Plan, test, redesign, maintain, and measure your website to make that beast work as hard as it can for you.

Have you ever seen the infomercial for the Ronco Rotisserie? Ron Popeil up there on stage wearing his apron and a big grin, roasting a chicken and leading the studio audience in shouting his product’s tagline — “Just set it…and FORGET IT!”

Ron Popeil is an American marketing legend (Veg-o-Matic, Popeil Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone), but it’s a good thing he’s not in the website business. If you want your website to do all that it should, you can’t just “set it and forget it.” It requires regular attention to keep it running optimally, to keep the content current and relevant, to ensure that it’s attracting its intended audience, and to measure whether that audience is getting what they want.

But wait…there’s more! Take this ten-question quiz to see if you’re giving your website the attention it deserves.

1. Which page or section of your website gets the most visitors? Is it your home page? Your customer service page? Your product page? Are there trends or patterns in these numbers?
2. What words are visitors typing into search engines that lead them to your site? Knowing the search terms that your potential customer uses to find you online can give you valuable insight into the way they think and talk about your product or service. It can also tell you how well your search marketing is working and give you information to improve it.
3. For those top search terms, where does your website rank on the major search engines? Imagine, for example, that the most common search term that leads people to your website is “slices dices and juliennes.” Now imagine that you don’t rank higher than 15 for that search term in Google, Yahoo, or MSN. How much more business could you do if you showed up on the first page of search results?
4. How do you measure the success of your website? The key word in that question is “measure.” The first three questions on this list are all measures or “metrics.” So are length of visit, conversion rate, signups, requests for information. What are you measuring?
5. How often do you update content on your website? Ever visited a site and found that the entries on the home page were dated two years ago? Did you feel the doubt and distrust creep in? Now take a look at your site. Do you have anything new — and relevant — to talk about?
6. What is the call to action on your website? For a shopping site, this one is easy: It’s the “Buy Now” button. A call to action is just as important for other page 2 of 2 sites. If you know the purpose of your site, you can create a call to action. Does your site have one? Can visitors find it?
7. How do you update your website? Because it’s so important to keep content on your site current and relevant, it should be easy to update your site. Can you do it yourself? Or does it take a week and an act of congress?
8. What does your most important site visitor want from your website? Have you identified your most important site visitor? Have you asked that visitor what he wants? There are a lot of ways to do this, including online surveys, live user tests, and online panels.
9. How does your site fulfill that need quickly and easily? After you have an answer to question 8, put yourself in your visitor’s seat and run through your website. Better yet, sit with one of your customers while they use your site. Don’t talk, just watch and listen. Is it easy? Are they finding what they want? Are they finding what you want them to find?
10. How does your website reflect your brand? This one should have been answered when your site was designed, but it’s never too late to ask. Does your website give visitors a sense of what you do, what you stand for, how you’re different, how you can help them? Does it do this through words, or through pictures? Does the experience of using your website cause visitors to feel good or bad about you? How do you know?

If you come up short on any of your answers — or you’re not sure how to get the answers you need — it’s time to get some help. Don’t let the money you’ve spent on developing a website — and the money you’re spending to host and maintain it — go to waste. Act now!

(This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in Southwest Graphics, Fall 2007)

One of the most common requests we receive from our clients is to include an FAQ section on their website. Despite the frequent requests for FAQs, we rarely put one on the sites we build. Why not? Because your entire website should be an FAQ.

Not literally, of course. I’m not suggesting pages and pages of Q&A. What I am suggesting is that you craft the content, organization, and design of your website guided by the answers to these three questions:

1. Who are the most important users of your website?
2. What are their “frequently asked questions,” i.e., what do they want from you?
3. How can every page of your website answer those “frequently asked questions”?

Focus on Your Site Users

This idea — and the entire philosophy built around it — is called user-centered design (UCD). UCD was formulated in the software industry of the 1990s, but it has far-reaching influence. Think about the intuitive controls of an iPod, the comfortable handles of OXO kitchen tools, and the squeezable ketchup bottle that rests “upside down” so the ketchup is always ready to pour. These are all examples of UCD in practice.

On a website, UCD means figuring out what the visitors to your site want and giving it to them quickly and easily. It seems obvious, but it’s not common. Every one of us has struggled through a website, trying to figure out what to click or where to look or how to buy something. And typically, when that happens, we just leave and never come back.

Although the D in UCD stands for design, providing a positive experience for your visitors actually requires a combination of design (the layout and style of the pages), information architecture (arranging and naming the sections and pages of the site), content, and functionality. Nevertheless, you can take the first steps yourself by putting your website through a simple review.

Do-It-Yourself UCD

Gather up a group of 6 to 8 smart people from your organization. Ask them to identify then rank the most important visitors to your website. You can define “most important” however you like. We typically ask “Who are the most frequent visitors?” “…the most desired?” “…the most loyal?”

For each of those groups, make a list of their needs and questions, such as “What does your product cost?”, “Where can I buy it?”, “Why should I buy from you?”, and “How do I get service?”.

Finally, with your list of FAQs in hand, take a stroll through your website. Try to think like someone who doesn’t already know all about your business and its products or services. If it isn’t obvious where the answers can be found, or it takes more than a couple clicks to find every one of them, then your website could use a user-centered design makeover.

Writing for websites is different from writing for print media. Numerous usability and eye tracking studies have shown that website visitors skim and click. They don’t read thoroughly or linearly. To draw users into your text and to improve your site’s “skim-ability,” use these well-documented tips:

• Get to the Point – Site visitors have a reason for coming to your site. Don’t slow them down with self-serving content.
• Subheads – These help the reader quickly determine the type of content on the page and find the parts that interest them.
• Bulleted Lists – These are the essence of skim-ability. A list of services, products, or locations, for example, is very easy for the reader to understand and use.
• Highlighted Keywords – Emphasize keywords in your writing that help the reader find the subject of the content. (Be careful about this; you don’t want the visitor to confuse highlighted text with hyperlinks.)
• Short Paragraphs – Break it up. Long blocks of copy are death on a website.
• Short, Active Sentences – Dump the adjectives and work the verbs. Craft sentences that jump, sing, cry.
• 
Inverted Pyramid – Put the most important information — who, what, when, where, and why — within the first sentences, with more detail following.
• Simple Writing Style – Write the way you talk. Read your writing out loud to make sure it sounds natural.

Find out what your customers want from you on the web, then give it to them. That’s my first rule of success on the Internet. Is your website doing all it can for you, or are you breaking the rule? Take five minutes to look at your website with a critical eye and see how many of these danger signs you can identify.

1. Is your site organized like your company? Unless you’re a department store, your site visitors probably don’t think about your company in terms of its divisions. They have a need and they think you can solve it. If your site’s main navigation has categories like Sales, Marketing, Engineering, or the worst one – Solutions – then it’s not user-focused. Your site should be organized to coincide with your customer’s needs.
2. Is About Us the first link in your navigation? About Us is an important section, particularly if you’re a publicly traded company and have loaded up your About Us section with pertinent press releases, copies of your annual reports, and other investor relations info. But it’s not the most important information for your customers (you do have a product or service to sell, don’t you?) and it’s not a section that most visitors will visit frequently. Check your website stats and see what percentage of visitors are hitting this section compared to others. Odds are it won’t merit top billing.
3. Does your mission statement appear on the home page? Your mission statement is critical to you and to all of your employees, but your customers just want to get their questions answered quickly and easily. Don’t slow things down with internally directed content. Put that stuff in the About Us section.
4. Is there more than a page of text on your home page? People don’t read. I’m sorry to say this, as I’m a writer and a reader. But the evidence is in, and it unequivocally shows that website visitors skim, especially on your home page when they’re still trying to figure out what you have and what you can do for them. Big blocks of text, particularly if they’re more than a screen-full, simply won’t get read. Eliminate words, use subheads, use bullets. Make your content short, to the point, and easy to read. Find more detail in my post Writing for Websites.
5. Is your home page title “Welcome”? The title is what appears in the bar along the top of the browser window when you look at a web page. If it says “Welcome,” it is not doing its job and it’s wasting your money. That title space is a valuable opportunity to say something meaningful – “Discount Toner Cartridges” or “Advances in Recombinant DNA” – to your visitors and to search engines. This is true of all the pages on your site.
6. Do you have a splash page or animated intro before getting to your home page? It is the antithesis of good user experience to force a visitor to watch something you want them to see. There are good ways to push information and content to your visitors and customers. But this isn’t one of them. And there is an appropriate way to use Flash and animation on your website. But this isn’t it. If your site has an animated intro, eliminate it before you go home today.
7. Do most of the links on your pages say “Click here”? Nobody takes classes on how to surf the Internet (none of your customers, anyway). They learn by doing. And we’ve all learned that an underlined phrase in blue type is a link. You don’t have to tell us “click here.” Instead, the blue underlined phrase should tell us what will happen when we click it: Get a Price Quote, Download a Spec Sheet, View a Demo. Make it easy for a visitor to skim your text and decide what action to take. (How you word these text links also affects search engine optimization, but that’s a different article.)
8. Do you use more than four colors on any page of your site? How comfortable and easy is it for a visitor to use your site? Too many colors confuse your visitor, and this problem is often found in conjunction with other user experience problems: banner blindness, animation avoidance, and pop-up purges (all of which mean that users avoid anything that is slick, fancy, and looks like an ad). Eliminate visual confusion in whatever form and your users will have a better experience. Bonus: Your website will look more professional.
9. Is there a photo of a smiling woman or two people shaking hands on your home page? This is just one example of the scourge of the stock photo. Photos and other visuals can add interest to your site, relieve the eye, direct a visitor’s attention, and support your company’s brand. But not if it’s a generic photo you pulled from a royalty-free photo website. If a photo, chart, or other visual on your site is not communicating specific information that is relevant and useful to your site’s visitors, eliminate it and use the space for content.
10. Is there a search feature on your home page? Unlike the first nine questions, the answer to this one should probably be “yes.” A large percentage of website users are search-centric: The first thing they look for on a site is the search box. If you have extensive content, you should use a search box, put it in the upper right corner (where users expect it to be), and make sure it works. Try some misspellings, type in the terms you think users will search on (remember they may not know your model number or the name of your branded service), and see how well your site is serving search-centric users.

You might also be interested in 10 Questions to Ask About Your Website and Design Your Website for the People Who Use It.

(This article originally appeared in a slightly different form in Southwest Graphics, Winter 2008)

I used to complain that the most difficult task in marketing was naming a company or product. The process is always highly subjective, fraught with the pitfalls of connotation, innuendo, vernacular, and slang, complicated by trademark searches and translation issues.

Then along came the Internet and the need to register domain names, and all of my past complaints seemed trivial by comparison.

Consider this: There are over 100 million domain names currently active, and another 200,000 are added each day. The prospect of thinking up a domain name that hasn’t already been thought up is daunting.

So, what can you do if you are starting a new business, launching a product, or…shudder…finally getting around to registering a domain name for your existing business? Here is a logical process to follow, and some tips to guide you through the domain name jungle.

Start your domain name search with your company or product name

If a savvy Internet user knows your company or product name, they’ll often just type the name into their browser bar. Give it a try with Coke, Hertz, Apple or iPod: No .com is necessary. If you have a unique name — Rumpelstiltskin or Shrek, for example — you may just be able to register this as your domain name and live happily ever after. If not, read on.

Make your domain name memorable (and short, if possible)

If you’re creating a new business or product, be sure to include a domain name search into your naming criteria. You want your potential customers to hear your domain name on TV or radio or read it in print and be able to carry it around in their heads until they need it. On the other hand, Uncle Elmer’s Country Time Barbecue and Bandstand may be memorable, but nobody wants to type that into their browser. You better hope the shorter UncleElmers.com is available.

Another option is an invented word, which has the advantages of being short and memorable as well as unique. An iPod meant nothing until Apple invented the thing and the name. There are popular websites called Pownce, Bebo, Vimeo, and Twitter.

Doug Cholewa, owner of interactive design firm Catywampus, has both short and memorable going for him in a business name. For those who aren’t so lucky, Cholewa offers a useful tip: “If you have to use a longer domain name, print your domain name in your ads and on your marketing materials using capitalization. SouthwestGraphicsRocks.com is a lot easier to read than southwestgraphicsrocks.com.” Domain names are not case sensitive, so you can type them in with or without the caps.

What if your company/product/service name is already reserved?

The real heartbreak of domain names happens here. You’ve come up with the perfect name for your business, only to discover that the domain is already in use or reserved. Mike Corak, director of Mighty Interactive in Phoenix, suggests your best options. “You can try to purchase the domain you want from the person who registered it, you can add a descriptive word onto your name to create the domain, or you can try to find a phrase related to your industry.”

That first option, purchasing a domain name, can be surprisingly simple or maddeningly impossible. You can try to make an offer to the domain name owner, but I’d recommend you call a pro for help with this.

The second option is a bit easier: Just start with the name you wanted, and add another word to it. If you wanted GuitarWiz.com but it’s taken, consider GuitarWizAZ, GuitarWizStore, or MegaGuitarWiz. Just be careful you’re not infringing on someone’s trademarked name (in other words, forget trying to build a company called AppleComputerAZ.com).

The third option is to give up on owning the domain you want and go with a related phrase. This is a tough choice to make, and it depends on customers using a search engine to find you. If your business is Trusty Lawnmower Service and TrustyLawnmowerService.com is taken, you could register SharpBlades.com. That strategy would find you some new blade sharpening business from local Google searches. Then, to make sure your current customers and people searching for you by your business name can find you, make sure your website includes your business name on every page and is also loaded up with all the terms your current customer might search on to find you. Here again, you’d be well advised to seek help from an Internet marketing professional.

Register all the domain name variants

Doug Cholewa calls the .com domain “the holy grail.” If you can’t get that, you should seriously consider picking a different name. Conversely, if you can get the .com domain, don’t stop there. Also buy the .net and the .org, and as many other extensions and variations as you can afford. Your goal is to prevent your competitors or unsavory online types from buying your precious domain name with a different extension and wreaking havoc on your good name.

Also register any common misspellings of your domain name. Del.icio.us is a handy bookmarking site, but I can never remember where the dots go in their name. Happily for me, they smartly registered Delicious.com, too. Walmart used to be Wal-Mart, but they registered domains with and without the hyphen, as well as the misspelled Wallmart.com. Adidas has Adiddas.com.

Or do what the Japanese do

Having collectively thrown their hands in the air over getting domain names that match their business names, Japanese marketers have simply started displaying a search box in their print advertising with their suggested search term already filled in. “Search for Guitar Wiz” is advertising’s new “Visit mylamedomainname.com.”

Do you have domain name success stories and tales of terror? Leave a comment.